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PATH: BS | Business | Get-Rich-Quick
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From Inside the Luxurious Pyramid
Posted by Pile
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[Get-Rich-Quick]
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| On April 19, 2001, a man named Alyn Waage was arrested at the airport in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with $4.5 million in his briefcase. Waage had boarded the Learjet intending to fly to Belize to pick up an employee who worked at the mail forwarding office there, then fly on to Vallarta where his company, the Tri-West Investment Club, was based, and then to Latvia where he intended to buy a bank he dealt with. The first two steps of this schedule he completed, but he wanted to deposit some of the money in the bank himself so he took a few million and stuffed it in his luggage. When the jet landed and the customs officials asked to look through his bags, the jig was up. |
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The Perfect Mark
Posted by Pile
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[Get-Rich-Quick] |
 "Late one afternoon in June, 2001, John W. Worley sat in a burgundy leather desk chair reading his e-mail. He was fifty-seven and burly, with glasses, a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, and a bushy gray beard. A decorated Vietnam veteran and an ordained minister, he had a busy practice as a Christian psychotherapist, and, with his wife, Barbara, was the caretaker of a mansion on a historic estate in Groton, Massachusetts.
Worley scrolled through his in-box and opened an e-mail, addressed to CEO/Owner. The writer said that his name was Captain Joshua Mbote, and he offered an awkwardly phrased proposition: With regards to your trustworthiness and reliability, I decided to seek your assistance in transferring some money out of South Africa into your country...
Still, Worley, faced with an e-mail that would, according to federal authorities, eventually lead him to join a gang of Nigerian criminals seeking to defraud U.S. banks, didn’t hesitate. A few minutes after receiving Mbote’s entreaty, he replied, "I can help and I am interested."
The New Yorker has a great story about a prominent Christian leader who lets his greed overcome his commmon sense. His reward? Two years in prison and more than $600,000 in fines. When you read those goofy Nigerian e-mails, you think, "Nobody is stupid enough to fall for this stuff right?" Well, it seems that Christians are one of the scammers' favorite targets. They have the right combination of naivety and greed that makes them, "The Perfect Mark." |
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Bumper Sticker Store
Thieves who made off with more than $1.7 million in nuts were apprehended recently when a suspicious ware house owner noticed large numbers of squirrels lurking outside one of his rented spaces.
An eBay auction for the mummified remains of what appears to authorities to be a child was shut down recently and efforts are underway to determine just whose mummy this might be. Selling mummified human remains is against eBay's policies (and gross), although the bid got up to $500 bucks (from an eBayer by the monicker of "Satan's Child," no less) before Port Huron, MI authorities and the eBay staff were notified.
Not merely content to grace the presence of 
"Davis said it wasn't supposed to be like this. They survived Hurricane Katrina's Category 3 winds and the ensuing looters. They reopened despite the long odds of doing business in a devastated city. The last thing the Magazine Street shop owners expected to threaten their survival was a crime ring of transvestites....
Mark Burnett, creator of the Survivor and The Apprentice reality shows, and AOL have teamed with CBS to create a web-based treasure hunt titled "Gold Rush". The idea behind the series is that clues will be embedded on various web sites and within commercials on CBS. Burnett seems to think that the quest for hidden gold buillon throughout the country will entice users to watch commercials, if not actually Tivo them and watch them over and over to get clues.
You've seen the commercials...credit counseling agencies offering to help you get out of the big, fat hole of crushing debt you've gotten yourself into. These largely non-profit agencies are supposed to help people by negotiating between strapped consumers and lenders, making payment of debts more manageable so everybody is happy--consumers pay off their debts, lenders get some of the money they're due, and the agencies take only the amount needed to cover their costs...because after all, they're charitable organizations.
What a concept--a bill has just been introduced to tie Congressional raises to the minimum wage. Think about it; in order to vote themselves a raise, Congress would have to give the same raise (percentage-wise) to every regular working stiff in the country. Certainly if they need a raise, Joe Schmo down at Burger King needs one, too.