Jay Rock’s hearing

Friends of the blog, Vertrue and its subsidiary Adaptive Marketing, found themselves the subject of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing yesterday entitled, “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers.”

You can view the hearing here, the staff report here and a quick NBC segment here.

In the NBC segment Ben Edelman of the Harvard Business School, refers to the tactics used by Vertrue and the other companies discussed in the hearing as “fundamentally a bait and switch.”

Look out Ben!

Update:

Actual analysis over at Felix Salmon’s blog here.

Some amusing flippant comments from the FT here.

Update 2:

Ben Edelman makes an interesting point here. Apparently, a lot of the business done by Vertrue et al. violates credit card network rules, but the credit card companies don’t seem to be enforcing their own rules. Jay Rock wants to know why (bottom of the Edelman post).

Laurie Taylor talks fraud

BBC Radio 4′s “Thinking Allowed,” has a good show on the culture of white collar crime here.

Update:

Part two here.

Update 2:

And now on to part three here.

 

Math for investigators

Radiolab gives us another investigative story here.  This time they did something on Benford’s Law.

importance of the dictograph in crime detection

More on the recent events of  Adaptive v. Yahoo! soon but in the mean time please see Paul Levy here and Felix Salmon here.

I’ve been very busy and uninspired so I’ve had nothing to write lately but here are some fun stories worth a read:

Wired UK has a long and fanciful asset tracing story here.

Jules Kroll’s publicist has been working overtime. He got himself a profile in the New Yorker. The first couple of paragraphs are here but you need a digital or print subscription to read the whole article.

You also might want to click on some of the key word links. You can see a portion of the 1943 article about Raymond C. Schindler, head of the Schindler Bureau of Investigation, who tells us about the “importance of the dictograph in crime detection.”

Update:

You can get the New Yorker story from Kroll himself here.