You’re at the track and the pony you bet on came up a winner. You go to collect your winnings, and there you see another bettor place a bet on the race that was just run. He collects a windfall. Ridiculous? That’s what happens when companies backdate corporate stock options.

History Byte: The Brinks Robbery
It was billed as “the perfect crime.” And it nearly was. On January 17, 1950, employees at the Brinks security firm in Boston were closing for the day when thieves surprised them and stole millions in cash and securities, making it the largest robbery in the U.S. at the time.

FBI Tracks Down Illegal Gamer
It must have seemed like the perfect scheme–buy the stolen source code of a popular online game, rent some servers to run the game as your own, and then hang a shingle on the web inviting gamers to come play at a steep discount. A California man who followed that path must have thought he’d never get caught. He was even warned once by the game’s rightful owner, a large South Korean company, to shut down. He didn’t.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 6:41 am and is filed under Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.