Every scam has one of these red flags: ex-con man Frank Abagnale

 

In the past, con men were able to charm people one-on-one with a nice attire, great vocabulary and a likable personality. While they were captivating in person, modern day con artists are anything but that. They work remotely behind computers and in their pajamas, where it’s easy to take everything without any compassion. Ex-con man Frank Abagnale, made famous in the movie "Catch Me If You Can," says technology may have changed the ways scammers operate, but it has not changed how scams work. To spot them, there are two red flags that are in almost every scam. Flag one: Artists will say they need money urgently. Whether it’s money or card information. They often obtain this through a romance scam, where the artists will target those looking for a relationship. Flag two: Artists will ask for personal information. They will often call or email as a bank fraud agent. By evoking fear into their victims, they can easily obtain the credit card security codes or social security numbers.

RSN: FOCUS: Jonathan Chait | Trump's Campaign Bilked His Fans Because of Course It Did

 

 

05 April 21

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

FREE OF CORPORATE INFLUENCE, BUT NOT FREE — Yes we have succeeded in building a great information source – free of shady financing. We do however have to pay the bills (the honest way). Join the many who support this wonderful project. Get behind RSN. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

FOCUS: Jonathan Chait | Trump's Campaign Bilked His Fans Because of Course It Did

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
Chait writes: "Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people."

Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: Once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular exposé of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony.

Shane Goldmacher reports at the New York Times that Trump’s campaign bilked donors out of tens of millions of dollars. The scam was not complicated. When people gave them money online, the donations came with pre-checked boxes authorizing the campaign to take donations every single week. They needed to uncheck the box to stop the automatic transfer.

At first the auto-checked box simply said, “Make this a recurring monthly donation.” Then it added, “Make this a recurring weekly donation until 11/3,” with a second box below it, with even more text, authorizing an additional one-time $100 donation on September 29.

Ultimately, the messages included two text-heavy boxes, filled with boldfaced, all-caps slogans, with a much less conspicuous line at the bottom informing whoever had made it through this mini op-ed that they were authorizing the campaign to drain their bank account.

Goldmacher found victims who faced serious financial hardship as a result of this scam. Even some professional political operatives sometimes failed to recognize the inconspicuous little box.

The story cannot tabulate how much the campaign raised from unwitting victims. Many of them simply paid without realizing it. The only measure of the size of the grift comes via people who recognized their bank accounts were losing funds every week and demanded a refund. There were a lot of them: The Trump campaign refunded $121 million, or $101 million more than the Biden campaign did.

Trump has been operating like this all along. His business hires contractors and then — by the hundreds — pays them half the promised fee, or nothing at all, knowing it can just find new contractors to unwittingly work for the famous Donald Trump. He bilks his fans into buying expensive vitamin scams, or investing in a casino that he loots, or signing up for expensive courses where the instructors take the students for all they’re worth.

Trump’s political career was — or, more pessimistically, is — an extension of his grifting career. He recognized conservative media as the perfect vehicle to identify a new and vast collection of marks. He ran as a populist and used the trust his voters placed in him to govern as a plutocrat. All the promises of restoring the factories that disappeared in the 1980s simply gave way to another tax cut for the rich.

It is a testament to Trump’s grifting genius that his victims continue to venerate him. Goldmacher’s story contains this utterly perfect sentence, describing one of the victims who was tricked into giving the campaign more than ten times what he intended to donate: “Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling the Times, ‘I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.’”

Almost every confidence artist has had to flee from his victims after they realized the trick. Trump may be the greatest con man in history. His victims still adore him.

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN

Update My Monthly Donation

The five dumbest Republican arguments for Trump

 

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Opinion | The five dumbest Republican arguments for Trump

None of Republicans’ commonly deployed arguments for reelecting President Trump are tethered to reality. The paucity of logic and factual support for their rationales suggests many on the right, even “respectable” columnists and elected officials, actually support him for reasons they’re loath to admit, whether it’s because they share his apocalyptic view of crime encroaching on the suburbs or are eager to see a country purged of immigrants.

He will give us law and order: If public safety is the concern, the unnecessary deaths from covid-19, which might exceed 200,000 by Election Day, and the anxiety over leaving our homes for fear of joining 6 million infected Americans surely make Trump’s tenure the most dangerous for ordinary Americans. Each week, we have been losing twice the number of Americans killed on Sept. 11.

No wonder Trump loves to highlight any domestic scene of disorder, mayhem and looting he can to frighten White Americans, arguing that if law enforcement “dominates the streets,” we will have public order. This is preposterous. We cannot go to war with millions of demonstrators. That’s simply impossible, not to mention morally objectionable. The demands of the protesters, among them police reform and voting rights legislation are entirely legitimate. But so long as Trump denies the legitimacy of these concerns and the presence of systemic racism, we will not have domestic tranquility.

Trump celebrates violence, encourages police misconduct, honors Whites indicted for brandishing guns at marchers and tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. Senior adviser Kellyanne Conway let on that the administration believes that the more violence happens in the streets, the better chance Trump has of being reelected.

Meanwhile, Trump smears our intelligence community, spinning false conspiracy theories and adopting Vladimir Putin’s version of the 2016 plot to interfere with our election. Trump tramples on laws and precedents ranging from the Hatch Act to turning over his tax returns to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee upon request. There is no president in recent memory who has hired and associated with so many convicted felons. He personally is under investigation by multiple authorities for potential financial crimes. He is his own crime spree.

Default Mono Sans Mono Serif Sans Serif Comic Fancy Small Caps

Default X-Small Small Medium Large X-Large XX-Large

Default Outline Dark Outline Light Outline Dark Bold Outline Light Bold Shadow Dark Shadow Light Shadow Dark Bold Shadow Light Bold

Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%

Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%

Opinion | Trump's 'law and order' tendencies are straight out of Nixon's 1960s

As President Trump threatens to unleash the military on American cities roiled in civil unrest, it's clear that he's embracing his inner Nixon. (Joshua Carroll, Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)

He has vanquished the pandemic: The level of delusion necessary to sustain the fiction that Trump has handled the pandemic well is unfathomable. We have more deaths due to the disease than any other country on the planet, many more deaths per capita than many advanced countries and no national testing-and-tracing program. We remain cloistered at home and children cannot attend school in person in most places after weeks of shutdowns, largely because Trumped egged officials into reopening prematurely. He has hawked dangerous and unproven remedies and pressured government health experts to weaken or change guidelines to minimize dangers and restrictions on activities. As he did Thursday night, he gathers large crowds without masks and social distancing, creating his very own potential superspreading events.

He has been great for the economy: Multiple fact-checkers have repeatedly demonstrated that the economy under President Barack Obama’s was stronger by multiple measures than the economy under Trump. This disparity was due in part to tariffs Trump imposed, which amount to a tax hike for U.S. consumers. If Trump falsely thinks he inherited a rotten economy, it’s inarguable that it got worse even before he crashed it by attempting to ignore a pandemic. It is now evident that some jobs lost will not return when — and if — the coronavirus is vanquished. Hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses have closed. Companies will not all emerge from bankruptcy. Trump ends his four years with record unemployment and debt — and without a plan to reduce either.

Joe Biden is a socialist: Not even the Republicans have the nerve to make that argument. Instead, they argue that Biden will be tricked or led around by the nose by forces on the left. This is entirely speculative and ignores Biden’s decades-long record in office (remember the 1994 crime bill?) and policy choices during the campaign, among them his opposition to Medicare-for-all. Moreover, we have yet to see in American politics a situation in which the wing of a party defeated in the presidential primary magically controls the executive branch after their rivals from the same party assume office.

Moreover, if “conservatives” are worried about the expansion of government, then Trump’s widespread abuse of executive power, meddling in investigations and enforcement actions to benefit cronies and punish enemies, threats to harm certain companies (as in his call for a boycott of Goodyear), protectionism and capitulation to illiberal regimes, as well as the mammoth debt he’s run up, his indiscriminate use of federal forces against protesters, his misuse of government property and government employees to serve his personal interests, and attacks on the courts and free press make Trump the least conservative president ever (if that word has any meaning anymore).

“Life”: One can respect those deeply opposed to abortion in evaluating the candidates, but by the same token, a president who prioritizes the economy over preventing a pandemic, rips children from the arms of their mothers, refuses to denounce killings of unarmed Black Americans and willfully declines to protect the lives of our troops on whose heads Russia placed bounties is not respectful of human life in any meaningful sense. Indeed, Trump has turned the party into a vicious death cult that trivializes the nearly 180,000 deaths caused by covid-19 to date. When you create superspreader crowds to soothe your ego, you are endangering human life.

When one party willfully ignores a pandemic and treats Black lives as expendable, it loses any moral authority regarding the sanctity of human life. In refusing to be guided by scientific facts (be it on air and water quality, climate change or covid-19), Trump puts at risk the health and lives of millions of people here and around the world. Those who value the essential worth of every human being should be repulsed by this administration.

The Ones You Just Can't Reach

Robert Slager

The Ones You Just Can't Reach ...

There will be no kumbaya moment between now and the presidential election. There will be no sudden epiphany for die-hard supporters of Donald Trump. They are truly a cult now. Any source you use to challenge their claims is reflexively labeled "fake news." Any fact-checking site you quote is immediately called "biased." They will double-down when proven wrong. They will call you names. They will post silly memes. They will deflect and deflect because their egos will not allow them to accept the possibility that they might be wrong.

Those people are beyond reach now. Trying to change their minds is a waste of time. They are hopelessly, helplessly trapped in a world of binary thought. They were rather believe that the president is the victim of a world-wide conspiracy designed to make him look bad rather than even consider that they got played by a con-man. They will never understand how badly they've been manipulated by government propaganda in the guise of right-wing media.

I spent about an hour yesterday asking Trump supporters what I thought was a simple question. I reminded them that Donald Trump's 2016 campaign pledge was to "Make America Great Again." I then asked them to tell me specifically when America was great, when did it stop being great, and what made it change.

A few people said America was great in the 1950s. They told me life was more simple then. When I reminded them that the 1950s weren't so great for African-Americans, women and gay people they called me a libtard.

Some people cited the Greatest Generation. Yes, it difficult to deny the heroism on display during World War II .There is no more noble cause than fighting against the forces of fascism in the world. But those were five years in the life of a 246-year-old country, five years that included the development and detonation of the only two nuclear bombs ever used in the theater of war. That may have been necessary, but it is not cause for celebration.

Most of the Trump supporters told me America was great before Barack Obama took office. They said he was a Muslim from Kenya who tried to bring Sharia Law to this country. They quoted numerous insane conspiracy theories. They said he divided this country by race when he told people that black lives matter.

I asked them why such a statement upset them so much. One of them told me that there was no racism in this country until the "Marxists" elected a black man.

These people are completely out of reach.

More than 3,300 stores are closing in 2020 as the retail apocalypse drags on

Daffy Don's failure to act swiftly and promptly, appointing unqualified and incompetent idiots to pretend to protect Americans, failure to provide testing and protective equipment caused this economic catastrophe and exploding DEATH TOLL. 

Fox News = Fake News compounded this tragedy.

Don't pretend and don't re-write history,

".....More than 3,300 stores are closing in 2020 as the retail apocalypse drags on. Here's the full list.

Retailers have confirmed at least 3,300 store closings for 2020.

Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Nordstrom, Sears, Forever 21, and Walgreens are among the retailers that are planning to close stores this year.

More than 9,300 store closings were announced in the US in 2019, smashing the previous record of roughly 8,000 store closures in 2017, according to an analysis by Business Insider...."

L Brands said Wednesday that it plans to close about 250 Victoria's Secret stores in the US and Canada in 2020.

About this website

msn.com

More than 3,300 stores are closing in 2020 as the retail apocalypse drags on. Here's the full list.

L Brands said Wednesday that it plans to close about 25

LINK

DEFINING STUPID!