Free Republic

Pretty sure I'm not the first to have noticed this: OK, you want buy something to read, a magazine - cost is, say, $2.50. How much time do you spend researching possible choices? A few minutes? Now you have to buy something that costs $50 (20 times more) - say, an MP3 player. How much time do you spend researching these possible choices? More, right? Of course, you're parting with more money. So you spend 20X more time researching - say, 40 minutes in total. Now a $1000 TV - another 20-fold increase. More research than for an MP3 player?...

Madoff Victims Still Demanding That Taxpayers Reimburse Them For Fake Returns Yael BizouatiSep. 24, 2009, 5:15 PMMadoff’s victims will finally get their day in court Feb. 2. The victims have been fighting with Irving Picard, the bankruptcy trustee, about the right way to determine their losses. Now a judge will decide. The victims say their losses should be measured by the fictitious amount they thought they had in their accounts when the Ponzi scheme collapsed.[snip]

THERE'S one thing more shocking than the illegal- alien smuggling advice that an ACORN official in San Diego gave undercover journalists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles: It's the illegal-alien home-loan racket that ACORN has been operating with the full knowledge of the US government. On Wednesday, O'Keefe and Giles published the fifth in a series of BigGovernment.com sting videos. In it, ACORN official Juan Carlos Vera coached the pimp-and-prostitute-posing pair on how best to pull off a border-busting smuggling operation. It would be "better from Tijuana," Vera counseled. He then generously offered the investigative couple his Mexican "contacts" to bring...

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's metamorpho sis is complete: Goodbye, House moderate; hello, leftist Senate radical. In Monday's Senate vote to strip federal grants from ACORN, Gillibrand was one of just seven members to back continued funding. She even broke with her New York patron, Chuck Schumer. Yes, Gillibrand said certain ACORN employees' actions were "reprehensible" and called for "a full investigation." But, the rookie senator, tapped by a clueless Gov. Paterson, nonetheless insisted that "thousands of New York families who are facing foreclosure depend on charitable organizations like ACORN for assistance." Yeah, we know -- and Mussolini made the trains run...

WASHINGTON -- This is your money at work. At work in the red-light district. And your government is the pimp who handles your "investment." Over the last six years, more than $10 million of your hard-earned money has been taken by the federal government and handed to ACORN, which we now know is ready and eager to use your money to finance whorehouses. What could possibly be more fitting? These tapes from inside ACORN offices in Washington, Baltimore and now Brooklyn make your skin crawl.

The Economic Club of Southwest Michigan is using Sarah Palin's name to promote an event to which it hasn't yet even invited her to attend. But what can we expect from an outfit that considers left-wing columnist Tom Friedman to be a "world-renown leader"?  From The Herald-Palladium: In announcing its 2009-10 speakers lineup Friday, the club offered the teaser that former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin might speak to the club. Palin, who recently resigned as Alaska's governor, has not begun accepting speaking invitations. But when she does the club will invite her, said Club President Michael Cook. If she...

MIAMI – Federal authorities arrested more than 30 suspects, including doctors, and were seeking others in a major Medicare fraud bust Wednesday in New York, Louisiana, Boston and Houston, targeting scams such as "arthritis kits" — expensive braces that many patients never used.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators on Monday made permanent an emergency rule aimed at reducing abusive short-selling, put in at the height of last fall's market turmoil. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it took the action on the rule targeting so-called "naked" short-selling, which was due to expire Friday. Short-sellers bet against a stock. They generally borrow a company's shares, sell them, and then buy them when the stock falls and return them to the lender -- pocketing the difference in price. "Naked" short-selling occurs when sellers don't even borrow the shares before selling them, and then look...

I have received two different scam letters, supposedly from our troops in Iraq, one regarding so-called hidden buried loot from Sadam, and one regarding large sums of cash. I believe that I was targeted because I am a relative of an aviator killed during Operation Desert Strike. Has anyone else received similar letters? Is there a way to apprehend the perpetrators? The letter writers pretended to be U.S. troops, but the idiomatic expressions and general tenor of the letters were clearly written by those not steeped in American speech. I fear older recipients might be gullible enough to "help" the...

Internet scams have been around for years, but the Federal Trade Commission’s recent crackdown on robocallers pushing car warrantees has put a spotlight on the thousands of tactics used by scammers to bilk Americans out of millions.

Prophets of Doom has been around probably since the beginning of man’s existence on earth. Whether one believe man was created by God from the dust of the earth, or he evolved from a sea creature, a monkey, or matter from a collision of the planets commonly known as the big bang. Whatever your preference for the origin of man it is no secret that from the time he began walking on planet earth he began predicting its end. It’s now estimated that more than 50% of the world population give doomsday prophets some credibility regarding “End Time Events” thereby...

A federal judge has issued a pair of temporary restraining orders to halt what officials describe as a wave of "robo-calls" warning people their auto warranties are expiring and offering new service plans. U.S. District Judge John F. Grady issued a temporary restraining order against Transcontinental Warranty Inc. on Thursday and one against Voice Touch Inc. on Friday. The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against the companies in U.S. District Court in Chicago on Thursday. Chairman Jon Leibowitz says the FTC "has disconnected the people responsible for so many of these annoying calls." Officials say Americans have gotten as many...

Legislation would hike resources to DOJ, FBI, set up outside commission. BY RONALD D. OROL WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The Senate voted Tuesday to give federal investigators more tools to combat mortgage fraud and other scams.The bipartisan legislation would authorize $490 million over two years to hire fraud prosecutors, increase enforcement actions and add funds to the Secret Service and Housing and Urban Development Inspector General. It also allocates funds to the Postal Inspection Service. It also sets up a commission of outside experts with subpoena power to examine the financial crisis and make recommendations.

A distraught twentysomething woman called the Better Business Bureau in Louisville, Ky., one day last month. She'd wired $21,000 to a scam artist who had requested the money as "collateral" for a low-interest $100,000 college loan. Crying hysterically, she told her story but then hung up before giving her name or before anyone could help her. "The odds of her getting her money back are pretty much zero," Many young consumers have lost cash to scams... a quarter of people ages 18 to 34 admitted to losing money in a scam in the past six months. Other research suggests that...

There are a lot of shady people hoping that you're after instant riches -- or at least a boost on making up for your recent stock market losses. Boy, do they have the sales pitch down pat. There are tax scams, penny-stock huckster scams, Instant Messaging scams, Nigerian confidence scams, mortgage-servicing scams, wrong-number pump-and-dump scams, bad-roommate-from-Craigslist scams. I could go on, but my keyboard is out of breath. How can you tell if an investment pitch is a scam? Unfortunately, there is no foolproof system. So occasionally we get a Bernie Madoff in the mix. However, there are telltale signs...

Feds: Women staged sham funerals for money Pair allegedly tried to cash-in insurance plans after burials, cremations April 9, 2009 LOS ANGELES - Two women have been charged with staging sham funerals to collect life insurance payments and other money totaling an estimated $1 million. Hawthorne phlebotomist Faye Schilling, 60, and Los Angeles mortuary worker Jean Crump, 66, were arrested Wednesday on a federal grand jury indictment. Prosecutors allege the women bought insurance policies, waited for them to mature, then held bogus burials or cremations and arranged for phony death certificates. "The level of deception is shocking," said Anthony Montero,...

INTERNET CRIME Complaints and Losses on the Rise 03/30/09 Reports of Internet scams and their financial toll continued to grow in 2008, according to the latest data by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which operates a website, www.ic3.gov, to collect and refer public complaints about Internet fraud. In 2008, more than $264 million was lost in 275,284 complaints—an average of $931 for every complaint—according to the 2008 Internet Crime Report, released March 30. Almost one-third of the complaints were for non-delivery of merchandise purchased online; auction fraud accounted for one in four complaints.

SIERRA VISTA — Some recent scams are geared toward people with mortgages, military families and people hoping to support their local police and fire departments, according to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard. Goddard met with the City Council Tuesday afternoon to discuss consumer fraud issues, among other topics. Con artists aren’t new, but the tricks they use are ever-changing. Seniors and military families are targeted in particular. “A lot of people make a living by preying on military families,” he said. Among the scams to watch out for are those geared toward mortgage help. For example, a man was charged...

Barely a year after Congress enacted an energy law meant to foster a huge national enterprise capable of converting plants and agricultural wastes into automotive fuel, the goals lawmakers set for the ethanol industry are in serious jeopardy. As recently as last summer, plants that make ethanol from corn were sprouting across the Midwest. But now, with motorists driving less in the economic downturn, the industry is burdened with excess capacity, and plants are shutting down virtually every week. In the meantime, plans are lagging for a new generation of factories that were supposed to produce ethanol from substances like...

CANTAUCO, Chile (Reuters) – It was supposed to be a magic recipe for instant riches, but instead hundreds of residents in this sleepy town in central Chile are up in arms over a "magic cheese" scam that has left many deep in debt. Chilean housewife Erica Pavez was one of around 300 residents taken in by the pyramid scheme, buying kits to make "magic cheese" said to be used in beauty products like luxury shampoo and moisturizers. Lured by the scheme, Pavez and her family spent about 25 million pesos (27, 745 pounds)) on the kits, which they believed contained...

February 4, 2009 Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel09/workathomescams020309.htm FBI: Don’t be Fooled by Work-at-Home Scams The FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) continue to receive numerous complaints from individuals who have fallen victim to work-at-home scams and remind consumers to be vigilant when seeking employment online. These work-at-home schemes are designed by criminals to gain the trust of job seekers in order to take advantage of working relationships to further illegal activity. Most victims do not even realize they are engaging in criminal behavior until it is too late. In many of the reported scams,...

Dear Mr. Scammer I owe you a few apologies: • I am sorry for responding and saying sure I am happy to engage in a bizarre business deal with you knowing full well it isn’t real. • I am sorry you wasted time to print a horrible fake check. • I am sorry you spent $4.90 UPS’ing it to me overnight. • I am sorry for taking a few days to get back to you after I got the check and ask you for your phone number which you can’t give me. I knew that and still I emailed you...

In November, the unemployment rate hit a 14-year high of 6.7 percent. For people who prey on unemployed workers, the high jobless rate is an opportunity to scam vulnerable job seekers out of their money and personal data. Scam artists know that when times get rough and bills are due, even the most sophisticated job hunters can fall prey to their employment schemes. That's why all job seekers should educate themselves about job scams. Many involve either work-from-home projects or online jobs. The ads are enticing: "Earn $200 a day just by clicking a mouse." "Make $50 to $250 an...

L’affaire Madoff is an exclamation point for all that has preceded in the last 18 months: It reveals to us who we are and what we have been in the first decade of the new century; naive adventurers in a world we didn’t understand. We all accepted the easy money and the bull market as a divine right. We turned the other way when a few Cassandras cried that risk was alive and well. We shrugged when the credit rating agencies turned into lapdogs for Wall Street’s financial engineers. Main Street investors were no different from Bernie’s A-list investo...

SAN JUAN -- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested in Puerto Rico 13 people accused of taking part in a scheme to obtain Green Cards through bogus marriages. The ICE spokesman in San Juan, Ivan Ortiz, told Efe that "this is not a new kind" of fraud to get residency. He said that there is "a very serious commitment of the U.S. Attorney's Office" to stop this, because the number of cases is increasing. Among those arrested were U.S. citizens Lydia Josefina Garcia Rios, 43; Jose Miguel Delgado Ortega, 47; Jorge Higgs Gaetan, 41, and Maria Rosa Fernandez, 27, who...

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain? Earlier this year Gore experienced a notable public relations debacle. The Tennessee Center for...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11, 2008 – Financial scams and predatory lending against servicemembers and veterans is so common that the Arizona attorney general has created an advisory board to stop it. “We got so many complaints that were related to either veterans or active-duty military on our consumer line that I felt it was necessary to set up this coordinating council,” Terry Goddard said. “It’s been very, very rewarding already and its only had one meeting.” Goddard, a retired Navy Reserve commander and Arizona’s attorney general for the last six years, said he was sure some of the complaints his...

Note: The following text is a quote: Holiday Season Cyber Scammers Target Victims The FBI is reminding people this holiday season that cyber criminals continue to aggressively seek ways to steal money and personal information. Scammers are using several techniques to fool potential victims including sending unsolicited e-mails that contain attachments such as electronic greeting cards containing malware (malicious software), setting up spoofing websites that look like legitimate commercial sites, and unleashing phishing and vishing attacks where individuals receive e-mails asking for personal data. “These cyber scammers will do whatever they can to steal your money and personal information this...

Ehud Olmert got a $300,000 discount on his home in 2004. Barack Obama got a $300,000 discount on his home in 2005. It's the same scam, windfall income or an illegal political contribution, interpret it as you will. Olmert got caught out in a bribe related to his. Obama seems to be too subtle and clever for that. But a corrupt politician is a corrupt politician no matter how you slice it.

New Mexico state Rep. Bill Rehm has heard the line more than once, so when a Traveller came calling to his Albuquerque home in March, he recognized the scam."They must go to college to learn this line," said Rehm, a retired sergeant with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department, recalling the pitch: " 'We are working on a [paving] job just down the street, and we can do your driveway for $2 a square foot. Today. Right now.’ He said they had over-ordered materials."Rehm turned the Traveller away, but others weren’t so savvy.This spring and summer, some Travellers — nomadic clans of...

Yesterday, I was on FreeRepublic and read an article. There was a prompt that said I could download something that would help the GOP if I did. It is somehow affiliated with Yahoo.Well, long story short, it is garbage. It takes me a few minutes to get on the internet. When I hit my homepage (msn), my screen goes white and at least 2 or 3 minutes later, I get the internet. I tried to call FreeRepublic to report and could not find a phone number in Fresno. Somebody tell me how to get this crap off.

A while back there was an article on a scam in Africa, Kenya IIRC. It involved political donations and had references to Obama in it. Can anyone point me to this or have any idea that might help? Thanks

Angela Carter's family has lived for 46 years in the same small two-story home in Chicago, perhaps a 15-minute ride from Barack Obama's adopted Hyde Park neighborhood. But today a piece of paper says someone else owns the property, and a judge will soon decide if Carter and her mom get to stay in her home. The reason Carter, 55, is facing eviction, she says, is that she fell for a high-stakes scam that’s sweeping the nation, preying on the 1 in 11 consumers who are either behind on their mortgage payments or already in foreclosure. Interviews with legal aid...

Bruce Watson, freelance blogger writes: When I was a student, there were many semesters when I spent less on food than on school books. I learned, from experience, that starvation is sometimes better than the 50th serving of lentils in a row, that there are only so many ways that ramen can be prepared, that $20 worth of raw materials can translate into a month's worth of hummus, and that sugar packets "liberated" from the local Burger King can be used to make Kool-aid, yielding a refreshing, almost free source of Vitamin C. I had always considered myself an expert...

Dear Friend ......I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE. My name is Sgt.Evans Mark, I am an American soldier with Swiss background, serving in the military with the army 3rd infantry division.With a very desperate need for assistance, I have summed up courage to contact you. I found your contact particulars in an address journal. I am seeking your kind assistance to move the sum of ( $ 25 million u.s. dollars ) Twenty Five million united states dollars to you, as far as I can be assured that my share will be safe in your care until I complete my service here,...

Somewhere on the road to Kyoto, Canada turned into the land of the carbon zombies. Like the walking undead, blood-sucking politicians of all stripes are howling at each other over discredited ways to reduce carbon emissions that other countries, having tried to implement, are running away from in terror. In Europe, politicians who boasted they were leading the fight to save Gaia from global warming are now fleeing before enraged mobs of citizens, furious their governments' plans to "save the planet" have turned out to be nothing more than skyrocketing taxes and energy prices. That, plus a "cap-and-trade" carbon market...

The Global Warming Movement’s Tactical Mistake Exposes Its True Motive$ Before you ask people to commit economic suicide, you best have your predictions coming true and not falling apart as reality overturns all your assumptions and claims. The WSJ notes today how badly the Church of Al Gore played their hand in trying to ram through Congress useless farces on Climate Control: "But it would appear the political consensus on global warming was as exaggerated as the alleged scientific consensus. “With gasoline selling at $4 a gallon, the Democrats picked the worst possible time to bring up cap and trade,”...

Forgoing for a moment the dirty trick of the doctored clip from “The War Room,” which falsely had Mickey Kantor using a racial slur, the filmmaker behind the documentary has posted the clip on his Web site to clarify that other point of confusion -- what Kantor was referring to when he cursed. (An apparent source of confusion since the movie came out and some newspaper writers thought he was cursing Indianans. See previous post for that.) Filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker write: "We would like to respond to some erroneous statements made today about our film, THE...

I received an e-mail today from “Todd Williams a staff of Natwest Bank plc London.” He told me about 12.5 million pounds in his bank, and offered to split it with me if I would “stand as [the deceased’s] next of kin for the fund release” in my name. This e-mail is an example of the Nigerian Scam. Originally, the grand sums that were available to be split up were supposed to be held in Africa. Now, the locale of the funds has spread. But the bad grammar and poor proof-reading suggest that this is from the same area of...

Clinton Campaign Staffers Not Going Without Pay Staff Had Offered to Go Without Pay to Save Campaign Money But Never Did By KATE SNOW Feb. 7, 2008 — So it turns out the Clinton campaign may not be so cash-strapped after all  at least not at this very moment. After offering on Wednesday to go without paychecks to help save precious campaign resources, senior staff members on Hillary Clinton's campaign are in fact not going without pay during the month of February, ABC News has learned. "It's not happening," said a source familiar with the situation. Clinton's campaign has...

WARNING! I was looking for some sales statistics on the Apple iPhone and Googled "iPhone" and noticed that the number one position on the "Sponsored Links" column offered an Unlocked brand new iPhone for $275! I clicked on the link and was directed to this website: Electronic4less.com. DO NOT TRY TO BUY ANYTHING FROM THESE PEOPLE! Everything they sold seemed too good to be true... $399 iPhone for $275 $1499 MacBook black for $999 $6,649 Canon EOS Digital Camera for $3,997... ... and many more that I knew they were too good to be true. I did a search for...

Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) tried that last week when Bush signed energy legislation that will curb greenhouse gases. "Congratulations and good work," Carper recalled writing. "By the way, Joe Lieberman and John Warner have a very good global warming bill that needs your support and you ought to support it." Bush tucked the note into his pocket and promised to read it later. Carper hoped he would find it at the end of the day when he slipped his suit off. No one knows what effect such a note might have, but it was just one more small foray...

A day after the White House unveiled a program to salvage the mortgage market, people are already talking about how borrowers might game the system. To qualify for the fast-track program, borrowers must have a FICO score of less than 660 and it can't have increased by more than 10% since they took out their original subprime mortgage. Because income isn't checked, some experts worry that borrowers who might otherwise be able to afford higher payments will try to lower their FICO score to qualify for a rate freeze. "The message here is to get your FICO score down," Mark...

Numerous Iraqi military and law-enforcement officials brought to the U.S. as part of special intelligence and training programs have run away and are seeking asylum in this country or disappeared altogether...Intelligence officials...say nearly a dozen Iraqis fled military training facilities in the U.S., including a brigadier general who went to Canada with his family...Army officials confirmed that five Iraqi military personnel whom the Army had been training disappeared between 2005 and 2007. They did not know how many other Iraqis sponsored by the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy may have done the same. "Nothing that this command is aware...

NBC Augusta.com Weather Channel Founder Calls Global Warming A 'Scam' By Rich Rogersrrogers@nbcaugusta.com Story Updated: Nov 8, 2007 at 7:21 PM EST When John Coleman founded The Weather Channel in the early 1980's, he probably never could have guessed that TWC would be promoting the theory of global warming in the 2000's. That's because Coleman doesn't believe in global warming, or so-called climate change. In a November 7 blog entry on icecap.us, Coleman makes it clear that he does not oppose environmentalism, but he says that global warming is a "non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam." "I have...

For about an hour last August, Gary Hoffman was a very lucky man. Hoffman was playing the nickel slot machines at the Sandia Resort and Casino on an Indian reservation in New Mexico, when he appeared to hit the jackpot: the machine said he won nearly $1.6 million. "I became ecstatic," he said. But the ecstasy was short-lived. Hoffman says in a lawsuit filed earlier this year that Sandia refused to pay, claiming that the machine malfunctioned. Instead, he said, they gave him about $385 and a few free meals at the casino.[snip]..... [snip]Regardless, a jury may never get chance...

Little Green Lies The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke. Meet the man wielding the torch Auden Schendler learned about corporate environmentalism directly from the prophet of the movement. In the late 1990s, Schendler was working as a junior researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank in Aspen led by Amory Lovins, legendary author of the idea that by "going green," companies can increase profits while saving the planet. As Lovins often told Schendler and others at the institute, boosting energy efficiency and reducing...

Most Internet users have grown sophisticated enough to know that former princes in Nigeria don't really need their assistance to transfer funds to the United States. They sympathize with those correspondents who have just been diagnosed with terminal illnesses but resist the widely-broadcast plea to become executors of their estates -- with the odd requirement to place large amounts of cash in escrow first. With a few exceptions, including a minister's wife who wound up murdering her husband after blowing $14,000 on an e-mail scam, Americans know better than to fall prey to the scamsters. Unfortunately, that doesn't apply to...

They just don't make Nobel Prizes the way they used to. That's the feeling we get after hearing that Al Gore was named co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his global warming alarmism. The other co-winner was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group of scientists. It was easy enough to understand how Hollywood awarded Gore an Oscar for his climate movie ''An Inconvenient Truth.'' The Academy Award judges live in the land of make-believe. But the Nobel is a serious prize and its judges are supposed to do better work than the movie crowd....

CLEVELAND, Aug. 31 -- The FBI is looking overseas for suspects who have phoned bomb threats to more than 26 grocery stores, banks and discount stores in 17 states, including Virginia. The callers have threatened to set off a bomb unless store employees wire money to an account abroad. At a Dillons grocery store in Hutchinson, Kan., the caller ordered customers and workers to take off their clothes and threatened to force them to cut off a manager's fingers.