Start a home business, get rich quick, win financial freedom! If you watch late-night TV, you've heard it all before. But what's the story behind these slick pitchmen and their dubious schemes? Enter The Salty Droid, your ornery metal guide to the corrupt underworld of scam-marketing scum. This charmingly acerbic bot (owned and operated by mild-mannered Chicago dog-lover Jason Michael Jones [inter-view, long talk + transcript]) is a valiant crusader against the vile con-men who bankrupt the elderly and the desperate with beautiful lies. Exposed so far: A shadowy "Syndicate" of frauduct-pushing personality cults polluting the media with blogspam and woo-woo talking points. Boiler rooms in the Utah desert where telemarketers farm credit from easy targets with cunning, probing scripts [PDF]. Powerful politicians bought wholesale. Believers left to die in fraudulent new-age vision quests. It's a soul-crushing beat, enough to make one feel like a regular catcher-bot in the digital rye. But somebody's got to do it -- preferably someone with plasma nunchucks and titanium skin.
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 31, 2011 - 47 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 Dark Knight - On Sir Allen Stanford
posted by Gyan on Apr 29, 2009 - 9 comments

Open Secrets - the trouble with Enron
posted by Gyan on Jan 2, 2007 - 68 comments

How to make $4 million, the easy way. A bankrupt Connecticut couple starts a business and secures state, city, and private funding. Then they go out of business and disappear from the face of the earth.
posted by dayvin on Oct 2, 2001 - 0 comments

Can you say fraud? Can you say it twice? As strange as it seems, these two are related. After Kurzweil's fraud was finally revealed, the top two execs went to jail, but there was some question about what was going to happen to the company. Well, what goes around comes around. Lernout and Hauspie bought out Kurzweil Artificial Intelligence. It seems like they picked up the corporate culture, too.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Dec 20, 2000 - 0 comments