Tag: Fraud

Should I Start a GoFundMe?*

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Poster child for backpfeifengesicht, a face that needs to be punched

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli will have to forfeit $7.6 million, including his copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon A Time in Shaolin as a result.

My heart bleeds borscht:

The disgraced pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli must forfeit $7.36 million in assets (PDF) to the federal government following his fraud conviction, a judge ruled Monday. The assets set for forfeiture (PDF) include the single copy of the Wu-Tang album Once Upon A Time in Shaolin that Shkreli reportedly bought for $2 million, as well as a painting by Pablo Picasso.

 The forfeiture follows Shkreli’s conviction last October on three of eight counts of securities and wire fraud. The federal government had indicted Shkreli in December of 2015 for running a Ponzi-like scheme, alleging he defrauded investors in two hedge funds he managed and siphoned millions from his pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, to cover losses.

Oh, the horror.

*For the snark impaired, if I do actually start a GoFundMe, it will be done ironically.

Cheer the IT Revolution

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It turns out that the increasing use of electronic health records saves neither time nor money, but this hasn’t stopped a rush by the government and the private healthcare industry from

I thought of working words like “debacle,” “scam,” or “bezzle” into the headline, but today is my day to be kind (and the entire topic really demands that I pull on my yellow waders and write another “Credentialism and Corruption” post, which I might do at a later time). However, the headlines give a sense of what a bombshell this study should be for the EHR industry. On the spectrum from reluctant admissions all the way through to The Bezzle:

  1. Electronic health records don’t cut administrative costs Harvard Gazette (February 20, 2018).
  2. Electronic Health Records Don’t Reduce Administrative Costs Harvard Business School (February 20, 2018).
  3. EHRs fall short in reducing administrative costs Health Data Management (February 21, 2018).
  4. Why health IT experts think Apple will succeed where Google failed with medical records Health IT and CIO Review
  5. An Introduction to Medicalchain: Blockchain for Electronic Health Records CryptoSlate. (This is from February 8, but I couldn’t resist.)

The complete study (an “Original Investigation”) is here at the Journal of the American Medical Association. Unfortunately, the study is paywalled, and the study material that JAMA exposes muffles the bombshell. From the abtract, the methodology:

IT is going to change the world making unachievable claims based on bad/non-existent evidence, and all we have to do throw money at them.

Protecting Our Purity of Essence

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The latest health fad for people is untreated and untested drinking water:

Welcome to 2018, where some things never change. Selling snake oil to those with more money than sense is still a thing, and the newest “health” trend is already upon us.

According to the New York Times, a new “raw water” movement is springing up in the West Coast of America, particularly in affluent areas like Silicon Valley and San Francisco, in an attempt to “get off the water grid”.

We’re sure many of you are scratching your heads and wondering what on Earth “raw” water means, and, taking its literal meaning, why on Earth that would be a good thing. So, let us explain.

“Raw” water (yep, sticking to air quotes) is, according to Live Water – who sell 11-liter (2.5-gallon) bottles for a hefty $37 – unfiltered, unsterilized, untreated spring water, and this is a good thing because unfiltered water has some kind of loosely defined probiotic quality, filtering water removes beneficial minerals and tap water is poisoned by those in charge.

They are literally spending 7 times as much for water as I do for regular unleaded gasoline.

To quote a character from a comic book, “I firmly believe that if you can’t fool all of the people all of the time you should start breeding them for stupidity.”

Here is some musical accompaniment to this story:

Wisdom of the Day

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Commenting on the latest Wells Fargo numbers, Ian Welsh notes that “Numbers which can only be made by cheating, will be made by cheating. It is that simple.”

He is correct. The idea that the epidemic of fraudulently opened accounts were the result of anything but the direct results of the demands of upper management is simply not credible:

My old employer never did anything this bad I was aware of, they engaged in aggressive corner cutting, but tried to stay, well, legal. But what they did that was dubious was known, even at the floor level.

And it was always driven by high level executive demands for targets that simply could not be met by staying in the straight and narrow. Always. Low level employees do much of the dirty work, but they do it because it is demanded, and because if they don’t they will be let go or fired.

Unfortunately, we won’t see John Stumpf frog marched out of his home in hand handcuffs, but that is what happened.

Yeah, Throw This Guy Some Coin

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Someone got sick and tired of the Indian phone banks that are making thousands of calls in an attempt to scam us, and someone calling himself “Project Mayhem” has written software to call the phone banks hundreds of times a minute to prevent them from reaching real people:

It’s likely you’ve gotten calls from criminals who pose as IRS employees and threaten to imprison you if you don’t pay them thousands of dollars. These crooks work in teams based in Indian call centers. They are scumbags of the lowest order, preying on seniors and immigrants through fear and intimidation. Here’s a security developer who decided to fight back. He wrote a script that called one of these IRS scammers’ phone banks 28 times a second, flooding their phone lines and making it impossible for them to ply their vile trade. It’s fun to listen to the scammers curse at the programmer’s recorded message. According to Twisted Sifter, he has launched something called Project Mayhem to continue his fight against these unscrupulous scammers.” He is seeking Patreon donations to go after IRS scammers, tech support scammers, loan scammers, “you have won” scammers, and “family member in trouble” scammers. ………

You can donate money to this anonymous hero via Patreon.

Unfortunately, he has not released the code, though a number of sources have said that it is a rather trivial programming operation.

Personally, I’ll just lobby my Congresscritter to put a penny a minute tax on all overseas calls in both directions.

For ordinary people the costs are minimal, but for the scammers, it would make their business model, such as it is, untenable.

As to those who would argue that this would cripple the technical support and customer service operations currently operated in India, I will simply quote Randall Munroe, and say:

My experience with Indian technical support and customer service has been less than salutary.