Geldschrank
A German word for moneybox, strongbox or safe. A Geldschrank bank offers secrecy and safety to its clients. It offers anonymous services in the tradition of a Swiss numbered account. It is difficult to trace fraudsters to the accounts because deposits are protected from police inspection by privacy laws and are attached to numbered accounts rather than people’s names. The oldest and simplest bank offering is  “anonyme Lager” (anonymous storage), a blind drop service otherwise known as a safe-deposit box. Access to a bank box may require a physical key plus a ten-digit account number created only by the client on a secure terminal. A key is often passed on as a client’s inheritance and a box lease may exceed fifty years. To discourage a hostage situation, the bank employees do not have master keys to the boxes.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, Doubleday, New York, 2003, pages 176 – 191.
 

Jitney
A circular trading stock scam. The same shares are intentionally sold and resold through a series of brokers to give the illusion of volume trading and to mask the identity of the seller who is also the buyer. Multiple jitneys can create the false illusion that there is renewed activity in a company’s sluggish stock. A jitney is the execution and clearing of orders by one member of a stock exchange for the account of another member. For example, investment Dealer A is a small firm whose volume of business is not sufficient to maintain a trader on the exchange. Dealer A gives its order to Dealer B for execution and pays a reduced percentage of the normal commission. “Jitney houses” (start-up brokerage firms) are eager to run business through their firms and rack up commissions. Late Friday afternoon is a common time for jitney trades. The jitney game hypes that stock in hopes of suckering real investors into that market at higher prices. Jitney was a slang term for a five-cent coin in 1903. When small Ford motorbuses began competing with horse-drawn streetcars in New York City, they were called jitney buses because the fare was a nickel to carry a passenger on a circular route.
George Chelekis, “The Jitney Game,” January 26, 1999, http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/
Exchange/1371/Chelekis/jitney_game.htm, January 5, 2004.
 

Paint the Tape
The illegal practice of making a sale to change the stock price on the ticker tape by using unscrupulous methods to disguise a deteriorating condition and sagging market value. The intent is to attract the attention of people who sit mesmerized by the narrow line of stock quotes streaming across a television or computer monitor. Video displays have replaced old telegraphed quotes that were recorded on a continuous ribbon of paper tape spewed out of a ticker machine, invented by Thomas Edison in 1868. The momentum players and chart readers think, “Gee, something must be going on. The stock looks more attractive. Someone must know something. I should jump on board too.” Example 1: A fund manager might buy 100 shares of a stock at an unusually high price right before the market closes at the end of the month. Then he can report that his entire long position in that stock is worth that price. Example 2: A large stock purchase is broken up into multiple small purchases to give the illusion of a buying frenzy. Example 3:  Corporate executives buy shares of their company. The public may falsely interpret these insider purchases as a vote of confidence in the corporation. To aid the scam, the corporation may be slow in reporting that it lent money to the executives to buy the shares, guaranteed the loans, will forgive the loans in the future, or will otherwise protect the executives from the consequences of a fall in share price.
“Paint the Tape,” Trade Ideas, www.trade-ideas.com/Paint_the_Tape.html, January 8, 2004.
Image: http://www.bankinghistory.de/Bulletin/EABH-web/web%202-2001/Removing%20the%20dust.htm
 

Private Eye
A private detective or private investigator or PI. Allan Pinkerton (1819 – 1884) was the first detective on the Chicago police force and also started the first private detective agency in the United States in 1850. Pinkerton solved his agency’s first case for the Illinois Central Railroad and its young attorney, Abraham Lincoln. The signs and advertising for “Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency” had a detailed illustration of a large unblinking human eye and the slogan “We Never Sleep.” Criminals referred to his agency as “The Eye.” It was the forerunner to the FBI, created in 1908.  Private eyes were popularized in mystery novels like “The Maltese Falcon” (1930) written by Dashiell Hammett, who was a Pinkerton detective. Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations became a subsidiary of Securitas AB, a Swedish company, to form the largest security company in the world in 1999.  A modernized image of an intently-looking eye is the new logo for Pinkerton.
http://www.pinkerton-europe.com/
company_history.htm, January 6, 2004.
Image 1: Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/
ammem/gmdhtml/cwmhtml/cwmum.html
 

Larry C. Adams, CFE, CPA, CIA, CISA, is an audit consultant in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of 80 articles and 2 books about fraud including Fraud In Other Words. His Web site is www.larry-adams.com. His e-mail address is fraudwritr@aol.com.
 

ã Copyright 2004 Larry C. Adams.
All rights reserved.

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