ChiefOfficers.Net

“The charges unsealed today are the result of years of investigative work conducted by the FBI and our law enforcement partners,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said announcing the charges "unsealed" by United States Attorneys Offices in the Eastern District of New York and the Western District of Washington. The list reads as if someone decided to find a copy Title 18 of the US Code and throw it at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Sadly, Wray's language is political and intemperate and undermines the credibility of the action from the outset.

You should neither know nor care exactly what criminal activity lies behind the link in this e-mail. The fact that it's fraud from beginning to end should be enough.

It's pretty much an established truth that Mark Zuckerberg and his senior team cannot be trusted but their latest wheeze is of such monumental importance to everyone that's it's time every one left each and every one of various parts of the Facebook empire. Some parts will be more difficult than others, some things will involve value judgements as to the lesser evil but, at the end of the day, one keeps coming back to the fact that Facebook cannot be trusted and it's about to get worse. Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are to become a unified surveillance and reporting tool and every user is the target.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) conducted inspections at Australia's six largest audit firms and found that they performed a little better than the industry average but even so, a fifth of them lacked material information.

When former policewoman and domestic violence sufferer Carolyn Kerr decided to take over an abandoned shack-like building formerly used as a butchers' shop, she did the thing that would remind her how far she'd come and named it "The Battered Wife." That's upset one of Australia's increasingly numerous and increasingly forceful self-appointed guardians of their own standpoint who began a brutal campaign against Kerr and her tiny business.

It all sounds as if it's tailor made for cynics: a government looks at high-growth companies using what it terms "non-traditional data" (which turns out to be social media comment about and by the company and the companies's own websites) and uses it to predict what industries and what regions may thrive. And cynics would be right: social media comment tends to be polarised and out of balance and websites are, of course, the bearers of good tidings. So what's going on?

Two companies have been sentenced following the death of a five-year-old girl who became trapped while using a lift at her home in Weymouth. In what was clearly not a case of corporate manslaughter, the companies accepted liability. The failures were pretty bad.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has applied to the Federal Court to wind up Traditional Therapy Clinics Limited (a Chinese Traditional Medicine company) after it was delisted by the Australian Stock Exchange and has asked the court that two members of Ernst and Young be appointed as liquidators.

So, now you know what all the letters mean, let's get on with the story which is, in part, about Red Stox and the continuing risks some of them pose for shareholders, regulators and sponsors to say nothing of those usually small businesses which put their faith in them ....

Mail order (remember when it used to be called that?) is heating up to be a serious battleground across South East Asia. Three problems plague local platforms.

Amazon's UK operation is set to beat them without even opening a distribution centre in the region.

Take out the ridiculous terminology and this report from the UK's Health and Safety Executive demonstrates the dilemma faced by medical centres which fall somewhere between hospitals and prisons staffed only with civilians.

"Brexit" rumbles on but the juggernaut that is EU legislation will not be denied: indeed, in many cases even staunch "leavers" see benefits in much of what the EU does (which leads to the charge of "cherry picking" to which the leavers say "so what?")

The Trade Mark Directive is one such piece of legislation providing intellectual property protection across a large market and, through international recognition, across much of the world. But it's not all rosy and it shows something about how EU citizens relate to their law-makers.

Fraud is cyclical. Historically, frauds would lie dormant for, perhaps, five years then come back. But the cycle has become much shorter, often only two or three months. Some frauds have become perpetual, aided by e-mail that hits so many prospective targets at such a low marginal cost. Others have a few days in the light before disappearing into relative darkness for a matter of weeks, perhaps because the targets are sorted by e.g. alphabetical order, into batches. One such is fraud relating to domain names. They take several forms but the same basic structure. The fraudster hints that, if you don't pay up, your domain name will stop working. Here's the anatomy of one such fraudulent mail that has reached us multiple times in the past several days.

This week, some Conservative Party MPs delivered, in sufficient number, a letter to the party's managing committee, the 1922 Committee. It expressed that they had no confidence in the Prime Minister and that the party should replace her. The timing, many have said, was a mistake, that those seeking her removal, should have waited until after the Brexit vote and attack her then, if she lost. That, it is here opined, would have defeated the purpose of this week's supposed rebellion.

It might not look much but Australia has just thrown a huge spanner in the works of international internet retailers who want to operate in their market. Whether it sets a precedent remains to be seen but, if so, cheap goods sent from overseas might have to be a lot less cheap. At the heart of this is unproven conduct by Wiggle Limited, a UK company, which the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) found to be in breach of Australian law. This is a significant extra-territorial application of domestic law - and it also interferes with the right to include a choice of law and choice of jurisdiction clauses in international contracts. And as if that's not enough, the ripples reach into call-centre operations worldwide.

Australia has long been in conflict with foreign discounters marketing, amongst other things, by internet. It all started with a fight over the price of books.