Bloomberg Businessweek

The looters arrived late in the afternoon at Koh Ker, a ruined 10th century city in northern Cambodia. They made their way through scrubby jungle to Prasat Krachap, a compact stone temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva and his son Skanda. They walked carefully. The countryside was strewn with land mines, and on another expedition some of the looters had watched a wandering cow be blown up. The leader of the band, a muscular man named Toek Tik, had selected Prasat Krachap carefully. As a boy, he’d been forced by the Khmer Rouge to serve as a child soldier. He escaped in the mid-1970s, disappearing into the forested slopes of a nearby mountain. While on the run he built up an intimate knowledge of ancient sites, sometimes using temples as…

Benjamin Ackerman opened the door in his pajamas. It was 7 a.m. on Sept. 20, 2018. Six detectives and six uniformed officers were standing outside his two-story 1930s apartment building in the Carthay neighborhood of Los Angeles. The two-bedroom unit, though modest, was outfitted with a 15-camera indoor-outdoor surveillance system. The authorities were flanked by an LAPD tactical team, and a police helicopter buzzed overhead. Inside the apartment, the reason for the cameras became clear. Expensive artwork lined the walls near the entryway. Handbags—some that retailed for as much as $100,000—and designer clothing were strewn in the office and organized on the floor by brand: Balenciaga, Chanel, Fendi, Givenchy, Hermès, Louis Vuitton. As they searched the unit, the detectives found Goyard wallets; Cartier, Patek Philippe, and Rolex watches; diamond-encrusted Gucci hair…

The hackers had been inside the Bitfinex servers for weeks before attempting the heist. They’d watched users on the cryptocurrency exchange buy and sell Bitcoins. They’d studied the commands that controlled the security system. It was as if they were hiding in an air duct above a bank’s vault, watching as tellers meticulously moved cash in and out, looking for vulnerabilities. They weren’t after Bitcoins, exactly. Bitcoins only exist as entries in a database maintained by computers around the world. What they needed were the private keys: cryptographic passwords that would allow them to unlock the coins and move them. Once they found the keys, they struck. At 10:26 a.m. on Aug. 2, 2016, the hackers raised the exchange’s daily withdrawal limit from 2,500 Bitcoins to 1 million, more than enough…

Kneeling beneath a framed print of Thomas Kinkade’s painting A Peaceful Retreat, Roli Chiu, alarm system installer, began his work one day in March by unpacking boxes of devices inside a new customer’s living room. It would take him five hours to set up the system. He’d begin with the command panel in the grand foyer of the 4,000-square-foot home in a Palmetto Bay, Fla., gated community—then connect it to all the new door and window sensors, motion detectors, and smoke and carbon monoxide monitors. Yet Chiu, who estimates he’s installed systems at 15,000 homes in his two decades at ADT Inc., thought this one could benefit from a bunch of Google gadgets that the company would soon add to its portfolio. “When the Nest cameras come—oh my goodness—that’s going…

Amina Parbin was alone, sweeping the floor of her parents’ home, when a man arrived on a January day in 2017 with a file in his hands. He introduced himself as a life insurance investigator and began pulling out papers. A payout claim. A passport photo. A death certificate—her death certificate. “Did you know Amina?” he asked. “I am Amina,” she responded, and “I am, in fact, alive.” It took seemingly Parbin’s entire family—with her brothers and uncles rushing over from their farms and shops—to prove to the investigator that she was the victim of some kind of fraud. They eventually persuaded him to turn over the paperwork he’d brought. And that’s how Parbin learned that a claim had been filed for an insurance policy on her life, one she never even…

By the spring of 2020, the lottery lawyer wasn’t sure the walls were necessarily closing in. The FBI had started interviewing his insta-millionaire clients, though, and things didn’t look good. The jackpots several winners had entrusted him to invest seemed to be dwindling, and Jay Kurland wasn’t sure how much they blamed him. Shortly before 9 a.m. on June 19, he hopped on the phone with his neighbor and business partner Francis Smookler, a tanned, easy-living ex-stockbroker. “My Staten Island clients are very concerned,” Kurland said, singling out one couple. “You know, the visits, combined with the lack of payments.” “Do you think that that’s going to explode into some big thing?” Smookler asked. “No,” Kurland replied. “At the end of the day, we made, we’ve got bad business moves, but it was…