A "
mystery man" was caught at a polling site for the New Hampshire primary attempting to use a dead man's name to vote. That man turned out to be
James O'Keefe, who may have also
broken federal law (and potentially violated his probation for previous wiretapping shenanigans) by crossing state lines to tamper with another state's election by filming poll workers and attempting to commit election fraud.
posted by backseatpilot
on Jan 12, 2012 -
153 comments
One way to
measure corporate fraud is look at reported numbers and see if they follow
Benford's law - number sets that are manipulated usually deviate from Benford's law. A
recent analysis of all public companies over the past 50 years has shown a steady upward deviation, strongly suggesting there is more corporate fraud now than ever before (peaked in 2008).
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Oct 13, 2011 -
41 comments
On July 23, 1920,
Charles Ponzi hired former Boston Post journalist William H. McMasters as his publicist, who quickly realized that his new client was defrauding the public. Just ten days later, McMasters wrote an exposé published in the Post that led to Ponzi's ultimate downfall. The newspaper won a Pulitzer. McMasters was
The Man Who Time (Almost) Forgot (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Aug 10, 2011 -
11 comments
Marissa is an adorable toddler with a rare and terrible medical problem:
West Syndrome, a.k.a. infantile spasms. Her father Mike has been active in the online Special Needs community, chronicling her story for years now at his blog
Marissa's Bunny. Last year, his readers raised almost $30,000 through a ChipIn fundraiser to offset the costs of Marissa's neurosurgery. As a sort of 'thank you', and with the help of matching funds from his employers, Mike
offered to give away and/or raffle 40 iPads to the special needs kids of his blogger friends, to be used as assistive technology devices for many of their non-verbal kids. This follows on the heels of several other
iPad raffles he's held in the past year.
Guess what happened next. The Special Needs Parenting blog community is on the case:
Ellen Seidman (and her commenters),
Rob Rummel-Hudson,
Sarah and Joyce Hely,
Shannon Des Roches Rosa and others are putting together the pieces right now.
(previously on MetaFilter: the unravelings of Kaycee Nicole, JT LeRoy, Kodee Kennings, Alexa DiCarlo, and Amina Arraf)
posted by Asparagirl
on Jul 18, 2011 -
183 comments
A thread at Apple's Support site has popped up with frustrated users describing nearly identical iTunes account disruptions: up to hundreds of dollars of charges are being racked up by fraudulent buyers, using iTunes gift card balances and even credit card information to fund the purchases.
[more inside]
posted by Khazk
on Mar 9, 2011 -
71 comments
Cracking the Scratchie. With cheating and money laundering and statistics, this story seems like it should be about something more exciting than scratch-off lottery tickets. But it isn't.
posted by jacquilynne
on Feb 1, 2011 -
92 comments
[Warning: some links
NSFW] Callgirl and blogger Alexa DiCarlo had some questions raised about her authenticity dating back to
2008 and
2009, but her website RealPrincessDiaries.com (
archive.org cache) still attracted huge traffic and she was even named
the #1 sex blogger of 2010. A student at SFSU's
master's degree program in sexuality studies, she also volunteered her time providing sex education advice to teenagers online under the name Caitlain or Cathy. And she mentored newbie sex workers via e-mail, giving them pro tips and even sharing with them one of her top clients, Matt, whose identity and safety she vouched for.
But in true
Kaycee Nicole /
JT LeRoy style, it now turns out there
wasn't any "Alexa", "Caitlain", or "Cathy". Outed by the anonymous blog
Expose A Bro, combined with the anonymous twitter account
@ExposingAlexa, the real story has emerged. Alexa was apparently a married middle-aged guy named Pat, not a student at SFSU, had no formal training from which to be sharing "advice" (or naked photos!) with those teenagers online, and
he was the "client" that "Alexa" had sent to her protégées to sleep with...
[more inside]
posted by Asparagirl
on Nov 22, 2010 -
188 comments
Ken Lay & Enron. Bernie Madoff. Bernie Ebbers & WorldCom. What is it about CEOs that makes them uniquely capable of pulling off the most audacious & expensive kind of white collar crime?
Control Fraud Theory has the answer. Via the ever-enlightening
Bruce Schneier.
posted by scalefree
on Nov 8, 2010 -
37 comments
"The first thing that needs to happen, I think, is to get these people out of their homes," a man wearing a bespoke blue-striped shirt, a Hermés tie patterned with elephants and Ferragamo loafers
said recently. But, maybe Wall Street doesn't understand
why foreclosure fraud is so dangerous to property rights? And, the Obama administration doesn't understand why
HAMP has been a
portrait in failure for homeowners (in eight parts
I,
II,
III,
IV,
V,
VI,
VII,
VIII.)
posted by ennui.bz
on Oct 15, 2010 -
107 comments
Undercover investigators posing as students interested in enrolling at 15 for-profit colleges found that recruiters at four of the colleges encouraged prospective students to lie on their financial aid applications — and all 15 misled potential students about their programs’ cost, quality and duration, or the average salary of graduates, according to a federal report.
NY Times [more inside]
posted by Think_Long
on Aug 4, 2010 -
48 comments
"Former Harvard student Adam Wheeler
was indicted [yesterday] on multiple counts of identity fraud and larceny. According to the
Boston Globe, Wheeler allegedly built a 'fraudulent life history that led to his admission to Harvard, and for using forged academic materials from Harvard when he applied for the prestigious Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships.'"
* In his transfer student application to Harvard "...Wheeler claimed he got a perfect score on the SAT, straight A's at prestigious prep school Phillips Academy Andover and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...In reality, he had never attended either school..."
* He
has plead not guilty to the charges.
[more inside]
posted by ericb
on May 18, 2010 -
164 comments
"When a company or individual receives a surprise subpoena on a Friday from the SEC, it is usually designed to ruin their weekend plans. Yes, the SEC can get personal in its own way...Back in the day as the criminal CFO of
Crazy Eddie, I received a surprise subpoena from the SEC late Friday afternoon. I had to wait until Monday before my attorneys had time to advise me on a course of action." Ex-white collar felon
Sam Antar blogs about the SEC's recent move.
[more inside]
posted by inkyroom
on Apr 20, 2010 -
50 comments
SEC sues Goldman Sachs for fraud . GS has already come under fire for "betting against" financial products it was marketing, a practice that apparently helped it prosper from the real estate bubble but come out relatively unscathed. The SEC now says that one such product was designed specifically so that a Goldman business partner, Paulson & Company, could take a short position on it. Investors were apparently not advised of this fact. Goldman's stock was off more than 10% in the half hour following the announcement.
[more inside]
posted by grobstein
on Apr 16, 2010 -
48 comments
An Australian Madoff? Trio Capital, an Australian fund manager, has been
ordered to wind up its funds after being unable to account for $123 million in its Astarra fund since investigations began in October. The fund "has a total of $426 million under management - including
superannuation savings of about 10,000 Australians." Some worry what this means for more potential frauds in Australia's "privatized social security."
[more inside]
posted by FuManchu
on Mar 21, 2010 -
10 comments
Google Alleges That Viacom ‘Secretly Uploaded Its Content to YouTube, Even While Publicly Complaining About Its Presence There’ Zahavah Levine, chief counsel for YouTube in its litigation with Viacom, explains:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. […] Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
[
via DF]
posted by ocherdraco
on Mar 18, 2010 -
49 comments
