thewayne | Entries tagged with fraud

Ah, such a lovely news night last night was! Arizona did two good things in one day - unbelievable! They started the repeal of the Civil War-era abortion law, and the Attorney General indicted eighteen people for the false elector scam that the Trump campaign tried to run, including: Rudi Giuliani and Mark Meadows, Kelli Ward, the former chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, and her husband Michael Ward, two serving state lawmakers - Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman.

The charges include conspiracy, fraud, and forgery. From the article: "The 11 people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claiming that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored."

The funny thing was that while Governor Ducey was signing the document finalizing the count, his phone rang with a Hail To The Chief ringtone - it was Trump. Ducey hit Ignore and finished his task.

An unnamed former American President has yet to be revealed. And it's rumored that a former aid to a former American President is singing like a bird to avoid being charged.

Florida, New York, Washington DC, Georgia, and now Arizona!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68893365

This Huffington Post article goes into details of other states that have prosecuted people for the same crime of invalid electors.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/arizona-grand-jury-fake-electors-trump_n_662994a0e4b005d7bf0c72a6

FTX was the exchange run by convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried, who is facing potentially decades in prison for his role in mis-managing the company and failing to produce the technology that the exchange needed. The current managers of the exchange have secured around $7billion in assets and will use that to try to repay customers as much as possible, their accounts were frozen in November '22 when the company filed for bankruptcy.

There's one little catch, which will make the customers unhappy: the payback will be in November '22 pricing. In late '22, crypto was in a slump. Bitcoin was trading at $16.8k, it's now at over $43k. But at least they'll be getting money back, which is more than people in most failed exchanges will be getting. All of this is taking place after having reached an agreement with the courts.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/31/ftx-crypto-exchange-cancelled-refund-customers

I had never heard of this, apparently it's been going on for some time.

The man, Tim, worked for a First Nations tribe in Alberta as a buyer. It was almost the end of the fiscal year and they needed to spend some money before the year was out, so he and another work partner ordered $2,000 worth of children's playground stuff off of Amazon.

Then things got weird.

Shortly after placing the order, he gets contacted by a woman in Ontario, accusing him of hacking her Walmart card and ordering this gear. Which he had not done.

Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police get involved and tell him he needs to come down to the station and answer some questions pertaining to an investigation. Which he says he'd be happy to do. He provides printouts of the orders in question, showing HIS credit cards, etc. And then he's threatened with arrest, his wife is harassed by the RCMP, and he is ultimately arrested. Because of the arrest, he loses his job.

The equipment arrives at his house with an additional oddity: a phone number in Mexico.

Here's what happened. An expert in "search engine optimization" in Turkey apparently stole the woman's credit card, or may have bought it from one of the numerous black market exchanges where you can buy such. He placed an ad on Amazon, where Tim bought the gear from him. The Turkey turkey never owned the equipment. He buys the gear from Walmart, using the stolen credit card, has it shipped to Tim. I have no idea where the Mexico phone number came into play, perhaps another layer of money laundering?

And Tim gets charged with a money fraud charge and can't get a job. Apparently in Canada, being charged with a crime - but not having been convicted - is enough to really mess with your employment opportunities.

Tim had a court date, but the Crown prosecution services decided to issue a stay on the case and defer prosecution, saying we're not going to prosecute at this time, but might at a later date. Apparently they have one year to bring the case back to trial, during which Tim is left hanging in limbo. Commentors on the Krebs article said it is likely that the case will be dismissed at the end of the year period, I don't know if this will erase the arrest mark on Tim's record.

Tim did nothing wrong, except getting caught in a fraud scheme. So be very careful buying things on Amazon if it is not 'Shipped by Amazon'.

*sigh*

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/01/canadian-man-stuck-in-triangle-of-e-commerce-fraud/

Last December a City of Reedly (close to Fresno, CA) code enforcement inspector was driving in a warehouse district and noticed something that should not be: a water hose going into a supposedly unoccupied warehouse. His followup discovered a pharmaceutical lab housed inside.

The lab had twenty-some infectious agents, including Covid-19 and HIV. It also had genetically-engineered mice, many dead.

From the article: Jesalyn Harper, the city of Reedley’s code enforcement officer, thought the call would be routine - following up on an anonymous complaint about a business operating without a permit in an old warehouse. But when she found a jury-rigged garden hose sticking through a rear wall and a ventilation fan blowing foul-smelling air through an opened back door, things took a turn.

Harper knocked on the front door of the decades-old cold-storage warehouse for an inspection. What she discovered inside on that December day was almost the stuff of science fiction: Dozens of refrigerators filled with vials of blood, viruses and bacteria; containers of chemicals; hundreds of laboratory mice; and an array of stored laboratory equipment – all inside an unpermitted business operating illegally.

“I wasn’t looking for an unpermitted lab,” Harper told The Fresno Bee this week. “I was just looking for an unpermitted business.”

Prestige Biotech Inc., a company whose owners live in China, was using the building near Reedley’s downtown for storing and shipping an array of diagnostic test kits for COVID-19, pregnancy, drugs and more after apparently being booted out of their Fresno location in late 2022. The inventory of biological agents in the refrigerators include coronavirus and other exotic contagions, such as malaria, Hepatitis B and C, chlamydia, human herpes, and rubella, among others, used in the production of various test kits.

It is quite a story. The company had been kicked out of several sites before popping up in Reedly.

https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article277836263.html

And it gets worse. The FDA has issued a safety alert on several pregnancy test kits from several brands that may have been made from this outfit!

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/08/dont-use-pregnancy-tests-linked-to-illegal-california-lab-fda-warns/

A reporter got wind of it and ordered a card for her dog, which the doc happily sent to her. She sent the information on to the local board of medical examiners. He sold them to people whom he had never met, including to people out of state.

We need a lot more stories like this!

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/06/doctor-who-sold-bogus-covid-vaccination-waiver-to-dog-loses-medical-license/

The first is the arrest of Faruk Ozer, a Turkish crypto exchange founder. The exchange collapsed, losing over $2B in "investments", and he fled. An Interpol red notice went out and he was caught and returned to Turkey for trial. Over 80 people were arrested in the collapse, including several of his relatives and friends.

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/04/20/collapsed-turkish-crypto-exchange-thodexs-ceo-faruk-ozer-extradited-arrested-in-istanbul-report/

https://slashdot.org/story/23/04/20/2339229/collapsed-turkish-crypto-exchange-thodexs-ceo-faruk-ozer-extradited-arrested-in-istanbul

Next up, a Seattle startup's former CFO invested $35M of the company's money into a crypto platform that he controlled as a side business. Except that no one else knew or gave permission to move the money into a crypto fund. The fund went bust, all the money vanished.

The only bit of good news is that the company is very well-funded and will probably weather the loss.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/seattle-startups-ex-cfo-accused-of-diverting-35m-losing-it-in-crypto-crash/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/05/18/2148258/seattle-startups-ex-cfo-accused-of-diverting-35-million-losing-it-in-crypto-crash

In the EU, starting next year crypto exchange will require licensing, will have to report on energy consumption, and transactions on exchanges will have to be traceable. Person to person transactions aren't included in this, unless it is above EU$1,000.

From the article: "To better protect crypto investors, the EU's rules ensure that crypto assets can be traced—just like money transfers—and suspicious transactions can be blocked. They also provide "enhanced consumer protection and safeguards against market manipulation and financial crime," EU lawmakers announced. The rules do not apply to person-to-person transfers but do cover transactions above 1,000 euros from self-hosted wallets any time they connect to wallets hosted by crypto-assets service providers.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/landmark-crypto-rules-make-exchanges-liable-for-customer-losses-in-eu/

An excellent article on how your private data gets shared and what you can do about it.

The WHY you should is pretty simple: 9 million AT&T customers were compromised in a hack at an advertising affiliate, T-Mobile has had 70 million accounts compromised in the last decade or so, etc.

These data breeches are so common as to be ridiculous. And that information can be used against you in possible fraud schemes. As an article that I posted recently said, Americans lost a record amount to fraud schemes in 2022, and breeches like these help fuel said schemes.

The article explains how to opt-OUT of data sharing for the Big Three: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/why-you-should-opt-out-of-sharing-data-with-your-mobile-provider/