Passengers on a Southwest Airlines flight from from Albany to Chicago endured a four-hour delay Monday after the co-pilot of the plane was arrested for packing a loaded handgun. [More]
Crime & Fraud
Customer Accuses DealDash Of Selling “Cheap, Generic” Products Disguised As Independent Luxury Brands
By 4.17.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
A California man who spent thousands on popular “penny auction” site DealDash.com says that not only is the company misleading bidders into believing they are can score huge savings, but that many of the incredibly expensive brands sold on DealDash are actually worthless generics from a company with an alleged connection to DealDash’s founder and biggest stakeholder. [More]
Feds Sue Debt Collector That Allegedly Misrepresented Attorney Involvement
By 4.17.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, it is illegal for debt collection firms to use false, deceptive, or misleading representations to collect a debt. One Ohio company apparently didn’t follow this rule when sending consumers letters that claimed attorneys were involved in the collection of their debts, and now it’s facing a lawsuit from federal regulators. [More]
College Professor Says Walmart Called Him A Toilet Cleaner On Fishing License
By 4.17.17
A college professor in Montana is accusing Walmart of libel, after he says the store deliberately listed his profession as “CLEAN TOILETS” on a state-issued fishing license. [More]
Report: Shoney’s Affected By Chain-Wide Payment Card Breach
By 4.14.17 — Updated: 4.17.17
If you’ve dined at Shoney’s anytime since Dec. 2016, you probably want to take a good hard look at your credit and debit card statements, as reports from financial institutions indicate that some cards used to pay for meals there have recently been used to make fraudulent purchases elsewhere. [More]
McDonald’s Manager Arrested For Refunding $3,800 Worth Of Big Macs … To Herself
By 4.14.17
Each day, fast food managers around the world refund money to unhappy customers, but one burger-brained McDonald’s manager realized she could issue a fake refund for a Big Mac and pocket the money… Then she did it nearly 1,100 times. [More]
Collectors Say Eli Manning Knew Company Was Selling Phony Memorabilia
By 4.14.17
Would you rather pay thousands of dollars for a football helmet worn by your favorite athlete in a championship game, or for a piece of equipment that has never seen action in a game? If you’re a collector of sports memorabilia, the difference between the two can be thousands of dollars. Collectors suing a well-known sports memorabilia firm, now claim to have evidence that New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning aided in this deception by providing “game-worn” items that had never seen time in an NFL game. [More]
Dead Child’s Family Uses Ancestry.com To Find Man Accused Of Stealing His Identity
By 4.13.17
While the internet has only made identity theft easier for criminals in recent years, the web can also prove helpful in busting those posing as someone else. To wit: The family of a boy who died in 1972 at two months old recently found a man accused of posing as the deceased child while researching their family tree online. [More]
AT&T Says It Has Blocked One Billion Robocalls In 5 Months
By 4.13.17
At the end of last year, AT&T launched a service that would let its mobile phone customers block some nuisance robocalls from some devices. The service serves as a spam filter for eligible users’ phones and also lets them report and block numbers that place unwanted calls. AT&T announced today that its expanded call-blocking service has blocked more than 1 billion robocalls, an important milestone. [More]
United CEO Says Airline Won’t Use Law Enforcement Officers To Remove Passengers
By 4.12.17
When the news broke that a United Airlines passenger had been forcibly dragged out of his seat and down the aisle of a plane to make room for airline crew members, United CEO Oscar Munoz put the blame squarely on the passenger, calling him “disruptive and belligerent.” That didn’t go over well with the public, and now Munoz is doing an apology tour, promising that “This will never happen again.” [More]
Does The Fine Print In United’s Contract Prevent Kicked-Off Passenger From Suing Airline?
By 4.11.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
A lot of people are saying the United Airlines passenger who was forcibly booted from a Sunday afternoon flight should sue the carrier, while others say he can’t sue because of fine print in United’s 37,000-word customer contract. Turns out he probably can take the airline to court, but whether or not he’d prevail is unclear. [More]
FTC Shuts Down Tech Support Scammers Pretending To Work For FTC
By 4.11.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
Con artists love pretending to be from the federal government; it can lend an immediate air of far-reaching authority to whatever scam they are pulling. Similarly, play-acting as a tech support expert can take advantage of everyday folks’ lack of knowledge about the inner workings of their electronics. One Florida man allegedly tried to combine these two beloved character types into one Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of fraud, only to be shut down by the very agency he impersonated. [More]
Feds Go After Stock-Picking Writers That Were Secretly Paid To Hype Up Investments
By 4.10.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
The internet is not lacking in prognosticators telling you which stocks you should or shouldn’t buy. If any of these folks are being compensated — even indirectly — to promote an investment, then they are breaking the law. Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission took action against 27 individuals and companies for their part in hyping up investments without disclosing that money had changed hands. [More]
Kingpin Of IRS Scam That Made $225K/Day Arrested In India
By 4.10.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
Police in India say they’ve arrested the suspected kingpin behind a scammy call center operation that raked in $225,000 per day by pretending they were agents for the Internal Revenue Service. [More]
Hackers Targeting Amazon Third-Party Sellers
By 4.10.17
If you’ve seen something with a too-good-to-be-true price in the Amazon Marketplace lately, there’s probably a good reason for that. Or, rather, a bad one, as it seems some fraudsters’ new favorite trick is to hijack unsuspecting Amazon sellers’ accounts and fleece shoppers for every penny they can. [More]
Wells Fargo Takes Back Another $75M From Former CEO & Exec Blamed For Fake Accounts
By 4.10.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
The Wells Fargo board of directors has completed its investigation into the bank’s fake account fiasco, which saw Wells employees open more than two million bogus accounts in customers’ names. For their failure to curb this bad behavior, “retired” CEO John Stumpf and former head of retail banking Carrie Tolstedt have had an additional $75 million in compensation clawed back.
[More]
GameStop May Be The Latest Loser In Data Breach Roulette
By 4.7.17
Add a new certainty to the old pair of “death and taxes”: data breaches. GameStop may be the latest retailer to face this inevitability, with a new report indicating that customer data has been stolen from its website. [More]
FAFSA Tool Vulnerability May Have Exposed 100K Individuals’ Personal Info
By 4.7.17
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is a bit cumbersome, so the Department of Education tried to ease that burden by creating a tool that automatically filled in an applicant’s previous year’s tax information. That tool was suddenly taken offline last month over concerns about data security, and now we have some idea of how many applicants may have had their information exposed. [More]
