Category: Crimes

Google for Idiots

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Too funny for words. Google needs to use this in their next Superbowl ad.

Google in Colorado safe cracking caper
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Tuesday 10th July 2007 19:49 GMT

It’s true. Google can help with anything. Minutes before they operned several locked safes at a “family fun center” in Colorado Springs, a team of masked bandits sat down at a nearby PC and Googled “safe-cracking.” “They brought up a site called ‘How to Open Safes,'” Colorado Springs detective Chuck Ackerman told The Register.

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All Your Base Are Belong To Us

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I read this, and that’s what popped into my head.

Talking Trojan taunts victims
Malware authors have developed a talking Trojan capable of taunting its victims even as it goes about its work trashing their PCs.

The BotVoice-A Trojan (http://www.pandasoftware.com/com/virus_info/encyclopedia/overview.aspx?idvirus=166596&sitepanda=empresas) informs victims that their Windows PCs have been infected as it deletes files. The malware uses Windows text reader to play the following message:

You has been infected I repeat You has been infected and your system files has been deletes. Sorry. Have a Nice Day and bye bye.

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The RIAA Has Me Rooting for the Russians

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Heck, if the choice was between the RIAA and Dick Cheney, I’m not sure how I’d choose.

Russian copyright wars to continue despite AllofMP3 shutdown
By Chris Williams
Published Tuesday 3rd July 2007 10:47 GMT

AllofMP3.com, the UK’s second most popular source for music downloads after iTunes, has been shut down after diplomatic pressure was piled on Russian authorities.

MediaServices, the combative firm behind the site, is still selling cut-price music however, meaning the international legal posturing is set to continue.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which had won the right to sue AllofMP3 in the UK, told The Reg this morning it was unsure how the shutdown would affect its legal attack.

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Bambi, Don’t Bogart that Joint!

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In related news, 12 deer have been arrested on suspicion of breaking into a Quik-E-Mart and stealing 3200 ice cream sammiches. Authorities followed the path of discarded wrappers to catch the alleged thieves.

‘Unusually frisky’ deer blow lid on marijuana plantation

By Lester Haines
Published Monday 2nd July 2007 13:35 GMT

Italian police busted two would-be marijuana cultivators after “unusually frisky” deer alerted the authorities as to the presence of their mountaintop dope plantation, UPI reports.

Locals in Trento began telling tales of the abnormally high-spirited animals, while forest rangers began to wonder why the normally shy and straight-laced cervine population was letting it all hang out by day and “making great leaps on the mountainside”.

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Senior execs targeted in ‘precision’ malware attacks

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Evil techno geeks vs. evil MBAs. Hopefully, there is a way for BOTH of them to lose.

This is very smart on the part of the scammers. Most exploits are found because they are millions of copies floating around the web. In this case, they might not be found until well after the criminals have put a few million bucks in Zurich.

Senior execs targeted in ‘precision’ malware attacks
By John Leyden
Published Monday 2nd July 2007 12:36 GMT

Hackers are targeting senior managers of large firms – along with members of their families – in a new wave of highly-focused email attacks.

On 26 June, net security services firm MessageLabs intercepted more than 500 individual email attacks targeted against individuals in senior management positions. The attack email often featured the name and job title of the intended victim in their subject lines. Chief investment officers accounted for 30 per cent of the attacks, 11 per cent were directed against chief executives.

Other job titles among the top 10 targets included chief information officers, chief financial officers, directors of research, directors of development, and company presidents.

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28301-016, Next Round

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Scooter just got turned down by the appeals court. He’s going to have to go to jail.

Libby, Ex-Cheney Aide, Must Go to Jail During Appeal
July 2 (Bloomberg) — Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, must go to prison while appealing his conviction for obstructing a CIA leak probe, a U.S. appeals court said.

Libby may be behind bars within weeks after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit today denied his request for release. The decision will increase pressure on President George W. Bush to decide soon whether to pardon Libby, 56, as the former White House official’s supporters have urged.

Libby “has not shown that the appeal raises a substantial question” under federal law that would merit letting him remain free, the court said.

Libby was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison last month following his March 6 conviction of lying to investigators probing the 2003 leak of Central Intelligence Agency official Valerie Plame’s identity. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton refused to let Libby stay out of prison during his appeal — which might take more than a year to resolve — saying that evidence of his guilt was “overwhelming.”

Libby was convicted of obstructing justice, perjury and making false statements. He resigned as Cheney’s top aide upon being indicted in 2005.

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It was a unanimous decision by the appellate panel, so he’s going to be going to jail. No legal question here.

Of course, the Supreme Court could review this, but I don’t think that even Scalia would be so brazen.

Surprise, Big Companies Discover that Chinese Corruption Might Endanger Customers

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Actually, it’s not the deaths that they are worrying aobut, it’s the poor PR.

This has been a concern for decades.

Companies in U.S. Increase Testing of Chinese Goods
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

General Mills, Kellogg, Toys “R” Us and other big American companies are increasing their scrutiny of thousands of everyday products they receive from Chinese suppliers, as widening recalls of items like toys and toothpaste force them to focus on potential hazards that were overlooked in the past.

These corporations are stepping up their analysis of imported goods that they sell, making more unannounced visits to Chinese factories for inspections and, in one case, pulling merchandise from American shelves at the first hint of a problem.

General Mills, which makes food products like Pillsbury dough and Chex cereals, is testing for potential contaminants that it did not look for previously, although it would not name the substances. Kellogg has increased its use of outside services that scrutinize Chinese suppliers and has identified alternative suppliers if vital ingredients become unavailable. And Toys “R” Us recently hired two senior executives in new positions to oversee procurement and product safety, mainly for goods made in China.

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Gangs of San Jose

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Rival criminals gangs on the net, sabotaging each other.

On the bright side, no one is being shot gangland style, which implies, contrary to the hype that the Russian Mafia, the Cali Drug Cartel, and al Queida are not involved.

Additionally, any effort spent going after each other is time NOT spent going after us.

This is the real second life.

Rival malware gangs wage turf war
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Sunday 1st July 2007 07:02 GMT

Security researchers have uncovered evidence of a turf war between rival criminal enterprises connected to two of the most sophisticated malware toolkits in current use.

Like competing gangs in the Mafia – for those who followed the HBO series The Sopranos, think the New York-based Lupertazzi crime family and its sometimes enemy the DiMeo crime family, which Tony Soprano ran from New Jersey – the malware groups are fighting for turf and control.

But rather than clashing over who gets to skim money off a garbage collection contract or a major construction project, the cyber criminals are battling to own tens of thousands of compromised computers.

Enter the propagators of a piece of malware Symantec dubs Trojan.Srizbi (http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2007-062007-0946-99&tabid=1), one of a handful programs spread by the MPack attack kit (http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/18/hijacked_sites_install_malware/). A trojan that makes infected computers part of a botnet that churns out spam, Srizbi is also known to uninstall competing spam malware being spread by another nasty piece of malware dubbed the Storm Worm.

“The Storm Worm criminals appear to have taken exception to that,” says Lawrence Baldwin, a malware researcher who has recently observed Storm zombies DDoSing the server Srizbi uses to download installation files. Baldwin is unable to estimate how much traffic the Storm bots are sending to the Srizbi server, but he says attempts to get an infected machine in his lab to update the Storm malware makes him believe the attack is significant.

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Criminals in Journalism

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This guy moved to a competitor, and stole proprietary data. He thought he could get away with it because of who his father is (see last paragraph).

I’ve always thought that the large corporate media chains were pond scum, and now it is confirmed.

Ridder says he shared Pioneer Press data
Publisher denies breaking noncompete pact
BY JENNIFER BJORHUS
Pioneer Press
Article Last Updated: 06/25/2007 09:46:57 PM CDT

Star Tribune Publisher Par Ridder acknowledged taking confidential financial information from his former employer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, to his new job at the Minneapolis paper; separately, he insisted his noncompete agreement with the Pioneer Press had been waived, making him free to go.

Ridder’s videotaped testimony, played Monday in Ramsey County District Court, started a three-day hearing for a temporary injunction against Ridder’s employment at the Star Tribune. The Pioneer Press has sued the Star Tribune over Ridder’s departure in March and is seeking to hold Ridder and two other former Pioneer Press employees to their noncompete agreements, barring them from working at the rival paper for one year.

In addition to determining whether the noncompete agreements are valid, Ramsey County District Court Judge David Higgs must decide whether the spreadsheets Ridder allegedly purloined constitute trade secrets. The judge also must decide whether the Pioneer Press will be irreparably harmed by the Star Tribune’s having them.

In a brief filed last week, the Star Tribune argued that the noncompete contracts aren’t binding. It also argued that the electronic data Ridder and the other employees took may have been sensitive but weren’t all that important. The Star Tribune said it didn’t use the data and it didn’t hurt the Pioneer Press.

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Ridder said it was “inappropriate” for him to have taken Pioneer Press personnel paperwork – the disputed noncompete agreements – from the Pioneer Press building. He also said he told his new bosses at the Star Tribune “that I would do this differently,” referring to loading up his laptop with confidential Pioneer Press financial information and then distributing it via e-mail to top executives at the Star Tribune.

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Ridder testified that after speaking with Cartalucca about how to handle the paperwork, he called his father for advice. Ridder’s father is Tony Ridder, former CEO of the dismantled Knight Ridder newspaper chain.

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Yes, Virginia, There are Scummier People than Realtors

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The changes in ground rent law were a result of a very good Baltimore Sun Expose (Part 1, Part 2, and part 3) about how a relatively small number of ground rent holders are regularly using this to screw people.

These people should be hung by their tongues and their genitals.

Ground rent suit is filed
Action challenges new laws reforming a system that had cost hundreds their homes

By June Arney
sun reporter

June 26, 2007

A trustee for a ground rent owner has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of new laws intended to reform a system that had cost hundreds of people their homes.

In the suit filed in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, Charles Muskin seeks a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to block measures that end ejectment – the seizure of a property for nonpayment of ground rents – and require a registry of ground rents.

The laws, which would take effect July 1, were part of a reform package enacted in the last session of the General Assembly in the wake of an investigative series published by The Sun . The articles reported that ground rent holders had sued to get possession of homes nearly 4,000 times over six years – sometimes over unpaid sums of as little as $24. Baltimore judges awarded houses to ground rent holders at least 521 times between 2000 and the end of March 2006.

In many cases, ground rent holders used their power under state law to oust homeowners, then sold the properties, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Some homeowners were able to reach settlements to regain their houses by paying legal and other fees many times the amount of ground rent owed.

In addition to stopping ejectments and creating the registry, the package of reform laws also banned the creation of new ground rents and made it easier for homeowners to redeem – buy out – ground rents.

Muskin, a trustee for two trusts from his grandfather’s estate that include about 300 ground rents in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County, testified against some of the bills before the General Assembly last session.

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Rick Abbruzzese, spokesman for Gov. Martin O’Malley, said yesterday the state will stand by the new laws.

“We will defend, and we are confident the court will uphold this important legislation,” he said. O’Malley supported the reform package and signed it into law.

Raquel Guillory, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said the suit had been received and was being reviewed, but declined further comment.

Brian E. Frosh, chairman of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, which considered the bills, said lawmakers “got advice from the attorney general that the legislation was constitutional, particularly with respect to the claims made” in the suit.

The laws changed “not a property right, but a remedy,” said Frosh, a Montgomery County Democrat. “It used to be you could toss somebody out of their house for a $20 payment. Now you can get the 20 bucks, but you have to follow a different procedure.”

Under the new laws, if all else fails and a house is sold, Frosh said, the ground rent holder collects only what he is owed, and the homeowner gets the balance.

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SEC Starts Turning Over Rocks, Unpleasant Stuff Found Beneath

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This is a real can of worms that we are getting into.

SEC probing Bear hedge fund losses

NEW YORK, June 25 (Reuters) – Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. (BSC.N: Quote, Profile , Research), which recently agreed to bail out a failing hedge fund it manages, is facing a preliminary inquiry from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, BusinessWeek reported on Monday.

The SEC is looking into why Bear Stearns restated results from the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund. The Enhanced Leverage fund is the sister of the fund that Bear said it would bail out with an up to $3.2 billion financing package.

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The Voice of the Corrupt, Stupid Washington Elite Calls for Cheney to Go

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Sally Quinn is everything that is awful about the inside the beltway set, and she speaks for them.

Atrios describes her as, “Sally Quinn, the permanent hostess of the floating Washington cocktail party.”

Once again, he shows me why he’s an A-list Blogger, and I’m a Z-list blogger.

A GOP Plan To Oust Cheney

By Sally Quinn
Tuesday, June 26, 2007; 12:00 AM

The big question right now among Republicans is how to remove Vice President Cheney from office. Even before this week’s blockbuster series in The Post, discontent in Republican ranks was rising.

As the reputed architect of the war in Iraq, Cheney is viewed as toxic, and as the administration’s leading proponent of an attack on Iran, he is seen as dangerous. As long as he remains vice president, according to this thinking, he has the potential to drag down every member of the party — including the presidential nominee — in next year’s elections.

Removing a sitting vice president is not easy, but this may be the moment. I remember Barry Goldwater sitting in my parents’ living room in 1973, in the last days of Watergate, debating whether to lead a group of senior Republicans to the White House to tell President Nixon he had to go. His hesitation was that he felt loyalty to the president and the party. But in the end he felt a greater loyalty to his country, and he went to the White House.

Today, another group of party elders, led by Sen. John Warner of Virginia, could well do the same. They could act out of concern for our country’s plummeting reputation throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East.

For such a plan to work, however, they would need a ready replacement. Until recently, there hasn’t been an acceptable alternative to Cheney — nor has there been a persuasive argument to convince President Bush to make a change. Now there is.

The idea is to install a vice president who could beat the Democratic nominee in 2008. It’s unlikely that any of the top three Republican candidates — former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Sen. John McCain of Arizona or former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — would want the job, for fear that association with Bush’s war would be the kiss of death.

Nor would any of them be that attractive to the president. Giuliani is too New York, too liberal. His reputation as a leader, forged on 9/11 and the days after, carries him only so far. McCain, who has always had a rocky relationship with the president, lost much of his support from moderate Democrats and independents (and from a fair amount of Republicans) when the Straight Talk Express started veering off course. And no matter what anyone says about how Romney’s religion doesn’t matter, being a Mormon is simply not acceptable to Bush’s base. Several right-wing evangelicals have told me they don’t see Mormons as “true Christians.”

That leaves Fred Thompson. Everybody loves Fred. He has the healing qualities of Gerald Ford and the movie-star appeal of Ronald Reagan. He is relatively moderate on social issues. He has a reputation as a peacemaker and a compromiser. And he has a good sense of humor.

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The Military’s Criminal Gang Problem

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This is what Iraq is doing to our military.

We are not just scraping the bottom of the barrel, we are training members of criminal gangs, and they will bring their skills back home.

Gangs of Iraq
Desperate to shore up its flagging ranks, the military is quietly enlisting thousands of active gang members and shipping them to Iraq. Will a brutal murder finally wake up the Pentagon?
By Seamus McGraw

e was groggy, thirsty, and in terrible pain. His bowels and kidneys felt like they were about to explode. Faint bruises, some the size of a soldier’s fist, others the size of a military-issue combat boot, were already forming on Sergeant Juwan Johnson’s skin. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.

It was almost a miracle he was able to stand, some of the soldiers who were with him that night would later recall. They were amazed he still had the blue bandanna clutched tightly in his fist. Things had gotten out of hand.

A ghost army of gangbangers presents a terrifying challenge for the military. It is “setting the stage for a disaster,” says one longtime military advisorOnly a few guys were supposed to be beating him—maybe three or four, definitely no more than six. They were men Johnson knew and trusted, soldiers he had fought with in Iraq. The beating was only supposed to go on for a minute or so. After all, they weren’t trying to kill him. They were trying to make him one of their own.

All he had to do was hold onto the blue rag and silently suffer through the slaps and kicks and punches. When it was over, he would become an official member of the Gangster Disciples, a man with connections all over the United States. Hell, all over the world.

But something had gone awry on that summer night at the Kaiserslautern Army Base in Germany. It seemed like everybody in that secluded pavilion, a grill house not far from the barracks, had taken turns pummeling the small young sergeant from Baltimore. In the frenzy, no one even knew for sure how long the assault had lasted.

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State Farm accused of Katrina racketeering

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Ordinarily, I’m concerned about a misuse of the RICO statutes, but I think that “criminal enterprise” is a good description of insurance companies.

State Farm accused of Katrina racketeering

Federal lawsuit claims insurance company manipulated damage reports
The Associated Press
Updated: 5:39 p.m. ET June 20, 2007

NEW ORLEANS – State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. engaged in a “pattern of racketeering” by manipulating engineering reports on Hurricane Katrina damage so the company could deny policyholder claims, lawyers for a group of Mississippi homeowners allege in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The federal suit against State Farm represents a new legal strategy for attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, who has played a prominent role in challenging the insurance industry for its handling of Katrina claims.

Hundreds of homeowners in Mississippi and Louisiana have sued their insurers for denying their claims after the Aug. 29, 2005, storm. The suits typically accuse insurers of bad faith and breach of contract for refusing to pay for damage from Katrina’s storm surge.

Wednesday’s lawsuit on behalf of Mississippi Gulf Coast homeowners is the first in which Scruggs and his legal team accused an insurer of violating the civil Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act, commonly known as RICO.

Scruggs, who helped negotiate a multibillion dollar settlement with tobacco companies in the mid-1990s, said he had filed similar civil RICO suits against tobacco companies. They are tougher cases to build, but can carry stiffer penalties, he added.

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I love Manual Transmissions.

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But I’ve never thought of them as an anti theft device.

US car thieves floored by manual gearbox

By Lester Haines
Published Thursday 21st June 2007 10:06 GMT

Two US would-be car thieves failed dismally to make off with a Honda Accord after discovering it had a mysterious manual gearbox, RTÉ reports.

Having menaced the owner with a gun outside a pizza restaurant in Georgia, and relieved him of his wallet and car keys, the pair of teen master criminals prepared to make good their escape. However, according to an employee of the pizza outlet, “they could not start it because it had stick shift”.

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Fraudulent Appraisals, Part One of Many.

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People who have bought houses since 2000 or so, myself included, have bought houses with phony money generated by Alan Greenspan for houses with phony valuations.

Ohio Sues Real Estate Firms for Pressuring Appraisers

By Brian Louis and Sharon L. Crenson

June 7 (Bloomberg) — Ohio, the state with the third highest number of foreclosures, sued 10 real estate companies for improperly pressuring appraisers to inflate home values.

The companies, based in Ohio, California, Arizona and New York, set specific estimated values on properties and communicated a desired price to appraisers, according to the lawsuits filed by Attorney General Marc Dann today. In Ohio, it’s illegal to influence an appraiser. Those sued include seven mortgage brokers, two lenders and an appraiser.

Foreclosure filings in Ohio jumped 135 percent in April from a year ago, pushing the state’s rate to almost two times the national average, according to RealtyTrac Inc. States have opened investigations of mortgage brokers, lenders and appraisers as delinquencies rise across the U.S., led by subprime borrowers.”

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Why Identity Theft Should Not Be Left to the Private Market

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Because if it is, this will be the rule, not the exception.

Call your congressman and tell him that you should be able to have a credit freeze on demand.

Lifelock Founder a Shady Identity Thief?

By Kim Zetter

The Phoenix New Times has published an investigative piece showing that Robert J. Maynard, Jr., one of the founders of Lifelock, a company offering a service to protect people from identity theft, is himself a suspected identity thief who may have stolen his own father’s identity, has a troubled financial past (including at least two bankruptcies), and was jailed in 2003 for defaulting on a $16,000 Las Vegas casino loan — an incident that the New Times says Maynard has lied about repeatedly to customers and reporters.”

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