Scam compounds, sewing patterns and stolen dimes

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This is The Indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Waylon Wong.

I'm Darian Woods.

And I'm Adrienne Ma.

And we're all here to welcome to you to our final installment of our week-long Vice Series, where we've been exploring the evolving business of crime.

And today we are talking about our favorite pieces of true crime content with a little econ twist.

Yeah, true crime is a super hot industry.

A recent study found 84% of the U.S.

population ages 13 and up consume some form of true crime content.

Obviously, we know it's big in podcasts, we've got cereal, my favorite murder, criminal.

So we're going to have a freewheeling discussion going through each of our favorite pieces of true crime content.

We'll bring you an economic lesson from it.

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Darian, you want to start us off?

Yeah, so my favorite true crime series that I've listened to recently is one called Scam Inc.

It's a podcast series by The Economist magazine.

And this one goes really deep into pig butchering.

You've probably heard about pig butchering elsewhere.

Yeah, I've heard of this.

It's basically a long-term scam.

Yeah, so instead of having just a single email saying, give me your money, it's like an ongoing relationship.

And maybe it's a long-term business partner or a long-distance relationship from somebody you've found on a dating website and then eventually the call for money happens yeah you know i get these texts almost once a day it'll be from an unfamiliar number and it'll just say hello or how are you doing and i think that's the beginning of one of these scams right to draw me into a bigger conversation so i'm the pig in this scenario if you reply to that you are the pig or the piglet waiting to be fattened up oh dear yeah so this is why they call it pig butchering right Because they're sort of trying to fatten up their targets before they drop the axe.

Exactly.

And what this podcast showed me was this whole infrastructure underlying pig butchering.

It is global.

It is really confusing who the bad people are because actually the other people on the line are victims themselves a lot of the time.

So the podcast had interviews of people who had been promised well-paying call center jobs.

They flew into Thailand from places like the Philippines or Uganda and a driver picked them up from the airport.

They're driven for hours and hours and hours until they pass the border with Myanmar, and they're escorted by people with guns.

Their passports are taken away.

They are threatened with physical punishments if they don't meet quotas for who they scam.

There's division of labor, just like we see in above-board businesses.

So somebody will be a specialist in setting up profiles.

Others will do the initial chat to people.

And overall.

So it really is sort of like a a, almost like a corporate structure to this scam operation.

Yeah, it's made me appreciate just how much of an uphill battle this fight against scammers is for law enforcement all around the world.

I'm going to have to put that on my listen list.

Wayland, do you want to go next?

Yes, I will say mine is much lighter and lower stakes, though no less full of learning.

Are you guys familiar with the site Ravelry?

Nope.

It's an online community for knitters and crocheters, and it's also been the site of many a drama.

And they're very good at like ferreting out, I would say, bad behavior within their own community.

You could argue they're not sticking to their knitting.

I dare you to make that joke in there.

Sharp objects.

I'm defenseless.

So in 2017, there's a little discussion brewing on ravelry.

There are people who have created knitting patterns.

So this is when you design, let's say, say, a shawl or a pair of socks or something, and you put up the instructions, right?

And people who have created these patterns notice that there is a business based in my town that is using their patterns without permission.

This business was selling memberships to like a monthly fiber arts club where you would be emailed these patterns, right?

And so it turns out that this business was taking patterns from people without compensating them.

And so, yeah, the original creators then found out and then the sleuths on Ravelry pieced together this huge Excel spreadsheet of over 100 designers who had their patterns kind of co-opted by this business.

And the whole thing came tumbling down.

They raised a huge stink about it.

There seems to have been some kind of mediation process with the Illinois Attorney General.

There were complaints filed.

The business was eventually shut down.

I am seeing a legal issue here of copyright infringement.

Yes, that is exactly right.

And what's so interesting to me is that, you know, knitting patterns are not explicitly mentioned in copyright law.

I don't think they've historically risen to the level where they would be kind of like a huge body of, I guess, like jurisprudence around this kind of stuff.

I also know that clothes are not copyrightable as well.

Right.

Clothes are not copyrightable.

So this is like one of those kind of mind-bending things, right?

Where a knitting pattern can be considered a work of visual art if there's like a picture or a graphic attached to it.

But the clothing you make from that knitting pattern, the scarf, pair of socks, that's not copyrightable.

And so clothing is a very funny area of copyright law.

And then if you did what this local business did, which is not compensate the original creator of these knitting patterns, that can be a problem.

Don't mess with the knitting nerds, I guess is the lesson of this story.

I mean, there's like more stories from Ravelry I could tell you too, but I'll save that for a different episode.

Well, Adrian, we come to you.

Your favorite true crime podcast, movie, newspaper article.

My favorite piece of true crime dates back to April 2023.

very valuable cargo.

The truck is headed for Miami, but along the way, the driver decides to stop for the night and pulls into a Walmart parking lot.

Overnight, a group of people break into this truck.

They swing open the doors, and what do they find?

High-end Danish furniture.

They find...

The Declaration of Independence?

That would also be good.

But in fact, they found $750,000 worth of dimes.

Oh!

7.5 million dimes.

That's so many dimes.

I bet they were both equally excited and disappointed at the same time.

They tried to make lemonade out of lemons and they started loading these dimes into bags and trash cans and then made off with them.

Think about just the amount that that many dimes would weigh.

Apparently, the amount of dimes they made off with was about $234,000 worth, which is about six tons of dimes.

And they just roll it away in trash cans.

I think some of it ended up in like cars.

And there's actually a photo from a Philadelphia Inquirer article this year, which shows a photo of one of the alleged thieves just lying in the back of a car on top of a pile of dimes, like Screw McDuck style.

Just loose dimes.

So they actually tried to convert these dimes by depositing them in various banks and converting them at those like Coinstar machines.

Oh my gosh.

Imagine going to the grocery store with a trash can full of dimes.

Totally legit.

Totally legit.

Yeah.

So this plan did not end up working out for the alleged burglars because, well, they were caught and they were arrested and they were charged with theft, robbery, and conspiracy to commit racketeering.

And here is the sort of the mystery that still lingers from this story, which is a large portion of these dimes, according to the Philly Inquirer, are still unaccounted for.

So out there somewhere may be hundreds of thousands of dimes just like waiting to be discovered.

All right, I'm buying a metal detector and heading to Philadelphia.

This is our new spin-off podcast, The Dime Hunt.

The Dime Hunters.

Get rich or dime trying.

That wraps up Vice Week.

Thank you everyone for your loyal listening and we will be back to our scheduled programming on Monday.

Stay in school and don't commit crimes.

Our series this week on the evolving business of crime was produced by super producer Cooper Katz-McKim with engineering by Jimmy Keeley.

It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.

Kick and Cannon edits the show and the indicators of production of NPR.

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