A note to all the stupid criminals out there: when making a purchase with a forged check, you're probably better off not using your local FBI office as the delivery point for the goods you're trying to scam. That's what a mastermind in Monroe, La., did recently, giving the feds' address for a shipment of cell phones he wanted to receive. The firm he "bought" the phones from noticed something fishy when the guy paid with a "cahier's check" (as opposed to a cashier's check), and they called the authorities, who later found the guy trying to flag down a delivery driver outside the FBI office. Sometimes, you have to wonder, do these people just want to get caught?

A few years ago, we wrote about the odd (and somewhat amusing) case of a group of fraudsters in China who didn't just build knockoff NEC products, but created an entirely fake version of NEC in China. Yes, they set themselves up as if they were a legitimate division of NEC, but had nothing to do with the company (other than producing knockoff NEC gear). That was corporate identity fraud taken to an extreme level, but it seems like others are starting to jump into corporate identify fraud in a way quite similar to personal identify fraud. Michael Scott points us to a story about some scammers in West Virginia who took on the identity of various vendors to the state, and were able to scam $2 million out of the state before the scam was exposed. While the article calls this a "rare" occurrence, I'd be willing to bet that it's going to become a lot more common. For scammers looking for a big score, taking on a corporate identity rather than an individual's seems likely to get you into higher dollar amounts much more quickly...

Pretty much everyone is getting those telemarketing scam car warranty calls these days. They're the ones that start out "this is the second warning that the factory warranty on your car is about to expire...." Of course, it's not the second warning (in some cases it's the 100th) and it doesn't matter if your car warranty is about to expire or even if you own a car. They just call everyone. Last summer, the FTC announced that (partly in response to those calls), all prerecorded telemarketing calls were banned. But, considering these guys are scammers, that wasn't going to stop them. It looks like the folks over at Reddit got fed up and social engineered the phone numbers of the company out of a rep, and then the community just started calling repeatedly, overwhelming the company's phone lines. Of course, while it certainly has that poetic justice feel to it, it won't stop them. They'll change their phone number and get right back to it. What's not clear is why the Reddit folks could track down who was responsible while the FTC has been unable to do so...

I know I've mentioned for a while that I've been spending a lot of time looking into the healthcare industry -- particularly pharmaceutical companies, but haven't written that much about them yet because I haven't had the time to put everything together. However, the one thing that seems pretty consistent is how incredibly untrustworthy some of these companies are. The claims that it costs $800 million to make a pill are totally unsubstantiated. The idea that patents are necessary to create drugs is also entirely unsubstantiated. The more you look at it, the more you realize that patents have actually allowed the pharma industry to slow down many potential life-saving innovations in favor of a drug-based solution that isn't always the best. That isn't to say that there aren't some valuable pharmaceuticals, but the industry has a long history of deception and convincing the public and politicians that they need a lot more protection and money than they really do -- and that their drugs are more effective than they really are.

Even so, I was still somewhat stunned to read (via Clay Shirky) that Merck supposedly created a fake peer-reviewed journal to publish data that made its drugs look good. It also got Elsevier to publish the journal to make it look legit (Elsevier being one of the bigger publishers of -- of course -- proprietary medical journals). Two companies with a history of locking up information and data teaming up to mislead doctors and the public? What a shock...

Of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that you can do when everything is locked up and proprietary, rather than open. There's almost no way to confirm or check the data or information to make sure it's legit, so people tend to assume it is. In that regard, perhaps it's no surprise that the two companies eventually went down this road, but it does highlight one of the problems with the way the system works today. As Shirky later points out this is hardly unique for a firm like Elsevier, which has faced some serious ethical questions regarding its publications in the past as well.

It looks like if anything is going to be able to effectively stop spam, it might be pressure on spammers' profit margins that makes spamming a less attractive line of work. But that still seems a ways off, as long as enough people continue to buy the stuff being sold in spam messages. Spammers know if they can reach a high enough volume, they'll find enough suckers to make it worthwhile. Scareware, too, is a volume business: a new report looked at a recent scam in which users were sent to booby-trapped web sites which said their computers had a virus. They were then directed to a site selling them some $50 "anti-virus" software. While a small percentage of people actually ponied up the cash, enough did to allow the scammers to pay more than $10,000 per day to the people who used SEO techniques on keyword typos to drive marks into the scam. It's easy to say that people shouldn't be so stupid and fall for the scams, but at the same time, perhaps a bigger issue lurks for the legitimate security software industry: if people can't distinguish between legitimate warnings from their products and scams, it could be a problem for them.

For many years, there have been stories of various shady online electronics (especially camera) retailers (many of whom are based in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn). The main scam is to offer super cheap prices on cameras to get you "in the door" (either online or in person), and then focus on trying to sell you all sorts of massively over-priced add-ons and warranties. If you turn them down, they suddenly "discover" that the original product you ordered is out-of-stock. At times, over the years, various authorities have cracked down on such resellers, though they often pop right back up under a different name.

Still, folks who know the business were well aware of such shady companies and often knew to avoid them... but it's a bit different to find out that some large brand name retailers appear to be doing the same. Laptop Magazine is reporting on a series of whistle-blowing employees at Office Depot, detailing how they pulled off similar scams. The typical "oh, that's out of stock" trick is apparently quite common, but it even gets more advanced, with some employees creating photoshopped price signs, in order to "hide" the price of an expensive warranty add-on in the "list price" for a computer. These practices are quite illegal, and it looks like the report might trigger some FTC interest, especially given the multiple reports, suggesting that this isn't just a few rogue employees.

It does make you wonder what Office Depot was thinking. The obvious answer is: "anything for a sale," but that doesn't tell the whole story. Sooner or later, companies that do this sort of thing are going to get caught -- and when that happens (beyond the fines), the damage to a company's reputation can be massive and debilitating. It just seems like the cost of being outed is so high, it's ridiculous that any company would encourage such behavior.

Last year, a company called Platte Media came to light in the UK, after it started running a slightly bizarre spyware extortion scheme. The company would suck users in with a site promising licensed blockbuster movies, then take users through a registration process that involved installing some adware on their PCs. It didn't actually have the movies, just some trailers, and drove users to pornographic content. If users didn't cancel the "trial" they'd unwittingly agreed to in the process, they'd start getting popups on their screen, demanding payment of subscription fees. But the company has now shut up shop in the UK, though it's not clear if it's because the company wasn't properly paying taxes or because of scrutiny from the country's Office of Fair Trading. The company says it's pulled out for business reasons, but nobody will likely care too much, as long as it just goes away.

Scammers look they're being stimulated by the government's stimulus plan, and it seems likely that they're finding plenty of marks in these gloomy economic times. For instance, fake job ads that are fronts for identity theft are up 345% over the last three years. It wouldn't be a stretch to think they'll become even more common, as more and more people start searching for jobs -- and their desperation leads them to lower their defenses in hopes of landing employment.

A few years back, there were some stories about how some scammers had found online manuals for popular ATMs, which included a default password, which was rarely changed (yes, that's an amazingly stupid design). This meant that it was fairly easy to program the ATM to believe that it held different denomination bills. For example, you could program it to think that it held $5 bills when it actually held $20s -- and then if you took out "$40" you would be given 8 bills -- or $160. Not surprisingly, other hackers have replicated this scam a bunch of times -- aided in large part by ATM owners who still haven't changed the default password.

Still, if you were a scammer pulling such a scam, you might think that it would make sense not to pull it at the same store multiple times. But, that's exactly what two guys did last year, where they tried to hit a local restaurant's ATM for the fourth time. By that point, the manager had been alerted to look out for them, and called the police on them when they came in again. There was a bit of a mess after that, as the manager tried to pull a gun on the scammers, and there was some sort of scuffle, a gunshot, and then a car chase... but eventually the guys were arrested. So, once again: ATM makers: stop offering machines with default passwords. ATM owners: change the default password on your machines. Scammers: don't be so dumb as to try to rip off the same place multiple times (or, maybe that's what we want, since it makes them easier to catch... but it's still dumb).

This probably isn't much of a surprise for most folks, but scammers have wasted no time at all in using news about the massive government stimulus plan to try to trick suckers into various scams. Many of these are scams trying to get people to sign up to pay a "fee" to find out how they can get their "stimulus check" even though the stimulus program isn't sending out checks to individuals. Expect to see plenty more similar scams as well.