Tag Archives: scammers

May 16, 2023 · 15:51

Pregnancy optional

Yup, that happens apparently. Or so we can believe. You see, the story I saw at the BBC hours ago seemingly pried loose a few issues. The article (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65556437) gives us ‘UK men offered £10K to pose as dads in visa scam, BBC investigation finds’ Here we re given “Scammers are using Facebook to tout for business and claim to have helped thousands of women in this way. Facebook says such content is banned by its rules.” Which got me two feathers rustled. Lets be clear this could be happening and it likely is. So where does the BBC get the word ‘thousands’? The article gives us “Thai, who didn’t advertise on Facebook, said he would concoct a convincing backstory in order to successfully dupe the authorities.” We are also given “Another agent, calling herself Thi Kim, claimed she had helped thousands of pregnant migrant women. She said she could provide a British man and it would cost “ten thousand for the dad”, with her fee being £300.” You see, this is an income track with a short lifespan, and she taking £300 whilst paying the man £10,000 rings untrue. £2,300 and £8,000 would sound more believable. The entire setting is one that comes across particularly nasty. So when we get to “However, last year 4,860 family visas were granted to “other dependents” – a category which includes those applying to stay in the UK as parents of British children. Deliberately giving false details on a birth certificate is a criminal offence.” It is at this point I wonder what the game of Patrick Clahane, Divya Talwar & Khue B Luu is about. Is it about what we shallowly read, or is one of their friends anti-immigration? You tell me, because this story could go either way. How were the thousands ‘found’ and the fact that scammers are using Facebook is nothing new, but in this case how many are on Facebook? Then we combine the ‘thousands’ again but now we look at where these women come from. Thousands and there is no top-line listing? The names are Thai and asian sounding, but how many are from South America or Russia? And the last quote was “The BBC could not estimate the scale of the fraud, as the Home Office was unable to provide data on the number of cases it had investigated.” Well, the numbers we do get gives us over 41% (thousands divided by 4860) and that is merely the top, there is too much inaccuracies. So are the BBC again biting at the steak of emotional baggage? I wonder what is actually true here and it is not the first time that the BBC is reporting in a questionable way.

So what will be the next stage, vacations to dubious locations are offered free of charge so that you can impregnate (read: have sex) with a dozen women, all for free? If the article has any truth in it then it would be the part where we see “how desperate these women are”, mainly because for a lot of non-europeans the UK still represents a slice of golden future. That was never in question. The question becomes the BBC and what they consider making news. As I see it “has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment” is a mere approach to give validity to something that is not and I have a few questions on the article that lacks a whole range of validity. So how about Tim Davie? Will you improve the story quality and the numbers on this or are you destined to be the next Uber driver? They are taking resume’s at present.

Enjoy your non impregnating (or non impregnated) day today.

What was this about?

That was the second thought I had, not the first. To be honest, I was swept up by emotional phrasing that was done rather well, but the whole mess changed when I had some time to think it through. It started about 2 days ago when I saw ‘My bank did not stop £6,500 payment to holiday scammers despite my pleas’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/mar/20/bank-did-not-stop-payment-holiday-scammers). The initial thought was what screwed up thing did the banks do this time, it was accelerated by the small issue of £6,500, which for a lot of people is regarded as loads of cash, especially when you arrange your budget in pints, which in some places outside of London will bank you 1,625 pints. For some people that is a drinking option dragging you on for well over a year, 18 months and that is a lot. So why the beer reference?

Money is a direct number, but how to compare it? There is a discussion whether an annual event can be compared to normal monthly budget. Personally I do not believe it is valid or even acceptable. If we did that we might never have a vacation ever again at present. But back to the article. We are given “Graham says that for more than six hours after she had authorised a €7,155 (£6,500) payment to a Bank of America account in the US, the money continued to sit in her First Direct bank account. When she received an email an hour after making the payment warning her that the villa’s listing on Vrbo had been removed for security reasons, she immediately phoned First Direct back to halt the transfer”, now there are issues here, but that gets to legal to consider, but VRBO removed the villa AFTER payment was processed, there will be legal issues for VRBO. The second part is that this is a US setting, with seemingly no representation in the UK, that is the actual issue for me. Then we get “At this stage, she says, the people purporting to own the villa said they might be able to do Graham a deal if she was prepared to move outside Vrbo’s email system, and to email directly.” Taking VRBO out of the loop sets VRBO free, why do you want to be out of ANY loop? And that is where the victim gives us “They have been about as useless as they could be”. The woman who is referred to as Sarah Graham is wrong.

In the first the bank correctly performed a payment setting. At the time of the payment it was ‘agreed’ on by both parties. In the second, the move outside of the VRBO loop got VRBO off the hook because they were unaware of what was going on.

Now a small education for the stupid people out there. Scammers are pretty much everywhere, where ever there is a quick deal, a cheap deal (£800 cheaper) there is an exponential growth of a scam in place. There is a travel agency in almost every corner of any street in the UK and EU. There is a reason for that. Looking at a hotel in Crete I see one for 113€ a night, that is including the flight a lot less than £6,500 for a month.

There is a growing issue with people thinking that they can get the cheap deal and when you do not know the party on the other side, there is an increasing chance of losing your money. With local travel agencies (in the UK) they tend to have ATOL protection.

This means that the scheme provides protection for travellers who book a holiday, which includes a flight. If an ATOL licensed travel company collapses, it ensures that your money is protected and you can get home. And now we get to the real part, the article does not once mention travel agency or ATOL. As such the question towards writer Miles Brignall becomes. Did you do anything more than exploit the victim? If you wanted to alert the people you would have mentioned travel agencies, ATOL licences and the issue with foreign organisations, even though I will admit that all facts taken aside, VRBO is in the clear, the scammers made sure that they were out of the loop so that they could collect, and in this the banks have no blame either. A service was performed and the bank performed it.

This was about a person trying to get the golden deal for a lot less whilst she knew none of the parties. How does that usually go over on the internet?

Saved by the Ding Dong

Yup, we all have these moments, you are about to take a dive into one direction, hen just in time, you see the shark swim by and as it goes, you end up jumping the shark by jumping away. I was about to go into a stage of my opposition to existential philosophy, it does not matter why, but the stage is seen as the shark (scammers) give me a reason to jump the other way. So as ABC gives us ‘Scammers target desperate renters on Sunshine Coast as housing crisis continues’, the article (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-12/scammers-taking-advantage-of-desperate-sunshine-coast-renters/100032390), where we see “Late last year Morgan Smith, a single mother of two, found “a gorgeous house” in Peregian Springs at a reasonable price, listed on Facebook”, it is a state of as close as pointless and useless as a situation gets. This is not about the almost victim Morgan Smith, she did as much as she could have, the idea that in a stage of 0.4% availability. Do you seriously think that anyone would would offer a ‘reasonable price’ location via Facebook to complete strangers? A person with available rental property will soon have more fake friends than Kim Kardassian ever had.

The stage of Facebook is overrated and to some degree outright dangerous and the federal government there (QLD) is clueless, outmatched and overwhelmed to the largest degree. I will bet you that there is not a viable trace to work on with these scammers, is there?

So when we take notice of “Since the start of the year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has received 32 reports of rental or accommodation scams from Queenslanders, totalling $8,000 in losses”, we see the larger failing of places like Facebook, a stage not for the openminded and openly communicating people, but the ones seeking scams and phishing opportunity against unknown people and the stage is set by not INFORMING the people on the dangers of Facebook, because like that shark in the deep blue sea, Facebook has it own level of vermin and they hide better online than the roaches in your living room. So, as we start to take notice of ““The second one is that Australia has really lax laws around cybersecurity.” Mr Connory estimated there were about two million cyber crimes committed last year”, some might take notice of just how clueless the federal government is. A stage that has been there for several years and a stage that has according to some ‘two million cyber crimes committed’, and still we see the federal government fighting for advertisement money and a lot less for increased protection for it citizens and increased options for hunting down cybercriminals? Aren’t you wondering why that is? Is it because the bill is only $8,000? I wonder what ill be found when we consider “1.93 million of those cybercrimes were never investigated, never looked at”, as such when we see ““If somebody has your date of birth, your tax file number and your driver’s licence they can act as if they were you. “They can go and create companies, they can try to set up phone bills.” Mr Connory said that a driver’s licence and tax file number could not be changed in several states. “Once they’ve been compromised, you’re always going to have issues, pretty much for the rest of your life,” he said.” In this I take offence to: ‘Once they’ve been compromised, you’re always going to have issues, pretty much for the rest of your life’, if the Federal Government has that much problems fixing the matter, give me the name and address of the roach, I will personally cap their fucking brains, it needs to end and there needs to be a clear consequence there too. If if cannot be fixed we need to find another solution and if the only good scammer is a dead scammer, then so mote it be. We see the government coming up short, we see tech firms coming up short and we merely see victims, so who is with me on this?

I do not fault the ACCC, I get it when they give us “A spokesperson for the ACCC said to be wary of “any property you are told you will be unable to view in person before handing over any bond or rent money”.” And it makes sense to do the research, it really does, yet the stage we see now is a stage with two players (government and Facebook) letting the scam ride and none of them have a clue to stop it, especially when they rely on AI, and when we consider that AI is still a decade away, they are basically telling the scammers that they have a decade left to make a killing, so why do we not invoke our own killing?

Emotions?
This is indeed overemotional, yet the stage of people in pain (shortage of budgets), people hurting (impact of budget) and we see some scammers having a field day. We need to make sure that they understand that they must be willing to put their lives on the line, if they are relying on the minor defence, too bad, their parents should have been there to teach them the lessons that matter, if they are adult they should accept that there is a price for everything. We played the nanny state to these clowns for too long and now when we realise that there are well over a million optional victims, it is time to make the tally. It is the cost of doing business and if so, business will be good. When you consider that we can buy a 9mm bullet for $0.61, we can conclude that business will be good for us and perhaps a little less good for the scammers. We can twist and turn all we can and come up with some kind of ‘compromise’, yet I feel that it is way too late for that, especially as the law and Facebook seem more protective of the scammers, than the victims, so why do we not turn that around?

I am all for the law, yet I believe that the law has failed its victims too often and it is time to give the scammers less protection, also less life, but that might merely be me.

Tag Archives: scammers

Pregnancy optional

What was this about?

Saved by the Ding Dong

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