Hoaxes, Scams, & Con Artists
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Hoaxes, Scams, & Con Artists
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Modern Day Hoaxes
Con artists mostly prey on the elderly, the ill and the poor; people that desire a quick way out of their desperate situation. The three greatest weapons used against them are:
Some of the more common scams are fly-by-night home improvement offers, unbelievably low-priced travel packages, pump-and-dump stock offers coming by way of junk fax to your office, phone solicitors offering "prizes" won in "sweepstakes" which must be claimed by small advance payments for "freight" -- or worse, by providing your social security number, credit card number and other private information to be used for identify theft. Following are some of the many scams that have permeated our modern day society: Rene Veenema’s firm, US-based Lunar Embassy has been selling Moon plots since 1996. He has been charged with fraud after his clients complained of not receiving their ownership Certificates. The company made a fortune when Moon plots became a popular Valentine gift in Romania. Veenema told Dutch newspaper The Telegraaf, “I have been pulling this off for more than ten years…I conned them all.” “When there is a willing buyer, there is a willing seller.” An e-mail is received with the following subject, “Strictly Confidential and Urgent.” The following investment opportunity follows: I am Mr., M GROTE an Executive Accountant with the Department of finance of mineral resources and energy South Africa. First and foremost, I apologized using this medium to reach you for a transaction/business of this magnitude, but this is due to confidentiality and prompt access reposed on this medium." Except it's from Nigerians, Somali's, Kenyans or whatever. What's amazing about this scam (which exhorts you to deposit vast sums of money into their bank accounts, promising that you will get it back with a fat stack of interest), is that if it wasn't working it wouldn't still be doing the rounds. It is the most successful scam on the Internet to date, which means that thousands of people are sending thousands of wire transfers to unknown recipients in foreign lands today alone. That's gullibility. The Marc Harris
Organization At prices which were probably 1/3 to 1/2 of the going rate, the Marc Harris Organization provided everything from trust services and company formations, to offshore mutual funds and annuities, to offshore insurance company and bank formations. They also offered tax services, and through a variety of tactics detailed in the "Harris Matrix" (essentially, a list of strategies) could create enormous bogus paper losses for U.S. companies, while actually moving millions of dollars offshore to be controlled by the tax-evading business owner. The Marc Harris Organization was an immediate success, and they were soon -- in total numbers of employees (~150) -- one of the largest, if not the largest offshore service provider in the world. Very quickly, the Marc Harris Organization made arrangements to "back office" many other offshore service providers, and had offices in most of the major offshore jurisdictions. Marc Harris himself was an American-born, American-educated CPA, with impressive academic credentials and a flair for creating grandiose-sounding tax strategies on the spur of the moment. He brought with him to seminars a fairly impressive entourage of U.S. tax and financial professionals, who by strict order were always immaculately dressed as Marc himself was. To meet and work with Marc and his group you felt like you were with the highest of the high in the financial world. The Marc Harris Organization was always on the prowl for U.S. planners too, to be conduits to send them business. Many highly-credentialed and respected practitioners made the pilgrimage to Panama to meet with Marc and his staff at their impressive offices, and listened to stories about all the good they could do for their mutual clients. In December of 1997, I traveled to London to attend the Shorex convention, in part to meet Marc and hear him speak. The Marc Harris Organization was at that time going full blast, and they had sent me a bunch of information on their services. For reasons which at that time were unknown to me, the Shorex folks would not allow Marc to speak at their seminar, and instead he had rented a very large conference room just off of the main exhibition hallway. Shorex had a disappointing turnout generally, and Marc had only about 15 listeners in a room which seated 200. Marc gave an excellent speech about the offshore industry in general, and how the other offshore service providers were "dinosaurs" by not providing certain services demanded by clients (there is a lot of truth in there). During his speech, Marc went through his "Octopus" structure, whereby clients would own many businesses, but moneys would eventually be funneled to a Panamanian Foundation (Panama's version of the Lichtenstein Anstalt). While I had seen this structure before, I was thunderstruck at how much Marc was charging for several trusts, IBCs, an insurance company, a bank, and several other structures -- about US$9,000 for a structure that any other legitimate service provider would have charged more like $50,000 for. I recall speaking with Oklahoma City attorney Mike Johnston and San Diego attorney Mike Potter shortly after Marc's speech, and the three of us concluded that it was unlikely that he could really offer such a large and complex structure that cheap, even with cheap Panamanian labor -- so he was probably dipping into his clients' assets. This conclusion caused all three of us to forego doing business with the Marc Harris Organization (the "MHO"), although a couple of months later I did get to watch Marc's presentation for a second time in Nassau at a seminar given by an offshore service provider there. Marc at that time was at his peak, and I had a lot of time to socialize with some of his other planners. They were uniformly upbeat about the future and talked about how quickly the MHO was growing, although in response to specific queries they didn't seem to be at all familiar with even some of the most basic principals of offshore planning for U.S. citizens. Little did I know that within six months the massive Marc Harris Organization would be reduced to, well, pretty much just Marc himself and a few hangers-on. In 1994, Clyde Hood, a retired electrician with a history of petty fraud from the quiet little town of Mattoon, Illinois, woke up one morning and declared himself to be one of only seven "traders" in the world who were capable of pulling off multi-quadrillion dollar deals to benefit humanitarian programs worldwide. As stupid as this sounds, Clyde started lecturing to church groups and promising people that if they would just give him $100, he would give them back the $100 plus $5,000 in profits, and people believed him like crazy. Literally thousands of people sent Clyde $100 bills (often in amounts in the $20,000 range) wrapped in aluminum foil and delivered by Federal Express (since, according to Clyde, the U.S. government was attempting to "block" the trades and thus the U.S. Postal Service was untrustworthy). According to Clyde, the program "closed" to new investors in 1995. By the end of 1995, Clyde had scammed more than $10 million dollars, mostly from the poor and retirees, and was spinning a long line of excuses as to why the program hadn't hit it big yet. But, even though the program wasn't paying as promised, more people wanted to enter the program so Clyde and his accomplices spun the tale that some people had wanted out of the program and had sold their units back to it, and these units were now available to them as "refund units", costing $100 but worth $5,100. Also, having a pool of suckers who were dumb enough to buy in once, Clyde and his band of Hoods then ran several similar scams known as "Alpha" and "Destiny" which were premised on the payouts from Omega. People bought into these programs too, though Omega was seriously overdue. All this time, Clyde and his Hoods were living the high life and taking tours of Europe (ostensibly to close the deal) and buying up businesses in Mattoon, such as the Blue Bird Diner. Clyde and 18 more of his Hoods were finally indicted in 2000, and all either plea-bargained or were convicted. AOL Database Corruption Scam The following scam directs you to a web page (view a copy) that is not part of AOL. The web page asks you to enter your username and password, giving the scam artist access to your account. If you ever put your username and password into a page like this, change your AOL password immediately and contact AOL security. World Currency Cartel This scam wants to make you a part of the World Currency Cartel who has this magic method for turning $25 into $100. Just send in your $29 (plus $5 postage and handling) and just like magic; you will never see it again. Area Code 809 Scam This is a hoax message that describes a real scam. It was ripped of from a 1996 ScamBusters report and revised with lots of errors added. See the Scambusters 809 report for more information. The real scam works much like the warning, but the numbers are wrong. The 809 area code serves the Dominican Republic and thus is an overseas call even though you dial it just like a long distance call within the U.S. Some numbers in the 809 area are pay per call numbers similar to 900 numbers except that there are no laws requiring them to tell you before you dial. This does not mean that you should never call an 809 number, just know who you are calling first. Other area codes to consider are: 242 - Bahamas 284 - British Virgin Islands In addition to the scambusters report, you can read about this scam on the A. T. & T. website. To see where an area code is located, call your operator or look it up on the Telecommunications Research & Action Center site. Black Inheritance Tax Refund
Scam Fraudulent tax preparers have been running a "Black Inheritance Tax" or "Slavery Reparation" scams, claiming that you can get money from the government if your ancestors were slaves. They charge you $100 to help you apply for the credit. There is no such tax refund; in fact, there is no Federal Inheritance Tax to get a refund from. At the Federal level it is called an Estate Tax. Applying for the false credit and scamming others into applying for it can get you in deep trouble. See the IRS Warning and Congresswoman Johnson's statement about this scam for more details. PayPal System Update Scam Here is another network service scam. This one wants you to go to a website and update your PayPal information. If you do, you will have given access to all your online money to some scammers to use. The message is in html so you can't immediately see where the "click here" link is going to take you. If you hold your mouse pointer over it most browsers will display the actual link. In this case, notice that the link is to: www.paypal.com@az.ru This link won't take you to paypal.com but to az.ru in Russia. You really don't want to go there (you can't anyway because this site has already been shut down) unless you like giving your money away to scammers.
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Created by: Sam Sanabria and Tracey Selby |
