Greed

1. The May 24, 2004 issue of e-week had as its lead story, Tales of Cyber Crime. The story dealt with the theft of information which, according to the article, comprised thousands upon thousands of credit and debit cards of the retailer's customers.

A friend of ours told me just the other week that he recently received from his credit card company a new card with an new account number, because it appeared his card numbers had been used by unauthorized persons - in other word, the card information was stolen. These kind of incidents are crimes which are difficult for the consumer to control. But other scams exist over which the consumer has total control. In the same article, thee was a sidebar about a couple who got ripped off for about $400K. They were taken in by a scam which has been around for several decades, about which I wrote a few years ago on these pages, and one, when you first hear about it - at least in its initial stages, gave cause for a "double-take".


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  To quote from the article: "For years, scam artists in Nigeria,the Philippines, and other countries have been flooding then Internet with phony please for help moving large amounts of cash out of their country and into U.S. banks. Known as advance-fee schemes, these e-mail messages promise victims in return for advancing a few thousands of dollars to cover legal and processing fees to transfer money."
Like thousands of others online, I receive at least one of these e-mails every day - sometimes more. When I first received these letters, they were sent by fax, mail, and then e-mail. I believe some of the early scam artists from Nigeria were arrested in New York City quite a while back, but I haven't heard of recent arrests taking place. How greedy can people be? Ok, I know that when these "get rich without work" schemes first started, people traveled to Nigeria, and actually received some cash funds, but in the end, they were all taken. Are there that many totally unaware, unsophisticated people with money who are ripe for the taking, or are they just plain greedy!

Greed is what trips up criminals, and greed is what trips up people who do not want to understand that if it looks too good to be true, it isn't. If you want to lose money, come on down to Las Vegas - at least you'll get some good comps, and who knows, you might even win! 


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2. Today (10-04-04) I read an interesting article in the Las Vegas City Life paper, on of several excellent alternative publications in this town. One of my "minor" complaints about some security personnel is that too often they look like the stereotype of cops, which, especially, when they're working as store detectives, etc., sort of takes away their cover.
Anyway, our police officers often have the same problem, so to get an idea of what can be done, read the article "Cop Props", you should find it interesting. Las Vegas City Life is available online.