Record Tampering
Where: Edom Group, The United Nations of Europe and Americas, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
When: 1010 hours, Tuesday, November 5, 2041
Currency: UNEA credits
My main office as well as a number of Edom Group departments were situated on the thirty-second floor of the second-tallest building in downtown Milwaukee. I owned the entire floor. The owners of the other floors and I shared the cost of security management and building maintenance. Since I spent a lot of my time in the office, I made sure it was designed to my liking, embellishing it with the most comfortable and luxurious Italian furniture. The office was mostly made up of glass, and every inch had been shielded with the highest calibre of bullet-proofing that ProteriTek had to offer.
My interactive desk was situated towards the back of the office. This position provided a view of the city, and from here all the other skyscrapers could be seen. If I needed to change the view, I could do so from my desk by selecting any widget of my choice. There was also an option to select a widget by voice command. However, I disabled the voice feature as well as the comms device connected to it. I didn’t trust devices that had the ability to eavesdrop.
One of my favourite widgets is the Mellow-317. It projects onto the full-length window a waterfall, surrounded by greenery with a sunset in the distance. This was my widget of choice on days when things got a bit hectic. I was holding a meeting with Alex, Chris, and Joe this morning, and I had the feeling I would need to replace the view of the skyscrapers with the Mellow-317 by the end of the meeting. On the other side of the office was a conference table that seated ten people. It was sort of like a mini-conference room right in my office. This was reserved for my inner circle. Occasionally, I would hold meetings with VIPs here, but it would have to be necessary for that to happen.
My personal assistant, Brandon, had impeccable timing when it came to serving coffee, and by ten o’clock we were already on our second round. We had been scrambling, trying to figure out what we were going to do about all the evidence submitted to the court. Matthew Harrington, the tech guru, had dropped by the office to deliver some information about the data footprint found on my office comms device. Matt apologized for the delay, saying that it took a bit of time to decrypt and extract the metadata on the file. The main data was accessible, but the metadata had been encrypted.
The main data revealed an inbound message to my office from a remote device. The metadata, on the other hand, allowed him to see the date and time the data exchange took place. The main message contained information about individuals who had paid sums of money in exchange for college degrees and data injection. The data injection involved the keying of academic credits and degree information into student academic records. These records were stored in databases across several universities. The sender, who is still unknown, sent a request for approval of the data injection. In response, a confirmation message was sent from my office comms with approval for the generation of the college degrees and for the data injection. Once he delivered his report, I sent Matt on his way.
There were a couple of things that didn’t add up. The first was that the message on the file hadn’t come from me. Secondly, everyone involved knew better than to send such explicit information over the sat network. We have been involved in the record cultivation and data-tampering business for years, but I haven’t had any direct involvement. The legwork has always been handled by our low-level guys. We had everything set up so that any visible digital exchange looked like a legal business transaction. The way the operation worked was that people paid us to provide them with identification or qualification documents. Our people that worked in the relevant government or education bodies would then key the corresponding information into their databases. Airborne Net-Cloud, Edom Group’s domain hosting and cloud services, served as the front.
Our client list provided a way for us to keep track of who paid for what. For example, someone who needed a driver’s license would register for a website that offered driving lessons. That person would then pay us to design the website. They would also pay an annual fee for hosting the domain for the website. On the surface it looked like a legit business arrangement, and we did build the website, albeit a crummy one. However, what was actually happening was that the customer paid a down payment for an illegal driver’s license. The annual fee was ongoing payment to keep the driver’s licence active.
It was a perfect setup. If an investigation ever took place, it would be expected that a domain-hosting company would charge annual fees in exchange for its services. My company does actually provide these services to customers on the legit side of the business, and it is indeed profitable. In order to launder the proceeds from the not-so-legit side, the prices of services are ridiculously inflated. We justify the exorbitant fees by delivering the best value to our legit customers. Airborne Net-Cloud offers the most robust services, and we have one of the best data-security services in the Nations. Efficiency and security are key factors for most customers, and these organizations were willing to pay more for better services.
We added special transaction codes on client records which allowed us to differentiate between illegal and legal transactions. If we needed to track down any of our illegitimate customers for any reason, we had a way of doing so. For example, if we needed to get a list of customers with outstanding payments, we would simply query our database to return all
