Why Consulting Is One Big Grift, And More Of The Week's Best Scam Stories
It seems like we're living in a society that's full of scams, hoaxes and questionable practices committed by individuals or corporations these days. Some scams are purely horrible, some are more incredible than egregious, and some are just really, really weird.
Welcome to Cons And Pros, a weekly roundup of the most outrageous scam stories we have come across this week.
Who's Managing The Management Consultants?
For those of us who have ever wondered about the efficacy of management consultants — why are they so expensive? what is it that they actually do? — this Mel article by Chris Bourn, who characterizes the consulting industry as "expensive, often useless," makes for a satisfying, if slightly caustic, read. (Apologies to all the management consultants reading now.)
Bourn makes clear in his article that he himself is not a management consultant. What he lacks in personal experience, however, he tries to make up for in research, availing himself of the insights of consultants that have shed a light upon the industry before him.
While there is an undeniable schadenfreude in reading Bourn's argument that management consultants are grossly overpaid, what is perhaps most valuable about Bourn's piece is his examination of why we place so much value upon this occupation in the first place:
During his 15 years' experience running workshops with clients, Culmsee has also noticed that what many decision-makers in business seem to struggle with most is ambiguity — the anxiety of situations that have no easy solutions in terms of costs and benefits, or where a rational, logical approach doesn't seem to help. Time and again, he's noted "a rush to grab on to a process, or 'Six Easy Steps to Awesomeness' or a SWOT chart — drawing a two-by-two diagram on a whiteboard seems to have this amazing calming effect on certain people." […] And this fetishizing of simple, logical-looking solutions is one of the quirks of organizational psychology that the consultants have been trading on for decades.
[Mel]
My Way Or The Towaway
Last week, we had a man who claimed he owned the New Yorker hotel after staying in it for one night. And this week, in one of the latest weird tales about New York real estate, there's the story of a billionaire whose neighbors are claiming he carved out a fake parking space for himself on a West Village street:
Deep-pocketed investor Noam Gottesman — who built himself a corner compound on Jane and Washington Sts. over a decade ago — gave himself the ultimate upgrade during the renovation process: his own private parking spot on one of the city's most coveted streets.
The sleight-of-hand was achieved thanks to what the Department of Buildings says is an illegal curb cut — an unauthorized slice into the edges of the city sidewalk to make it appear as if a driveway exists at 777 Washington St.
And to make matters even shadier, Gottesman has taken to putting up "No Parking" signs at the spot and has hired people to dissuade others from parking there with threats that their cars will be towed. Here's what Eyal Levin, Gottesman's neighbor, has to say about this:
"It's all a scam … He doesn't have a freaking driveway," Levin said. "He just has fake signs on it. He knows it, everybody knows it and still they try to intimidate everybody about it. I found it to be outrageous. It's outrageous to put that sign up when you have this huge mansion."
The 12-Year-Old Wii Sports Hoax
For those that don't remember, back in 2007, an anonymous man claimed to have received a 2,400 Wii Sports rating after 900 hours of playing and over 20,000 games. His record has since remained unbeaten and now we finally know why.
Well, it turns out that rating was merely a hoax and it's virtually impossible for anyone to receive a 2,400 skill rating on Wii Sports. Not unless they're good with Photoshop.
Here's what Adam Haller, the man of the "record-breaking" 2,400 score had to say about his deception:
What I can remember is that, when I played this game, I spent a few weeks getting to the score of 2399 and at that time took the picture. Afterwards, I decided to Photoshop the picture to say 2400 instead […] During that same time period, I created a website on 250free.com to blog about it. I then submitted that website to Digg and created several fake accounts to up-vote it a few times until it got some traction. I also posted the website to several other Wii Sportsforums, under false accounts to give it additional hype. I relished in the comments people posted about it, some claiming they had been trying for weeks to achieve the same thing, which is likely impossible to do. I thought it was funny to imagine people trying to match this impossible feat.
Doctoring The Doctorate
It's not unusual to cheat or perhaps help someone else cheat when you're in school. What is unusual, however, is helping people cheat their way to a PhD degree.
And yet as this Vice article shows, that is exactly what an anonymous 31-year-old graduate student has been doing these past few years, writing dissertations for people so that they'll earn their doctorate degrees:
I started advertising online on places like CraigsList and Reddit for that same service, and that kind of quickly turned into me approaching clients who were really, really struggling and saying, "Look, you have a deadline, and I can do this many pages for you if you can work on this other section instead."
[Vice]
He isn't indiscriminate in his services though and draws a line on working for certain clients:
I've also had three or four people come to me who are getting medical degrees, and those I have to turn down—I don't want somebody to die based on a paper I'm writing. There was one person who came to me trying to develop a new kind of stent for arteries. If there's something that someone comes to me with that is out of my wheelhouse completely, or might be compromising to others based on what job the client might then get, I don't do it.
[Vice]
