God's Debt Cancellation Plan

Posted by Alex in Crime & Law, Religion on May 28, 2009 at 7:45 am


Morris Cerullo in a poster advertising for his "Mission to London" (Photo: LoopZilla)

Loan modification and debt cancellation are hot businesses right now. So hot that God himself apparently decided to get in on the action.

Here’s a story of how one man built himself a surging evangelistic ministry, complete with "God’s debt cancellation" program – yours for the unbelievably low payment of a mere few hundred bucks:

Emotional on-air pitches generate much of the money used to pay network salaries. In March, Morris Cerullo appeared on Inspiration’s “camp meeting” with a message to fire up prospective donors.

“Is anybody ready for the greatest financial breakthrough you’ve ever experienced in your life?” he asked.

The elder Cerullo, a Pentecostal minister, at times appeared to speak in tongues. His gravelly voice periodically rising to a shout, he urged members of the audience to fill envelopes with $900 donations.

“When you sow for your financial anointing, the windows of heaven are going to open for you,” he said. “ … In the next nine months, you are going to experience more financial blessings than you’ve ever experienced in your life! 100 fold! Debt cancellation!”

Soon, these words appeared on the screen: “Call now with your $900 offering and receive God’s debt cancellation.”

Ames Alexander and Tim Funk of Charlotte Observer have the investigative report: Link – via Raw Story

 
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Your Car Warranty Is About To Expire Spammer Identified!

Posted by Alex in Car & Vehicle, Crime & Law on May 6, 2009 at 1:09 am

Tired of getting those "Your car warranty is about to expire" robo-call? I get those several times a week, even though I’m on the do not call list.

Well, thanks to some clever people over at reddit (oh, how I love reddit – can’t beat the sophisticated level of snark there …), we now have the identity of one of the spammers … and their phone number! Link

Will this stop them? Probably not – according to the Arizona Daily Star, it’s not just a one company operation.

 
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Necro-Phonies: Fake Funerals for Fake People Insurance Scam

Posted by Alex in Crime & Law on April 13, 2009 at 1:36 pm

Insurance fraud is not new, but this one is unusual: "necro-phonies" Faye Shilling and Jane Crump will be arraigned on charges of staging fake funerals for fake people to defraud insurance companies!

When staging the funerals, Shilling, a phlebotomist, and Crump, an employee at a now-defunct Long Beach mortuary, allegedly filled caskets with various materials to make it appear they contained actual corpses, documents show.

After the funerals, the women and their associates filed bogus documents with the county saying the remains had been cremated and scattered at sea, prosecutors said.

The insurance policies were worth $50,000 to $450,000, and the women had already collected on some as large as $250,000, officials said.

Link

 
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Is College a Scam?

Posted by Alex in Money & Finance on February 9, 2009 at 1:54 am

Kathy Kristof of Forbes seems to think so. In this intriguing article, Kristof argues that with student loans with terms worse than what you can get from Vito down at the docks, and with the overinflated importance of a college degree, higher education can actually mean a financial disaster:

Mindy Babbitt entered Davenport University in her mid-20s to study accounting. Unable to cover the costs with her previous earnings as a cosmetologist, she took out a $35,000 student loan at 9% interest, figuring her postgraduate income would cover the cost.

Instead, the entry-level job her bachelor’s degree got her barely covered living expenses. Babbitt deferred loan repayments and was then laid off for a time. Now 41 and living in Plainwell, Mich., she is earning $41,000 a year, or about $10,000 more than the average high school graduate makes. But since she graduated, Babbitt’s student loan balance has more than doubled, to $87,000, and she despairs she’ll never pay it off.

"Unless I win the lottery or get a job paying a lot more, my student debts are going to follow me to the grave," she says.

Link (Illustration: Alex Nabaum) – via The Zeray Gazette

 
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How Bernard Madoff Made Off with My Money

Posted by Miss Cellania in Money & Finance on January 5, 2009 at 11:25 am

Psychology professor Stephen Greenspan recently published a book about gullibility. He also lost a lot of money to Bernard Madoff’s financial shenanigans.

…I was a participant — and victim — of the Madoff scam, and have a pretty good understanding of the factors that caused me to behave foolishly. So I shall use myself as a case study to illustrate how even a well-educated (I’m a college professor) and relatively intelligent person, and an expert on gullibility and financial scams to boot, could fall prey to a hustler such as Madoff.

Greenspan (no relation to Alan Greenspan) explores the social situations and emotions that lead people to invest their money in scams like Ponzi schemes, and how the Madoff situation got out of hand.

The real mystery in the Madoff story is not how naïve individual investors such as myself would think the investment safe, but how the risks and warning signs could have been ignored by so many financially knowledgeable people, ranging from the adviser who sold me and my sister (and himself) on the investment, to the highly compensated executives who ran the various feeder funds that kept the Madoff ship afloat. The partial answer is that Madoff’s investment algorithm (along with other aspects of his organization) was a closely guarded secret difficult to penetrate, and partly (as in all cases of gullibility) that strong affective and self-deception processes were at work. In other words, they had too good a thing going, for themselves and their clients, to entertain the idea that it might all be about to crumble.

Link -Thanks, Eli Schwimme!

(image credit: Dan DeVore)

 
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