To all who knew him, Robert Kerbeck was an actor with roles in hit shows ER and Melrose Place under his belt, and had worked with the likes of James Gandolfini, Paul Newman and George Clooney.
But for nearly two decades, Robert lived a second life as a spy who made millions of dollars by lying, cheating and stealing sensitive information from some of the biggest companies in America.
Relying on his acting training, he put on accents, mimicked corporate big-wigs and manipulated innocent workers into passing on vital intellectual property which he would sell to competitors.
‘I would call up and say “This is Gerhard, calling from the office in Frankfurt. We have the European Union regulators here and we need some information from the States”,’ says Robert, putting on a thick, convincing and slightly jovial German accent over the phone from Malibu, California.
‘What are people taught in the corporate world? Be a good teammate. So they want to help you. Nobody’s thinking you’re pretending or that you’re a trained actor impersonating a real person. I was able to get people to tell me passwords, new product information, what they charged clients, what they paid their employees, who the top employees at their companies were and who were their rock stars at the organisation – and all of that information was so valuable.
‘Imagine if you could learn the names of the people on the design team in the early days of the iPad. How much money would that have been worth?’
A lot, is the answer. In 2011, Apple filed a lawsuit against Samsung for infringing on patents related to iPhone and iPad product design. Apple claimed that Samsung had replicated the look and feel of its devices and was awarded just over $1 billion in damages.
Trade secrets are big business. Robert, who earned $8 an hour when he first started the work to help him survive as an actor in the early nineties, later made up to $2 million a year.
Hi story echoes that of Rob Moore, who went from corporate spy to self-proclaimed double agent, and is the focus of Tortoise Media’s latest podcast, ‘Into the Dirt’.
Like Robert, Rob had a career in the media, but when work dried up, he started gathering corporate intelligence.
Commercial espionage causes big headaches globally. Across the European markets, spying is the fifth biggest concern for companies, according to cyber security specialists Gatewatcher.
Robert, who has great people skills and who says he can read the silences over the phone, would invent a series of ruses to obtain valuable information. He would study the accents of industry giants on TV interviews and mimic them on the phone so employees, starstruck, would tell him whatever he wanted to know. He would also form relationships with employees and call them multiple times over a series of years, pretending to know family members, or terrify his target with claims of being from head office.
‘The words corporate compliance strikes fear in employees,’ explains Rob. ‘They’re like, “Oh, my God, I got the head of compliance on the phone. Did I do something wrong? I’m in trouble.” So right away, you make someone defensive. People are afraid but when they hear there’s some corporate emergency that you need help with, they relax.’
With their guard down, they would give information freely.
According to Robert Kerbeck, it was like taking candy from a baby. ‘Nine out of ten people think that they would never release sensitive private information. And I’m telling you that nine out of ten people give it up,’ he tells Metro.co.uk.
‘Corporate espionage is an extremely competitive, cut-throat industry. We had to think on our feet always. Part of being an actor is you have to have strong improvisational skills. And we did a tremendous amount of research before we would make any ruse phone call. We would study the company, read their annual reports, read their press releases and go all over the website. My lies sounded better than the truth.’
Robert worked as a spy for around twenty years, telling only his wife how he really made his money.
At one point in the late nineties, he was hunted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Communications Commission and ‘every other agency that has three letters in the United States’. A lawyer told him that if a company wanted to prosecute him, he ‘would be in big trouble’, and Robert often had to talk his way out of hot water, change names, switch phone numbers and go underground.
Corporate espionage is not illegal in the UK, according to private investigator Jack Charman, ‘as long as the methods used to obtain the information are legal and there is just cause,’ he explains.
‘The term “corporate espionage” indicates that information gathered under this guise is solely used for business advantage. This isn’t a strong legal reason to pursue the gathering of information and thus doesn’t have just cause to conduct an investigation. It can be quite a grey area. I know it does happen in the financial industry – short selling is a great example of this.’
Working as an actor, Robert was able to hide in plain sight. In 1994 he was hired to work on an exercise video with OJ Simpson.
‘I was a huge OJ fan. I grew up watching him play football. One day, I showed up to the video set in a dance studio. I’m the worst dancer ever, and everybody does the dance, even OJ, and I am just pathetic. I am so bad. The choreographer was about to fire me, but OJ says: “No. Rob’s dancing is so bad, it’s making me look good. Rob stays.” And in a weird sort of way that bonded us and the whole rest of the three-day shoot OJ was my best friend.’
OJ promised Robert a role in his next show, but just days later, he saw the historic televised police chase involving OJ in the white Bronco.
‘I was just blown away. My jaw dropped,’ he remembers. ‘I literally slid off my couch and was on the ground. I couldn’t believe it.’ OJ was cleared of double murder in 1995, but jailed for armed robbery and conspiracy to kidnap in 2008. He has since been released.
Robert set up his own firm in the late nineties, and trained other spies to work for him. Did he feel bad? Yes – but he rationalised it.
‘There was part of me that said I was only stinging major corporations and financial institutions,’ he explains. ‘It doesn’t take a lot of research or awareness to know that many of these institutions have been convicted of many types of financial crimes, malfeasance and ripping off consumers. You can make a pretty easy argument that it was the greed of financial institutions that caused the 2008 financial crisis. I told myself I was just stealing corporate secrets from one firm and selling them to another; that’s just part of the capitalist system. But there were also people that I was dealing with that I was taking advantage of and that didn’t feel good.’
In the end, it wasn’t the FBI that brought Robert’s operation to its knees; it was his eight-year-old daughter who confronted him after overhearing him on the phone pretending to be someone else.
‘She said: “Are you a hacker?” And I said: “Oh no. I’m just getting information from one company and giving it to another as part of capitalism.” And she said: “But it’s dishonest.” That was the moment I knew I had to get out of the business,’ he says.
Robert went on to become an author, and finally liberated from the shackles of secrecy, he revealed all in a memoir called Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street – however, this unexpectedly served as an advert for his shady services.
‘I cannot tell you how many executives have reached out to me after reading the exposé.
‘They told me; “We loved your book. We’d like to hire you to spy for us.” I had to tell them that I was out of the business. But also; I’ve outed myself! I wouldn’t be a very good spy if I’ve outed myself. But corporations don’t care.
‘They just want the information and they’re willing to pay top dollar to get me or someone else to learn anything and everything possible about their rivals.’
Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street
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