While there are some mean and nasty people out there, generally people are nice, kind and cordial. We are conditioned from birth to be civil towards each other. However, those mean and nasty’s seem to pop up all the time and ruin someone’s day. One scam in particular that has always intrigued me revolves around…
The recession may have waned, but we aren’t out of the woods yet. The unemployment rate is still a staggering 9.5%. That’s millions of people without a job. Many who were displaced eventually got lower paying jobs, and are barely able to get by. Jobseekers’ desperation for employment makes them vulnerable to work-from-home scams and…
The Federal Trade Commission recently released the list of the most common consumer complaints in 2010. Identity theft topped the list for the eleventh year in a row. The FTC received 1,339,265 in 2010, and 250,854, or 19%, involved identity theft. In second place, there were 144,159 debt collection complaints. For the first time, “imposter…
Some painters were recommended to me by referral. By all accounts, they were hard workers and reputable. Because of my normal home security obsessed nature, I’d generally do some type of background check on the owner and get something of a background check from him on his employees. However, because of the time crunch of…
When you compare the cost of various services, you begin to see how much your time is worth. For example, it would take most homeowners a significant chunk of nights and weekends to paint a house themselves, but a professional crew can get it done in a week, for a reasonable price. Recovering from identity…
I’m in Mexico, but by the time this is posted I’ll be manning the watch tower at my fort. While I want to detail every adventure and post it as a status update (this country is very interesting), I haven’t, and I’ll never post in social media, that’s just plain nuts. So anyways, while I’m…
Oh the beauty of stupidity. Not a day goes by that some dolt breaks the law and makes himself look like a total buffoon. This burglar decided to break into a pizza parlor through an exit: the smoke vent. If you’ve ever walked behind a strip mall where there is a restaurant you know which…
This is the time of the year they come out of the woodwork. Scammers knocking door to door with promises of quality work for exceptionally low prices. The scams often include driveway repaving, chimney repairs, ductwork cleaning, and roofing scams. Toss a criminal handy man in there and you end up missing a jewelry box…
Spyware is sold legally in the United States. This software records chats, emails, browsing history, usernames, passwords, and basically everything a person does on that PC. Some spyware programs can record everything in a video file, which can then be accessed remotely. This is all perfectly legal as long as the PC’s owner installs the…
Certainly when someone hacks another person to death it is safe to say something is very wrong with them. In criminal trials, Wikipedia defines “the insanity defenses are possible defenses by excuse, an affirmative defense by which defendants argue that they should not be held criminally liable for breaking the law because they were legally…
