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Frauds, Scams & Cons (General; Miscellaneous)

This was described in a book on QAnon:

Although there were many prime bank scams in 1990s, Omega is set apart by the enduring faith of victims that they would receive a return on their investment, even after Hood's arrest.[1]: 136–137  When federal authorities offered restitution to an estimated 10,000 victims, many declined for fear of disqualifying themselves from receiving Omega's long-awaited payout.[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Trust
 
Three-year cruise cancelled

They had signed up for the experience of a lifetime: three years traveling the world from the comfort of a cruise ship, at prices that rivaled regular living expenses.

But now the dream is over for passengers who’d signed up for Life at Sea Cruises’ inaugural three-year voyage. After weeks of silence, the company has acknowledged to passengers that it has no ship, and has canceled the departure, vowing to refund those who’d signed up for cruises costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The cruise was originally due to depart Istanbul, Turkey, on November 1, but shortly before that date, departure was postponed to November 11 and relocated to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and then to November 30, again from Amsterdam. But on November 17 – less than two weeks before the third departure date – passengers were informed the cruise was off.

Some of the passengers who booked the 111 cabins sold are still in Istanbul, having made their way there ahead of the original departure date. Others say they have nowhere to return to, having sold or rented out their homes in anticipation of the round-the-world voyage, as well as jettisoning their possessions.

Most have spent tens of thousands of dollars on what was meant to be the experience of a lifetime, and now face a wait of at least several months to get their money back. The company has said it will make repayments in monthly installments, starting from mid-December and completing repayments in late February. It has also offered to pay for accommodation until December 1 and flights home for anyone now stranded in Istanbul. But some say they have no homes to return to.

Life at Sea Cruises had been planning to buy the AIDAaura, a ship retired this summer by AIDA Cruises, a German subsidiary of Carnival Corp. It was due to be rechristened as the MV Lara.

But after six weeks of uncertainty, during which Life at Sea repeatedly told guests that the sale was taking longer than planned, on November 16 another company, Celestyal Cruises, announced that it had bought the AIDAaura.

Owner of the parent company said “Miray is not such a big company to afford to pay 40-50 million for a ship,” but that it had “presented the project to investors, and had official approval from some of them to buy the vessel.”
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hunck said:
Three-year cruise cancelled

They had signed up for the experience of a lifetime: three years traveling the world from the comfort of a cruise ship, at prices that rivaled regular living expenses.

But now the dream is over for passengers who’d signed up for Life at Sea Cruises’ inaugural three-year voyage. After weeks of silence, the company has acknowledged to passengers that it has no ship, and has canceled the departure, vowing to refund those who’d signed up for cruises costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Life at Sea Cruises are still flogging their wares on the internet.

https://www.lifeatseacruises.com
 
Another way to avoid military service was ... You could also try to sandbag the government. An interesting example is the master bluffer -- at least it is tempting to use this term -- Jacob Gôransson, who was drafted as a soldier in Kalajoki (Ôsterbotten, Finland) in 1620, but he told the officers that three days a month he had such severe menstrual pains that it looked like he was dead. This very unusual problem for a man made him unfit to be a soldier.

Thirty Years’ War, Dick Harrison​

 
hunck said:
Three-year cruise cancelled

They had signed up for the experience of a lifetime: three years traveling the world from the comfort of a cruise ship, at prices that rivaled regular living expenses.

But now the dream is over for passengers who’d signed up for Life at Sea Cruises’ inaugural three-year voyage. After weeks of silence, the company has acknowledged to passengers that it has no ship, and has canceled the departure, vowing to refund those who’d signed up for cruises costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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kesavaross said:
Life at Sea Cruises are still flogging their wares on the internet.

https://www.lifeatseacruises.com
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This is odd. It would not be considered a scam if people get their money refunded, but if cruise is nonexistent, why would the site still be up? Reading the articles, it seems that "Life At Sea" was set up as a subsidiary of Miray Cruises specifically for what it was offering.

And several articles mention numerous different ships that the company claimed would be the ship for the cruise.

https://www.cruisehive.com/life-at-seas-fairytale-three-year-cruise-is-cancelled/116523

Though the fall out will be interesting as the above article does say people had sold homes and assets to fund their cruises.

I always go by my rule of not paying for anything that has not yet been built/acquired (example, the hot condo market that had started pre-selling homes before building had been started).
 
brownmane said:
This is odd. It would not be considered a scam if people get their money refunded, but if cruise is nonexistent, why would the site still be up? Reading the articles, it seems that "Life At Sea" was set up as a subsidiary of Miray Cruises specifically for what it was offering.

And several articles mention numerous different ships that the company claimed would be the ship for the cruise.

https://www.cruisehive.com/life-at-seas-fairytale-three-year-cruise-is-cancelled/116523

Though the fall out will be interesting as the above article does say people had sold homes and assets to fund their cruises.

I always go by my rule of not paying for anything that has not yet been built/acquired (example, the hot condo market that had started pre-selling homes before building had been started).
Click to expand...
,I don't know if it's still the case but it used to be very common in the UK for house builders to sell homes before they were built. referred to as buying off plan.
 
PeteS said:
,I don't know if it's still the case but it used to be very common in the UK for house builders to sell homes before they were built. referred to as buying off plan.
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And since the 90's (?), in Canada, much of the new build housing, which originally was mostly condo builds, were sold before anything was in the ground.

People who invested in this tended to lose their savings if the build was not completed. Most were buying with the hope that they'd make money and sell them with no intent of living in them.

One of the reasons for ridiculous housing prices.
 
This whole thing is hilarious:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-agreement-fictional-country?CMP=share_btn_tw

Paraguay official resigns after signing agreement with fictional country
Arnaldo Chamorro replaced after he signed ‘proclamation’ with representatives of fugitive Indian guru’s fake country

Representatives of the United States of Kailasa participated in two UN committee meetings in Geneva in February, according to media reports.

In March, Newark city hall in New Jersey acknowledged it had been scammed when it signed a sister city agreement with Kailasa.
 
The last paragraph :)

His troubles began shortly after winning election to the House in November 2022, when the New York Times reported he had lied about a Wall Street career, his college degrees and having Jewish ancestry.
Since then, the allegations have only piled up. He has been accused of a range of fabrications, from scamming Amish dog breeders in Pennsylvania to claiming his mother died in the 9/11 terror attacks.

In May, he was charged with 23 felonies, including wire fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds. He denies the allegations and is awaiting trial.
But the final blow came last month, when the House ethics committee found he had exploited "every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit".
Among its many allegations, the panel accused him of spending campaign money on Botox treatments, credit card debt, OnlyFans - a platform where users pay for content, including pornography - and trips to the Hamptons seaside enclave in New York.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67593885
 
Hopefully these two will face real bedbugs in prison.

Two men have been arrested in France after allegedly scamming elderly people into paying thousands of euros for bedbug treatment they did not need.

Police in Strasbourg said the men would go to their victims' homes, carry out phoney control services and then overcharge for treatment products. They added that 48 people had been scammed altogether, many of them women over 90.

Recent months have seen a rise in bedbug infestations across France. The issue has sparked concern across the country, with senior government officials working on measures to address it.

Entomologists and health experts have warned that the outbreak has also led to a rise in false sightings and unwarranted hysteria.

Authorities said the alleged scammers would phone their victims and tell them there was an infestation in their neighbourhood. They would then visit the person's home posing as health officials and, using aerosol sprays, pretend to fumigate the space. Before leaving, they would offer an ointment that they said would keep the bugs away from human skin. The ointment was in fact a simple eucalyptus-scented cream. Victims would be charged between €300 and €2,100 (£257 and £1,800).

Police said they had received a total of nine formal complaints for suspected fraud.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67655992
 
Now that's chutzpah!

Police in Gujarat, India busted five people who operated a fake toll plaza on bypass roads. Incredibly, the scam has been operating for 18 months. Smartly, the crooks charged less in tolls than the official government did at the real toll booth.

According to Financial Express, police "said that the accused used to stop vehicles and force them to use the makeshift toll plazas they set up instead of the one operated by an authorised operator on a national highway."

They "created bypass roads through WHTPL premises on the east of the NHAI toll plaza and through Vaghasia village west of the toll plaza, diverted vehicles to these bypass roads and extorted toll tax from vehicle drivers who took the bypasses."

https://boingboing.net/2023/12/11/f...-year-scamming-motorists-out-of-millions.html
 
From an Economist book review. Some OCR is bad, but you get the drift:

Vintage Crime. By Rebecca Gibb. versity of California Press; 2832 pope-o' and f25

rno MAKE A 1945 Mouton RothschiJd, rnjz 1 two parts Chåteau Cos d'EstorncJ to one part Chåteau Palmer and California cabernet. That was the strategy of Rudy Kurniawan, a wine fraudster, who poured his mixture of wines into old bottles with fake Iabels and sold them to gullible collectors. In 2014 he was sentenced to ten years in an American prison and ordered to forfeit $20m and to pay another $28m to victims.

Deported to his native Indonesia in 2021, Mr Kurniawan is now back in business. At fancy dinner parties, clients ask him to create fake fine wines to taste and compare with the real thing. Many tasters reportedly prefer his concoctions. "Mr Rudy Kurniawan is a vinous genius," one fawned. If a phoney bottle fulfils its Purpose—to give pleasure—does it matter that it is not what it claims to be?

Mr Kurniawan is one of the high-profile Scammers whose exploits are recounted in "Vintage Crime", a history of wine fraud by Rebecca Gibb, a winejournalist.
 
brownmane said:
For anyone who uses online venues such as FB marketplace to sell things, be aware of scams like this:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sask...middle-of-facebook-marketplace-scam-1.7044234
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FB Marketplace is full of scammers, even worse than eBay. Santander recently carried out some research on FBM in relation to scams involving cars and found there were numerous cases. In particular one seller apparently had 600 cars listed all over the country. I've found several where seemingly young female sellers have a number of high end cars for sale at 10-20% of their actual value. I presume these characters ask for a deposit before you get to inspect and then disappear or they use a variation on the third party shipper (actually none existent) to be paid up front, where you "get your money back" :)cool:) if not happy with the car. FB seemingly couldn't care less, despite the fact that some sort of algorithm would weed out this stuff before being allowed in listings.
 
A conwoman, a liar and a fraud. but is she a criminal? The National Crime Agency are investigating and the UK Government is suing for breach of contract and unjust enrichment.

Michelle Mone has admitted that she stands to benefit from tens of millions of pounds of profit from personal protective equipment (PPE) sold to the UK government during the pandemic by a company led by her husband, Doug Barrowman.

In an interview with the BBC, the couple apologised for denying their role in the deal for more than three years. But a defiant Baroness Mone said: "I don't honestly see there is a case to answer. I can't see what we have done wrong."

PPE Medpro was awarded government contracts worth more than £200 million to supply PPE to the NHS during the pandemic through a so-called "VIP lane", introduced to help the government choose between huge numbers of supplier offers.

In November 2021, the government revealed that Baroness Mone was the "source of referral" for PPE Medpro getting a place in the VIP lane.
Millions of gowns the company supplied were never used but the couple say these were supplied in accordance with the contract.

PPE Medpro is being sued by the UK government for £122m plus costs for "breach of contract and unjust enrichment".

Having previously denied gaining directly from the contracts, which yielded profits of around £60m, the former Conservative peer and lingerie tycoon admitted she and her children were beneficiaries of financial trusts where the money is held.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67736860
 
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PeteS said:
,I don't know if it's still the case but it used to be very common in the UK for house builders to sell homes before they were built. referred to as buying off plan.
Click to expand...
Bought my place here in Canada off-plan when it was just a patch of scrub.
 
uair01 said:
This was described in a book on QAnon:

Although there were many prime bank scams in 1990s, Omega is set apart by the enduring faith of victims that they would receive a return on their investment, even after Hood's arrest.[1]: 136–137  When federal authorities offered restitution to an estimated 10,000 victims, many declined for fear of disqualifying themselves from receiving Omega's long-awaited payout.[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Trust
Click to expand...
This one reminds me of that Dove of Oneness scam that some woman in Australia puilled off for most of the 90's. She claimed that the White Knights of something would be reforming the fiat money systems all over the world and anyone who got on her list would receive thousands from them when the banks were disbanded. I think she asked for 20.00 to get on the list. I knew people who were waiting over and over for their "refunds" and the date the White Knights were going to take down the banking systems kept changing. She had people hooked in for years, waiting. So stupid, yet in some groups very popular.
 
PeteS said:
FB Marketplace is full of scammers, even worse than eBay. Santander recently carried out some research on FBM in relation to scams involving cars and found there were numerous cases. In particular one seller apparently had 600 cars listed all over the country. I've found several where seemingly young female sellers have a number of high end cars for sale at 10-20% of their actual value. I presume these characters ask for a deposit before you get to inspect and then disappear or they use a variation on the third party shipper (actually none existent) to be paid up front, where you "get your money back" :)cool:) if not happy with the car. FB seemingly couldn't care less, despite the fact that some sort of algorithm would weed out this stuff before being allowed in listings.
Click to expand...
Facebook market place is so full of scammers that I'd rather shove something for sale out on the pavement with a sign - it would probably be more likely to sell! The number of 'I'll send a van to collect you just need to pay insurance' scams seem to make advertising anything on Facebook almost pointless.
 
JahaRa said:
This one reminds me of that Dove of Oneness scam that some woman in Australia puilled off for most of the 90's. She claimed that the White Knights of something would be reforming the fiat money systems all over the world and anyone who got on her list would receive thousands from them when the banks were disbanded. I think she asked for 20.00 to get on the list. I knew people who were waiting over and over for their "refunds" and the date the White Knights were going to take down the banking systems kept changing. She had people hooked in for years, waiting. So stupid, yet in some groups very popular.
Click to expand...
I thought it was the White Hats? Maybe I'm wrong on that. I've also got a memory of that scam is still happening but being done by different people.
 
ramonmercado said:
A conwoman, a liar and a fraud. but is she a criminal? The National Crime Agency are investigating and the UK Government is suing for breach of contract and unjust enrichment.

Michelle Mone has admitted that she stands to benefit from tens of millions of pounds of profit from personal protective equipment (PPE) sold to the UK government during the pandemic by a company led by her husband, Doug Barrowman.

In an interview with the BBC, the couple apologised for denying their role in the deal for more than three years. But a defiant Baroness Mone said: "I don't honestly see there is a case to answer. I can't see what we have done wrong."

PPE Medpro was awarded government contracts worth more than £200 million to supply PPE to the NHS during the pandemic through a so-called "VIP lane", introduced to help the government choose between huge numbers of supplier offers.

In November 2021, the government revealed that Baroness Mone was the "source of referral" for PPE Medpro getting a place in the VIP lane.
Millions of gowns the company supplied were never used but the couple say these were supplied in accordance with the contract.

PPE Medpro is being sued by the UK government for £122m plus costs for "breach of contract and unjust enrichment".

Having previously denied gaining directly from the contracts, which yielded profits of around £60m, the former Conservative peer and lingerie tycoon admitted she and her children were beneficiaries of financial trusts where the money is held.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67736860
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Simply corruption. The fact that this con artist can't see that she has done anything wrong speaks volumes about the kind of people who get elevated to high office.
 
Through Twitter I stumbled on this activist short-seller. They try to drive down the stock of shady companies. Of course they themselves are also a slightly shady company.

This is a crypto pump and dump scheme:
https://www.jcapitalresearch.com/hut.html

This looks like a somewhat classic mining scam, but there are many more companies on their website. This one has a video:
https://www.jcapitalresearch.com/northern-dynasty.html

Oh wow, the HUT report crashed the stock. The short seller will be happy:
1705609685988.png
 
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uair01 said:
Through Twitter I stumbled on this activist short-seller. They try to drive down the stock of shady companies. Of course they themselves are also a slightly shady company.

This is a crypto pump and dump scheme:
https://www.jcapitalresearch.com/hut.html

This looks like a somewhat classic mining scam, but there are many more companies on their website. This one has a video:
https://www.jcapitalresearch.com/northern-dynasty.html

Oh wow, the HUT report crashed the stock. The short seller will be happy:
View attachment 73033
Click to expand...
And in the one link about HUT, they identify themselves as short sellers. So yeah they're happy.

Cryptocurrency is overrated imo. Majority of us don't understand it and it still is extremely risky. The fact that several companies selling bitcoin have themselves suddenly ceased to exist because of the volatility is not something that can be used as a reliable form of currency.
 
Since the Gamestop debacle, many young people were inspired the 'play the market', thinking it was dead easy to make a killing.
Then the crypto influencers stepped forward: "Hey! Try gambling on the crypto market. We've made millions, look at our sports cars, mansions, prostitutes ... er ... sexy girlfriends! And as a really great thing, the market has minimal regulation or oversight, you can buy ANYTHING you want!"
 
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