The story is almost too strange to be true. It sounds like something you might read in the Onion:

An officer at Narita International Airport on Sunday stuffed 142 grams (five ounces) of the drug into the side pocket of a randomly selected black suitcase coming off an overseas flight so that the animal could detect it.

“The dog couldn’t find it and the officer also forgot which bag he put it in,” a customs office spokeswoman said.

“If by some chance passengers find it in their suitcase, we’re asking them to return it,” she said.

The 38-year-old officer was quoted by the spokeswoman as saying: “I knew that using passengers’ bags is prohibited, but I did it because I wanted to improve the sniffer dog’s ability.”

I wonder what other “improvements” will be attempted. I guess it’s a good thing the passenger was entering Tokyo and not outbound to another country for further security tests.

Network World tries to drive home the point that you should mature your IT governance if you want to be successful in business:

The most important finding cited in this report is that “organizations with best business results are the same firms with the most mature [IT GRC] practices and the organizations with the worst business results are the same firms with the least mature [IT GRC] practices.” The key takeaway from the report is this: “The way to improve business results and reduce financial risk, loss and expense is to increase or enhance the competencies, practices and capabilities governing the use and disposition of IT resources.” In other words, you’d better practice good IT GRC if you want to have a successful company.

I am biased so it is easy for me to agree, but the devil’s advocate in me says that this could be a misleading measurement. Perhaps successful companies practice good IT GRC. It would be most interesting to examine this relationship over time.

For example, I used to think Dell quality control and ethics were top notch. The components they used, the engineering and execution of their systems, and the support they offered were unparalleled for value in the early to mid 1990s. Then they became wildly successful, and by 2000 the wheels seemed to come off their wagon. Today I just read that they have been found guilty of fraud by the New York court. My guess would be that their IT governance, just like their other processes, were stellar in the big run-up to mega-success. Then management went awry and now they are still wildly successful, but if their governance of IT is anything like their current customer support or their engineering…see what I mean?

The PC Pro: News reports that a man stands accused of trying to create fake user accounts in order to accumulate money from “tiny” payments:

According to court documents, Californian Michael Largent used an automated script to open 58,000 such accounts, collecting many thousands of these small payments into a few personal bank accounts.

Largent also performed the same trick with Google’s Checkout service, cashing more than $8,000 alone from the service.

That is fairly common, in terms of fraud and new-user creation, but here is the newsworthy part.

When the bank asked Largent about the thousands of small transfers, he told them that he’d read Google’s terms of service, and that it didn’t prohibit multiple e-mail addresses and accounts. “He stated he needed the money to pay off debts and stated that this was one way to earn money, by setting up multiple accounts having Google submit the two small deposits.”

False data is at the heart of fraud, so I am not sure why he thought that generating false names and addresses would be considered kosher. Could he not have generated aliases for himself rather than completely fake names? Aside from this inconvenient fact that he created bogus data to intentionally mislead/misrepresent himself and get money from others for it, I find it interesting that the bank was suspicious of scripts that generate funds through accumulating small fees.

According to the government, Largent was undone by the USA Patriot Act’s requirement that financial firms verify the identity of their customers. Schwab.com was notified in January that more than 5,000 online accounts had been opened with bogus information. When the Secret Service investigated, they found some 11,385 Schwab accounts were opened under the name “Speed Apex” from the same five IP addresses, all of them tracing back to Largent’s internet service from AT&T.

So the USA Patriot Act is used to mop up for some financial firms with weak controls on their website. Who notified Schwab? You would think Schwab could detect 11,385 accounts under the same name, unless that really is not a violation of their terms and an individual is allowed to setup an unlimited number of accounts. But this just takes me back to the question of why Largent bothered with fake names instead of an alias or screen name, so to speak.