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STOPPED COLD: A stolen hearse with a body inside crashed after being pursued by Los Angeles police on Thursday, according to
authorities. One person was taken into custody after the accident, which closed the 110 Freeway during the morning commute.REED SAXON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ten percent ofU.S. busi-
nesses surveyed by the Amer-
ican Chamber of Commerce in
China estimated they were in-
curring losses of at least
500,000 yuan ($71,000) a day
in China amid the coronavi-
rus epidemic. In some edi-
tions Thursday, a World News
article about the survey in-
correctly said 50,000 yuan,although the dollar amount
given was correct.The Trading Diary table
that appeared in Thursday’s
Business & Finance section
incorrectly repeated data
from Tuesday’s trading. The
data from Wednesday’s trad-
ing is available at WSJ.com/
Corrections.Readers can alert The Wall Street Journal to any errors in news articles by
[email protected] by calling 888-410-2667.CORRECTIONSAMPLIFICATIONS
and the abortive listing of of-
fice-sharing startup We Co.,
according to a person familiar
with its plans. The company is
now considering going public
this year, the person said.
DoorDash, Postmates and
Uber’s food-delivery arm,
Uber Eats, each discussed var-
ious possible combinations
last year, according to people
familiar with those talks, noneof which has resulted in a
deal.
Grubhub has talked to ad-
visers about strategic options
and says it sees itself as a po-
tential acquirer.
The sector is also consoli-
dating globally. British food-
delivery company Just Eat
PLC recently agreed to merge
with the Netherlands’ Take-
away.com NV. Germany’s De-livery Hero SE agreed to buy a
South Korean competitor for
$4 billion in December.
Uber is pulling Eats out of
countries in which it isn’t the
No. 1 or No. 2 food-delivery
player. Uber Eats sold its
struggling India unit to a local
competitor this year and quit
South Korea last year. Uber
said this week the head of
Eats is leaving the company.WASHINGTONBill Passes to Help
Replace Huawei GearThe U.S. Senate approved leg-
islation that would provide $
billion for rural telecom carriers
to replace equipment made by
China’sHuawei TechnologiesCo.
in their networks. House law-
makers passed a similar bill in
December.
The measure, if signed into
law by President Trump, would
provide funds for about 40 rural
carriers that use Huawei gear,
which the U.S. says could be
used by Beijing to spy on the
communications that flow
through its networks. Huawei
has disputed those assertions.
A Huawei representative criti-cized the legislation, saying it
would “reduce the ability of
broadband providers to provide
the most secure network equip-
ment and in turn hurt local con-
sumers and businesses.”
—Katy Stech FerekECONOMYBusiness Investment
Increased in JanuaryA key measure of U.S. busi-
ness investment rose in January,
a sign businesses were more
willing to spend in early 2020,
despite coronavirus risks that
erupted late that month.
New orders for nondefense
capital goods excluding aircraft—
or what are called core capital
goods orders, a closely watchedproxy for business investment—
increased 1.1% in January from
the previous month, the Com-
merce Department said Thursday.
The rise came during a
month when the U.S. and China
signed an initial trade deal,
marking a truce in a protracted
trade spat between the two
countries. The coronavirus out-
break also emerged that month
in China and has spread to other
parts of the world, and could
pose a risk for the U.S. economy.
—Amara OmeokwePHILADELPHIASafe-Injection Site’s
Opening Hits SnagPlans to open the nation’s first
sanctioned supervised drug-usesite in Philadelphia next week
have unraveled due to blowback
from potential neighbors.
The nonprofit Safehouse’s
plan to open a site is on hold,
Ronda Goldfein, the group’s vice
president, said late Thursday.
Neighbors of the proposed site
at a health facility in South Phil-
adelphia raised concerns, and the
landlord decided not to lease the
property, she said.
Just a day earlier, a favorable
court ruling led Safehouse to an-
nounce plans to open its first
site next week. Advocates of
such facilities, sometimes called
safe-injection sites, argue they
can save lives by putting medi-
cal help nearby to prevent fatal
overdoses. The sites can also act
as conduits to treatment.
—Jon Kamphas shrunk and its shares
have dropped more than 40%
in the past year.
Meanwhile, investors have
soured on Silicon Valley’s
growth-at-all-costs strategy.
Industries that gorged on a
feast of venture capital, in-
cluding food-delivery, are
finding it harder to raise fresh
cash.
In an ominous sign for
DoorDash and its money-los-
ing rival Postmates Inc., which
is also considering a listing,
unprofitable mattress seller
Casper Sleep Inc. this month
priced its IPO at the low end
of an already-slashed range.
The stock closed Thursday
25% below its IPO price.
The food-delivery compa-
nies are counting on public
listings or mergers to shore
up their finances. Postmates,
which privately filed to go
public early last year, chose
not to proceed in 2019 after
lackluster offerings from Uber
Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc.Continued from Page OneDoorDash
To G o
Public
A funding round last year valued food-delivery provider DoorDash at nearly $12.6 billion.TNS/ZUMA PRESSU.S. NEWS
“Now the actors involved
are a lot more sophisticated,
and share intelligence and or-
ganized networks,” said Mi-
chael Driscoll, special agent in
charge of the cyber-and-coun-
terintelligence division of the
FBI’s New York office. He said
business-email compromises
are of particular interest to
the office because New York is
a financial hub.
Business-email scams first
appeared on the bureau’s radar
about a decade ago, officials
said. Back then the scams
tended to be relatively simple,
designed to imitate an email
from a chief executive asking
an employee to transfer money.
Over the years, the scams
shifted. Perpetrators targeted
personal email addresses in
2014, pretended to be lawyers
in 2015, then moved on to re-
quests for tax information and
targeting real-estate transac-
tions, officials said.
One new iteration, federal
officials said, involves fake re-
quests to divert payroll
funds. In this scam, someone in
a business’s payroll or human-resources department receives
an email purporting to be from
an employee. The email asks to
update direct-deposit informa-
tion for that pay period, which
then goes into an account con-
trolled by a swindler.
The scams also have shifted
from using “spoofed” emails,
often sent from an address sim-
ilar to one within the company,to the actual hacking of ac-
counts, said Edward McAndrew,
a partner at law firm DLA Piper
who represents companies that
have been victims of the
schemes. Once an email account
is hacked, the scammers have
access to contacts, calendars
and detailed email correspon-
dence of company accounts.
“The email gets hacked andthe bad guys can step into the
email threads,” said Mr. McAn-
drew, also a former federal cy-
bercrime prosecutor. “This is
no longer a situation where
some person who wasn’t pay-
ing close attention got duped.”
Many of the schemes are
operated by groups in Lagos,
Nigeria, some of whom work
out of office parks, said Ste-
phen Fullington, a supervisory
special agent with the New
York FBI who leads a team
that works on business-email
compromise cases. The groups
have bosses who run the
schemes, and use a network of
people that have learned vari-
ous fraud techniques, he said.
Many companies that fall
victim to such scams never re-
port them, often because they
are embarrassed, officials said.
In one case in New York, an
indictment was unsealed in
May of last year charging four
men for their roles in busi-
ness-email compromise
schemes that targeted victims
including a nongovernmental
organization in New York City.
Prosecutors said the schemedefrauded victims of million of
dollars over about two years.
As part of the scheme, the
men obtained fraudulent docu-
ments with fake names, regis-
tered shell companies and
opened bank accounts with
these shell companies and fake
identifies, the indictment says.
One of the men, pretending
to be an employee, tricked the
organization into sending a
payment to what he said was a
valid vendor of the organiza-
tion, which had done work re-
lated to South Sudan, court
documents show. Three of the
men have pleaded not guilty to
the charges, including Joshua
Ikejimba, who was arrested in
Houston. Todd Spodek, a law-
yer for Mr. Ikejimba, said his
client was an unwitting victim
to the richer, more powerful
men who ran the scheme.
“This is like organized
crime, and they are really just
finding flunkies in these
cases,” Mr. Spodek said.
Lawyers for two of the
other men didn’t respond to
requests for comment. The
fourth man remains at large.Email scams—often riddled
with typos and written by non-
native English speakers in Af-
rica—were once crude attempts
to steal money from inexperi-
enced computer users. No more.
Federal investigators say
these scams have become so-
phisticated frauds that are
costing American businesses
and individuals billions of dol-
lars a year.
Estimated losses have
soared in the past five years
from scams known as busi-
ness-email compromises, in
which swindlers con victims
into directing money into ac-
counts controlled by criminals.
In 2019, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation received
23,775 complaints of business-
email and email-account com-
promises, up from 20,373 the
prior year, according to data
the bureau published earlier
this month. Annual estimated
losses increased as well, to
more than $1.7 billion in 2019
from $1.2 billion in 2018, ac-
cording to the data.BYCORINNERAMEYEmail Scams Get Savvier, Target Businesses
prices fall by around 50% per
year between 2007 and 2018.
Put differently, data used per
dollar spent doubled annually.
A broader mobile-phone-ser-
vice price index has declined
42% per year, according to the
authors’ calculations, while the
consumer-price index for the
same service produced by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics has
declined just 4% annually.
Using the new measure of
prices paid for digital access,
overall consumer price infla-
tion has been more tepid than
government measures, includ-
ing the Fed’s preferred gauge
by the Commerce Department,
the personal-consumption-ex-
penditures price index.
This new measure found
digital service access prices
fell 12% between 1988 and- Over that period, official
government measurements of
these prices found a modest
increase of around 1%.
The overall PCE index in-
creased by 2.1% annually, on
average, between 1988 and - Using the alternate mea-
sure of digital access service
prices, the index rose by just
1.9% annually.
The slower pace of inflation
is even more pronounced since - The overall PCE index
has risen by 1.5% since 2008,
but using the alternate mea-
sure of digital service pricing
shows it would have climbed
just 1.1% per year.
Digital spending offers an
example of how technology is
creating greater deflationary
forces that have hindered the
Fed’s ability to keep inflation
closer to its 2% inflation target.
Inflation may have been
lower than official measures
indicated in recent decades
due to difficulty measuring
prices paid for consumer digi-
tal access services, according
to a new paper co-authored by
a senior economist at the Fed-
eral Reserve.
The mismeasurement has
widened notably over the past
decade, according to the paper
by Fed economist David Byrne
and Carol Corrado of the Con-
ference Board.
The paper proposes a new
method of measuring prices
paid for consumer digital ac-
cess services, which include
internet, mobile phone, cable
television and wireless
streaming services. This cate-
gory of services accounted for
more than 2% of consumer
spending in 2018.
The alternate measure of
prices paid for these services
takes into account changes in
the volume of data transmitted,
which has grown rapidly amid
advances in wireless technol-
ogy, including the advent of 3G
in 2007 and 4G in 2011.
Consider, for example, the
ability to stream a movie over
your phone. Few smartphones
existed before the release of
Apple’s iPhone in 2007, and
roughly 80% of the adult pop-
ulation had one in 2018. Over
that same time, hours per day
on the phone rose fivefold and
data use soared. The paper
calculates smartphone service
prices by dividing total spend-
ing by aggregate data use.
Measured this way, suchBYNICKTIMIRAOSResearch Suggests
Inflation Rate
HasBeenTooLow
‘The email gets
hacked and the bad
guys can step into
the email threads.’Business-emailcompromise
complaintsreceivedby
theFBISource: Federal Bureau of Investigation25,05,10,15,20,2014 ’Estimatedlosses00.1.1.$2.0 billion2014 ’