Step 2 - Reading

Reading
You’re going to read an article about social media, rich people and crime.
Look at the picture in the text below.

What do you think had happened before the photo was taken? Do you recognize the person in the picture?
Choose:

  1. He has just robbed a bank.
  2. He was playing a game of monopoly.
  3. He has filed for bankruptcy.

Now read the text and decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F).

By David Batty

From selfies on super-yachts to posing with private jets, the young heirs of the uber-wealthy have attracted worldwide envy by showing off their lavish lifestyles on social media.
But these self-styled rich kids of Instagram are, often unwittingly, revealing their parents’ hidden assets and providing evidence for investigators to freeze or seize assets worth tens of millions of pounds, and for criminals to defraud their families. Leading cyber security firms said they were using evidence from social media in up to 75% of their litigation cases, ranging from billionaire divorces to asset disputes between oligarchs, with the online activity of super-rich heirs frequently providing the means to get passed their family’s security. Oisín Fouere, managing director of K2 Intelligence in London, said social media was increasingly their “first port of call”.
Daniel Hall, director of global judgment enforcement at Burford Capital, said their targets in such cases tended to be slightly older people who were not really active Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but whose children, employees and associates often were. The firm recently managed to seize a “newly acquired private jet” in a fraud case because one of the two fraudsters had a son who posted a photograph on social media of himself and his father
standing in front of the plane. The growing significance of social media in litigation was recently
illustrated by rapper 50 Cent, who was ordered by a Connecticut court to explain a photo on
Instagram in which he posed with stacks of $100 bills that spelled out “broke”, months after filing
for bankruptcy. The rapper claimed the money was fake. Investigators often use location search tools
which enable them to throw a virtual “geo-fence” around a certain building or area and gather all of
the social media posted from there in real time.
Another cyber security company uncovered multimillion-pound hidden assets in a divorce case last
year by monitoring the location of the children’s social media posts. The court ordered the husband
to give his wife $30m, but he claimed not to have such assets. “We monitored social media, particularly
for his young adult kids, and found a lot of posts from the same geo-tagged sites,” said Beckett.
“Cross-referencing that with land registry and other similar bodies overseas, we found several properties
that were registered in the name of this person. “We went to court with a list of assets that we
conservatively estimated at $60m, which the court then seized until he settled the amount that had
been ordered.”
Beckett said the social media indiscretions of super-rich heirs were also leaving their families vulnerable
to fraud and extortion.
There has been a huge rise in such cases in the last year, as cybercrime groups increasingly target wealthy
families as well as corporations.
Jordan Arnold, the head of private client services at the firm, said it was helping the super-rich to devise family
social media policies that set out a code of conduct for posting sensitive content, such as images of their
properties, yachts and jets.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/

Read the sentences and complete with words from the text.

 
  1. When he died, the family discovered that he had ............... in several countries.
  2. These included a ............... which was a castle that had been built in the 17th century.
  3. It took the police several years to ............... the exact nature of the tax fraud.
  4. His wife ............... her beautiful necklace, which had been his last present to her.
  5. Parents ............... not to know as much about social media as their children.
  6. Police look at computers for ............... in cybercrime.