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A Billion Dollar Scam to Build an Undersea Arctic Cable

posted by janrinok on Monday October 14 2019, @11:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-she-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-if-it-hadn't-been-for-.... dept.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousCoward

This story about a billion dollar scam to build an undersea Arctic cable is wild

Last year, the CEO of Quintillion, an Alaskan company trying to build a trans-Arctic undersea cable, was charged with wire fraud after forging contracts to help raise more than $250 million from investors. This week, Bloomberg posted a captivating feature about how that CEO nearly pulled off the scam of a lifetime. It's a fascinating story of how someone tried to fake it 'til they almost made it — but also a cautionary tale about big ambitions can push people to make disastrous decisions.

Elizabeth Pierce apparently had huge ambitions to build an undersea cable to give Alaskans (and eventually, parts of Japan, the Pacific Northwest, Greenland, Iceland, and London) better internet access. It was a noble cause. Internet for much of rural Alaska is slow and depends on expensive satellites, and an undersea cable could bring much faster speeds at cheaper prices for consumers. (Undersea cables are also being explored by big tech companies. Microsoft and Facebook jointly own a 4,000 mile transatlantic cable, and Google has invested in some as well.)

To get investors to back the project, Pierce needed to prove that she had completed contracts that would guarantee some revenue. So, to show investors that the business was solvent, she went right ahead and forged signatures on contracts that, if they'd been legit, would have been worth more than a billion dollars in total.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday October 15 2019, @12:19AM (3 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday October 15 2019, @12:19AM (#907180)

    When she started to realize her sham was falling apart, she apparently just decided to try to delete them by moving them to the trash of her Google Drive.

    It was a good scam, it just needed someone cleverer to run it.

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  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday October 15 2019, @01:39AM

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Tuesday October 15 2019, @01:39AM (#907199) Journal

    Yep, it was sloppy.

    The far better scam is the California homeless project [latimes.com]. Still running, nobody even under suspicion. Working like a charm.

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @03:36AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @03:36AM (#907231)

    I guess the contracts were "undocumented" then. "Dreamers" even.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @05:29AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @05:29AM (#907253)

      I guess the contracts were "undocumented" then. "Dreamers" even.

      I'm not saying that it was aliens, but...