Pt 3: The Ear of the King
2013: Stock prices at PanGenTech plummet when it is revealed that the CEO has been holding high-level negotiations with a fictitious company called "PharmCoPro" which holds patents on a new male potency drug called Vigoralis. When an executive assistant recognizes this name as having originated in a series of manga (a popular Japanese form of comic-book) released under the English name Corporate Ninja Clan, she informs her boss of her suspicions about PharmCoPro and is promptly fired. Word of the incident is leaked to the press, resulting in a scandal that ultimately forces the CEO's ouster.
Documents from the joint FBI-SEC investigation into the matter reveal some disturbing facts: Analysis of voice recordings of the CEO's interactions with PanGenTech over secure phone lines indicate that at no point was the CEO speaking to an actual person. The head of PharmCoPro, characterized as "absolutely trustworthy" and "most emphatically NOT a machine" by the CEO, was in fact a machine. Investigators speculate that the electronic con man was actually a highly advanced phone-bot, probably being operated by a person or persons with previous criminal experience and armed with a wealth of private information about PanGenTech and its CEO. The perpetrator(s) clearly had access to secure phone lines and cracked private encryption keys.
The fraud was elaborate and included voluminous documentation of PharmCoPro's business operations, none of which had been known to anyone other than the CEO. False documentation even extended to internal PanGenTech documentation, apparently generated for the sole benefit of the "mark," concerning the status of ongoing negotiations as well as various briefs from the legal department. What emerges is an intricate and carefully targeted scam that successfully duped its intended victim into accepting an entirely constructed reality, trading heavily on a corporate culture of secrecy and exclusivity that allowed the illusion to grow unchecked. The "facts" of the high-level business dealings were never vetted through any employees in a position to verify them. Only when the deal was nearly ready to go public did eyes besides the CEO's see the falsified documents, and even then it was an assistant-level employee who finally raised the questions that resulted in an investigation.
Throughout the entire affair, the CEO had been utterly convinced that he had been speaking with a real human being, the head of a successful pharmaceuticals company that never in fact existed. It is the first such scam on record, a cell implant hack, which would later come to be known as “head-spamming” and then “head-cheesing.” Information attacks that deliberately feed misleading information to the chief officer of a large organization (usually with the added instruction that the false information be “kept private” because of its extreme sensitivity) are now commonly referred to as “cheesing.”
Because the fraud did not extend to the rest of the company and did not include any known monetary transaction, the motive for this elaborate ruse remains unclear. Investigators have variously theorized that it was internal sabotage at PanGenTech, an attack by a rival corporation bent on undermining PanGenTech's credibility, an attempt by speculators to manipulate stock value, or pure "malicious mischief" perpetrated by extremely skilled, unaffiliated hackers.
Next: Pt 4: The Web