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Fraud Link Tuesday

Psychic Con Game

Psychics say the new rules will shift the responsibility of proving they are not frauds from prosecutors and onto them.

"By repealing the Act, the onus will go round the other way and we will have to prove we are genuine," McEntee-Taylor told Reuters. "No other religion has to do that."

Is it too much to ask for a proof of miracles?

Cell Phone Spam

Attorney General Tom Corbett urged consumers to be alert for scam and "spam" text messages on their personal cell phones and urged consumers to never divulge personal information in response to an unsolicited text message.

Corbett explained that the Attorney General's Bureau of Consumer Protection has been receiving a steadily increasing number of complaints about unwanted cell phone text messages - primarily involving advertisements for prescription drugs and pornography.

I ran into this phishing scam several months ago, when someone left me a text message to call their number. Stupid cell phone almost did so by itself.

The Ritz Hotel in London

When businessman Terry Collins was offered the chance to buy the Ritz Hotel for a knockdown price of £250million it was an opportunity that sounded too good to be true.

And it was indeed too good to be true. The hotel, with an estimated market value of around £600million, was not on the market.

Yet two conmen managed to persuade Mr Collins, co-founder of a large and reputable property company, that the hotel's owners, the Barclay brothers, were prepared to sell it at a bargain price.

Once again proof that that being a successful business man or woman is no protection against the lure of something for nothing.

Lawyer Fraud

On Friday afternoon, as the WSJ Law Blog was reporting the unfortunate tale of Samuel Fishman, the former Latham partner who defrauded his firm and his clients out of more than $300,000, one major question of human psychology seemed to hang unanswered over the story.

Why, given the annual take-home of a Latham partner and the long period of time over which Fishman's fraud played out, would he risk so much for so little?

A good start to this question would be to review Dan Ariely's work on Dishonesty, he suggests that the farther removed from cash we become the easier it is to cheat.

Charity Fraud

Robert Eugene Cheney had a charity, too, called HARP -- "Helping All Races of People."

He said it provided funding and services "to the poor throughout the world."

But his enterprise was no more real than George's, according to federal agents, who say he and a partner invented it as part of a scheme to rip off investors in Crawford County and across the country of some $2 million from 2003 through March 2007.

The FTC has a new webpage on charity fraud.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on April 22, 2008 (boomark / email).