Tag: fraud

It is good this guy was caught and sentenced, but how stupid and gullible are the victims to fall for this scam?:

A former Camp Stanley employee has been sentenced to five years in prison for fraud and related charges after selling nonexistent base jobs to more than two dozen South Koreans.

The employee, surnamed Gang, worked more than 20 years in the Uijeongbu-area base, most recently as an ambulance driver, before being fired in March over the allegations.

Gang used a U.S. soldier who was unaware of the scam to interview Koreans by phone to test their English, South Korean police said. More than 30 victims paid him a total of $750,000 for the fake jobs over six and a half years, according to sentencing documents from the Anyang branch of the Suwon District Court.

Gang was also convicted of counterfeiting documents and circulating forged documents. He wrote 11 false letters of employment, using a computer at a U.S. military medical facility in Uijeongbu to produce at least one of the letters.

Among his victims was a woman who paid Gang 25 million won (almost $21,500) in 2013, believing she was securing a civilian job for her son with U.S. Forces Korea. Another woman, police said, paid Gang 100 million won (about $86,000) for administrative jobs for her husband, son and daughter. Gang promised some of his victims he would pay the human resources manager at an Army hospital, and their jobs would be guaranteed until retirement at age 68.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.

I don’t know what’s worse about this story, the victims trying to bribe their way into jobs or the conman who took their money for himself?:

A former Camp Stanley employee was arrested on allegations that he bilked South Koreans out of more than $740,000 in exchange for non-existent base jobs — and enlisted an unwitting U.S. soldier’s help to pull off the scam, South Korean police said.

The man identified by the surname Gang, 54, posed as a high-level base hospital official and convinced 27 people during the past six years to hand him a total of 800 million won, Uiwang Police Station officials told Stars and Stripes.

Gang forged Army documents and took his victims on tours of Yongsan Garrison, Camp Humphreys and other areas to help sell his story, police said.

Gang also convinced a U.S. soldier at Camp Stanley that the victims were prospective employees, then had the soldier interview them by phone to test their English, said Jo Min-chang, of Uiwang’s Economic Crime Investigation Team.

Police said they do not think the soldier knew he was participating in fraud.

Gang worked at Camp Stanley for more than 20 years before being fired last month, Jo said. He had most recently served as an ambulance driver.

When the victims began to complain about employment delays, police say Gang issued forged apology letters that used official Army logos, fonts and style, if not necessarily proper grammar.

“We would like to make an apology for any damage to who are newly employed and promoted because of a conflict between the 8th Army and Korean members of the 8th Army,” one of the letters read, according to a sample obtained from Uiwang police. “We, the 8th Army, are sincerely doing our best to make smooth recovery. And therefore, we would like to wish domestic bliss.”

In other letters, he blamed North Korean nuclear threats and bilateral defense budgets for causing delays, police said.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.

Here is a perfect example of why the safety and cheating culture that is pervasive in South Korea is so hard to change:

The whistleblower who exposed breakthrough cloning research as a devastating fake says South Korea is still dominated by the values that allowed science fraudster Hwang Woo-suk to become an almost untouchable national hero.

In an interview with The Associated Press after almost a decade of silence, Ryu Young-joon, one of Hwang’s former researchers, said the cost of telling the truth still weighs on him but he doesn’t regret his decision to out Hwang as a false prophet.

The revelations in 2005 rocked South Korea which had celebrated Hwang’s research as a historic achievement, focused unfavorable attention on the country and diminished the reputation of its scientific establishment. The memory of the scandal is still painful today and Hwang, though convicted of embezzlement and violating bioethical laws, discredited and relegated to the scientific backwater of pet cloning, retains a loyal following among sections of the public and media.

In the nearly 10 years since Hwang’s accomplishments were found to be built on lies, Ryu feels little has changed in a society where cozy ties between government, business, the media and academics stifle criticism and foster blind nationalism. And junior researchers still face great pressure to produce the results their scientific mentors want and lack a formal channel for whistleblowing.

South Korea, said Ryu, is still obsessed with joining the ranks of advanced countries and to achieve that end, many people believe it is acceptable to sacrifice ethics, safety and other concerns.

“Mr. Hwang is not a peculiar person. He is a portrait of us. He shows the South Korean society as it is,” Ryu said. “Most people believe that if we play by the rules, we can’t catch up with the advanced economies.”  [Associated Press via the Korea Economic Reader]

You can read the rest at the link, but what I find ironic about South Korean society being so caught up in catching up with advanced economies is that South Korea already is an advanced economy.  The country economically has caught up and now it is time for Korean culture to change to realize this.

What is really sad about this is that Ryu instead of being thanked for exposing this fraud nearly a decade ago was demonized and lost his job. Even after learning of the fraud the then Roh Moo-hyun administration tried to cover it up.  After the fraud could not be covered up, many Koreans still viewed Hwang as a national hero instead of the fraud that he was.

You can read more about Hwang’s fraud by digging back into the ROK Drop archives at the below links:

• Is this Why Dr. Hwang Woo-suk Committed Scientific Fraud?
• Korean Government Knew of Stem Cell Fraud
• Stem Cell Forgery Professor Steps Down from SNU
• Korean Scientist Admits to Faking Stem Cell Research

Via a reader tip comes this story about a man in Korea trying to commit insurance fraud by running at a car and bashing his head into the windshield.  Unfortunately for him the driver had a dashcam installed:

When he reaches the car, he leaps onto the hood in a superhero-esque dive and bashes his head into the windscreen.

The glass smashes and the man collapses onto the road.

It appears the opportunist was attempting to get some sort of payout for his efforts, earning him the label of an ‘insurance scammer’ in the video description.

The bizarre act was caught on a video camera mounted on the dashboard of the car.

Insurance fraud is a growing problem in South Korea. According to a recent study from the Insurance Research Centre, an average of 156 people are caught in car insurance fraud schemes in South Korea every day, with the amount of money involved totalling KRW1.18 trillion (AU$1.8 billion) over the last five years. [Daily Mail]

You can read more and see the video of this incident at the link.  According to this Insurance Research Center link on average 156 people are caught a day trying to commit insurance fraud in South Korea.  For those driving in South Korea it appears installing a dashcam is a good idea.

Update: For those coming over from Wikipedia, Key was the first US military member to defect to Canada that served in Iraq, those other two never deployed.  Telling half truths is a common tactic by people on the far left to discredit people. Notice how no where in that Wikipedia entry were the lies I exposed by Key ever disputed.

Make sure to read this updated posting about Joshua Key, especially if you clicked over to this posting from Wikipedia.

____________________________________________

I walked into a book store today and happened to notice a book that was standing prominently on the main book rack with what looked like an American soldier on the cover. I picked up the book and it was titled, The Deserter’s Tale, by Joshua Key. I knew instantly that this book was a hit job of the likes of Jessie Macbeth and Jimmy Massey on our hands. Fortunately the other two were exposed before they could publish books, but this latest pawn of the left has a book out sitting prominently in the front of bookstores spreading probably the same lies and hate of Macbeth and Massey.

(more…)

The New York Times had nice overview article about the whole stem cell controversy involving Dr. Hwang Woo-suk. A couple of things in the article did jump out at me. First of all how much did the Roh Administration know about the forgery before the MBC report?:

An indication of Dr. Hwang’s good connections to the government was the inclusion of Dr. Park Ky Young as a co-author of his 2004 report on human cloning. A botanist by training, Dr. Park may not have contributed much scientifically to the task of cloning of human cells. She is, however, the science adviser to Roh Moo Hyun, the president of South Korea.

Did Dr. Park know what was going on and maybe this is why the government was trying so vigorously to discredit the MBC report?

Here is the other thing I found interesting:

“Clearly the scientific credibility of Korean investigators has been compromised,” said Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell expert at Johns Hopkins University and a member of Science’s board of reviewers. He referred to the fact that duplicate and misidentified photos had turned up in articles by other South Korean authors besides Dr. Hwang.

This just makes me curious about what other cases of scientific fraud has been published by Korean scientists. Is this a systematic problem in Korea or are Korean cases of scientific fraud similar to the amount of fraud cases in western countries?

TIME magazine this months has a pretty good article about the Korean stem cell controversy for those who haven’t been following it very closely. TIME does try to explain why Hwang lied about his results:

But why it happened is still a mystery. By all accounts, the tales of Hwang’s dedication and personal discipline are all true.

(…)

Hwang insisted he had no interest in profiting from his discoveries; indeed, he turned over his patent rights to the university and the government.

That being the case, it seems unlikely that Hwang set out to perpetrate fraud. But it wouldn’t be surprising if he, or someone in his lab, believed strongly enough in the work to be willing to cut corners. If that’s true, the precipitating event could have come last January, when some of his stem-cell samples became contaminated, possibly by a fungus circulating in poorly shielded air vents.

Hwang claims it took six months to recover from the disaster. But it also might be that Hwang’s team couldn’t recover quickly enough and began taking shortcuts to fill the gap. Under pressure from the government and the university, and with a deadline looming for publication in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, the temptation to stretch the truth might have been irresistible. “I can only speculate that Dr. Hwang was driven by ambition. He may have thought he could manipulate the data to secure research funding and compensate for his actions with follow-up results,” says Ki Jung Kim, a political scientist at Seoul’s Yonsei University. In short, fudge it now, fix it later.

This explanation probably makes the most sense of why he committed a fraud that was bound to be uncovered. He gambled that he could get the real results before the forgery was discovered and he lost. Just makes you wonder if he wasn’t so hyped by the media and given so much money by the government in order to speed up scientific results; that maybe he would of spent the time necessary to conduct experiments ethically and more carefully so that he could have avoided the ethical violations that began the investigation and prevented the cells from becoming contaminated during the scientific process?

The Joong Ang Ilbo is reporting that the Blue House actually knew about the stem cell fraud back in November:

President Roh Moo-hyun addressed the emerging controversy over allegations of unethical practices by MBC on the Blue House Web site on Nov. 27, even before the network had aired the program. He made no mention of any doubts about Dr. Hwang’s research, not surprisingly because the doubts had only been communicated to a junior official the day before.

But on Dec. 5, one day after the YTN television network reported details of alleged PD Notebook threats to researchers in the course of gathering their information, Mr. Roh was quoted as saying in a meeting with his senior aides that he hoped “problems regarding verification of Dr. Hwang’s achievements could be put to rest at this point.” The science minister, Oh Myung, told reporters on Dec. 8 that those with doubts should blame Science, adding that talks of verification of Dr. Hwang’s research should no longer be brought up “for the sake of Korea’s science.”

How in the world can Korea’s science minister blame Science Magazine for Dr. Hwang’s fraud? Then he says that the allegations shouldn’t be brought up anymore? He sounds like someone more interested in a cover up than actually determining the truth.

In other stem cell news apparently about 1/2 of the Korean population wants Dr. Hwang to go back to work at Seoul National University and continue his stem cell work:

Nearly half of South Korean people still support disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who is accused of fabricating his research on tailor-made cells featured by the U.S. journal Science in 2005, a recent survey showed.
The survey conducted by The Korea Times on Dec. 27-28 last year found that 45.6 percent of respondents said it is desirable to give the former professor at Seoul National University (SNU) “one more chance’’ for his cloning work.

More than 70 percent of those surveyed were also skeptical about the government’s support for the World Stem Cell Hub at SNU, initiated by the cloning expert last October, without Hwang’s involvement, the poll suggested.

About 95 percent of respondents want the government itself to continue its financial support for the stem cell research rather than redirect the support to a private or scholar level.

As past experience has taught me, I don’t put to much credence in polls conducted in Korea. So take these results with a grain of salt, but it does tell us that there is still a sizable number of Koreans willing to overlook Hwang’s past trangression in hopes of future success. Hwang has actually played this whole crisis towards Korean nationalism very well and in the end he may still walk away with a job and research money some where. I don’t think SNU would take him back, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he resurfaces somewhere else to carry on his experiments when he still has a large amount of public backing.

I haven’t said anything about the whole Dr. Hwang stem cell mess that has brewing the last few weeks in Korea because I figured I would wait until the whole truth comes out before commenting on it. Finally it appears the truth has come out and Dr. Hwang has in fact faked his stem cell research:

New allegations of fabricated research by Korean scientist and national icon Dr. Hwang Woo Suk broadcast in the last hour on Korean nightly news have sent shock waves through the nation.

Hwang’s research team member Dr. Roh Sung Il told Korean broadcaster MBC, “No embryonic stem cells exist” in the research that was later published in the journal Science in June, 2005.

Roh told an MBC reporter that Kim Sun Jong, one of the team researchers dispatched to the University of Pittsburgh to work with U.S. scientist and paper co-author Prof. Gerald Schatten, said in a telephone conversation recently, “Dr. Hwang and Dr. Gang Sung Keun ordered me to fake the stem cell data.”

This is a huge blow to the morale of the entire Korean nation because so many people hyped Dr. Hwang’s research under the banner of nationalism and continued to defend him and demonize those who initially criticized his work.

When the first reports came out about him faking the data I always wondered why he didn’t let independent scientists validate his work to prove the detractors wrong. He never did and hid behind the banner of Korean nationalism by accusing foreign countries of trying to steal Korea’s stem cell technology. Now it turns out there was nothing to steal.

I can’t help but wonder why Dr. Hwang faked his research to begin with? It seems like it would be tough to maintain this lie indefinitely. Is this lie a product of the internationally low regard of Korean universities where officials were maybe eager for a ground breaking scientific achievement and may not have done enough to verify Hwang’s research? I’m sure there will be plenty of theories in the coming days and I’m sure the Marmot and Oranckay will be all over it.

What is really sad about this is that this whole situation is going to further create a negative stereotype on other stem cell scientists who are doing legitimate research in order to save and improve people’s lives.

I wonder when Koreans will learn there is plenty to be proud of in Korea and don’t need to always look for the next person who will bring glory to the Korean nation. The media built Dr. Hwang up just like they do everyone else that is some how connected to Korea and the public fell for the propaganda that Hwang was going to bring great glory finally to Korea. If this guy wasn’t so propagandized by the media and in turn the government the aftermath of this whole mess would not have been as ugly as this is turning out to be.