Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Help to Stop E mail Scams and Fraud
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Hi,
I just discovered that you can forward commercial e-mail scams to spam@uce.gov and the e-mail scams you receive and forward to them will become part of a data base that is available for law enforcement officials to peruse and investigate. This is a service of the Federal Trade Commission and the data base is meant to help shut down the operations of scammers. I intend to start using it.
Please note: this is not simply for hoaxes or misinformation or even spam -- which is often a legitimate business searching for customers. This address is meant for e-mail scams where someone is trying to fraudulently get money from you, gain access to your checking account, or find out your Social Security number or other private information that would be dangerous to you if it wound up in their hands. It is for e-mail scams.
I have gotten repeated e-mail scams letters at my online customer service address related to my www.bestluggagecarts.com website. I was almost taken in by the first one, but my supplier pointed out to me what was going on. I was so glad they were alert to this and told me about it. I then looked it up on the internet and found out more information about it.
What the scammers do is send an e-mail asking about a certain item (often it is something you sell -- sometimes it seems totally unrelated or even only vaguely related). They say they want to find out "more information about the item", "are they in stock," etc. and they drop the hint that as soon as you contact them they will give you a credit card number and then they will order a large quantity of the items they want. Not.
The reason they have not ordered anything from your website is that they dont have a valid credit card number so they are trying to get in the side door with the temptation of a large order. Dont fall for it. When I got the first one I actually responded to them. The second e-mail I got sounded like it came from a very busy (rich) person who was out of the country (in London) on business and they needed my personal help to get the items they wanted ordered and shipped to Haiti. They even gave me pick up orders because they wanted to use their own shipper. I wish I remembered the name of the shipper in that first letter because it was by googling the shipper name that I found the information about it being a scam.
The scammers will respond to any e-mail you send them and you will be drawn more deeply into their net. Here is an example of the most recent one I received:
Hello Good Day
With regards to your Company i am sending this email regards to order some ( Platform Truck ) ,i will like to know the type and sizes you have in stock and get me the sales price of one so that i will tell you the quantity i will be ordering, and also if you accept credit card as a form of payment .
Stay Bless .
John Truett (Owner)
Notice the name of the signer -- doesnt that sound like a typical American name? In this one the English is much smoother (they are getting better) but the gist of the e-mail is exactly the same. They promise to order (something) and want to know if you accept credit cards. If they had actually been to your website and were really interested in an order they would simply have placed it at the website. There would be no need for them to e-mail asking these kinds of questions or making these kinds of statements.
In this particular one they even have played on my religion with the line above the signature. They are trying everything they can think of to get me to trust them but, once bitten, twice shy.
After that first one, I began to recognize them. They always have what looks like a legitimate persons name as the sender -- something normal and American sounding like Bob Jones -- but it wont be a name from your address book. The language (at this point in time) is still a rather stilted and broken English. That is because it is not coming from native English speakers (nothing wrong with that -- but it is a clue). You get the gist. It will be rather bad grammar and sentence structure -- sometimes it may not even make total English sense. When you read it, it will sound "garbled" in your mind. These dont usually have any attachments but if you get one with an attachment -- do not open it because it will likely contain a virus.
I am glad to have a way to support law enforcement officials in shutting down this type of fraud. I will still delete them but not before sending them to the FTC. I found this e-mail address: spam@uce.gov at the FTC website: www.ftc.gov under the "contact" tab in case you want to check it out yourself. I like to check things out myself just to verify things in my own mind.
Be back soon -- Have a good one!
--Marcia
I just discovered that you can forward commercial e-mail scams to spam@uce.gov and the e-mail scams you receive and forward to them will become part of a data base that is available for law enforcement officials to peruse and investigate. This is a service of the Federal Trade Commission and the data base is meant to help shut down the operations of scammers. I intend to start using it.
Please note: this is not simply for hoaxes or misinformation or even spam -- which is often a legitimate business searching for customers. This address is meant for e-mail scams where someone is trying to fraudulently get money from you, gain access to your checking account, or find out your Social Security number or other private information that would be dangerous to you if it wound up in their hands. It is for e-mail scams.
I have gotten repeated e-mail scams letters at my online customer service address related to my www.bestluggagecarts.com website. I was almost taken in by the first one, but my supplier pointed out to me what was going on. I was so glad they were alert to this and told me about it. I then looked it up on the internet and found out more information about it.
What the scammers do is send an e-mail asking about a certain item (often it is something you sell -- sometimes it seems totally unrelated or even only vaguely related). They say they want to find out "more information about the item", "are they in stock," etc. and they drop the hint that as soon as you contact them they will give you a credit card number and then they will order a large quantity of the items they want. Not.
The reason they have not ordered anything from your website is that they dont have a valid credit card number so they are trying to get in the side door with the temptation of a large order. Dont fall for it. When I got the first one I actually responded to them. The second e-mail I got sounded like it came from a very busy (rich) person who was out of the country (in London) on business and they needed my personal help to get the items they wanted ordered and shipped to Haiti. They even gave me pick up orders because they wanted to use their own shipper. I wish I remembered the name of the shipper in that first letter because it was by googling the shipper name that I found the information about it being a scam.
The scammers will respond to any e-mail you send them and you will be drawn more deeply into their net. Here is an example of the most recent one I received:
Hello Good Day
With regards to your Company i am sending this email regards to order some ( Platform Truck ) ,i will like to know the type and sizes you have in stock and get me the sales price of one so that i will tell you the quantity i will be ordering, and also if you accept credit card as a form of payment .
Stay Bless .
John Truett (Owner)
Notice the name of the signer -- doesnt that sound like a typical American name? In this one the English is much smoother (they are getting better) but the gist of the e-mail is exactly the same. They promise to order (something) and want to know if you accept credit cards. If they had actually been to your website and were really interested in an order they would simply have placed it at the website. There would be no need for them to e-mail asking these kinds of questions or making these kinds of statements.
In this particular one they even have played on my religion with the line above the signature. They are trying everything they can think of to get me to trust them but, once bitten, twice shy.
After that first one, I began to recognize them. They always have what looks like a legitimate persons name as the sender -- something normal and American sounding like Bob Jones -- but it wont be a name from your address book. The language (at this point in time) is still a rather stilted and broken English. That is because it is not coming from native English speakers (nothing wrong with that -- but it is a clue). You get the gist. It will be rather bad grammar and sentence structure -- sometimes it may not even make total English sense. When you read it, it will sound "garbled" in your mind. These dont usually have any attachments but if you get one with an attachment -- do not open it because it will likely contain a virus.
I am glad to have a way to support law enforcement officials in shutting down this type of fraud. I will still delete them but not before sending them to the FTC. I found this e-mail address: spam@uce.gov at the FTC website: www.ftc.gov under the "contact" tab in case you want to check it out yourself. I like to check things out myself just to verify things in my own mind.
Be back soon -- Have a good one!
--Marcia
Olive Oil Fraud
Friday, March 21, 2014
Hi,
It seems that olive oil fraud has been around since day 0001 but it only came to my attention today in an e-mail from a guy who wants to sell me real extra virgin olive oil. I get so many e-mails from websites that are trying to sell me something that I dont often pay attention to them anymore, but this one caught my eye. I did not want to read the advertising for his expensive product so I searched out the source of information in an article that he erred to which was written in 2007 in The New Yorker magazine. (Here is a link if you are interested: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mueller )
After reading about all the corruption and mislabeling I am about to go off of extra virgin olive oil. There is no guarantee that what I am buying at my local grocery store, whether it be Kroger or Whole Foods, is even olive oil. It could be anything from soy bean oil to hazelnut oil. I only started using extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) because it was supposed to be so healthy for my body -- if I cannot be sure that what I am buying is actually EVOO, then why bother?
I can use extra virgin coconut oil (EVCO) instead. I tried using it in the salad dressing that I make myself and it actually tasted better than the EVOO from the plastic bottle under my counter. Plastic Bottle. That should be a dead give away that what is inside could be anything and the longer it sits (even if it actually is EVOO) the more rancid it gets. I dont need it. Out she goes.
The only problem I foresee with using EVCO for salad dressing is that in the winter time it tends to harden while sitting on the counter in my kitchen. It needs to be above about 75 degrees in order for it to be liquid form which works well in the pourable salad dressing. Ive been considering placing my bottle of dressing near the pilot light on my gas stove to keep it at a liquid temperature but I have no idea what that will do to my dressing. Perhaps I should put it in a different shaped container so I can spoon it out. I really dont know and will have to wait for winter time to experiment with that.
In the mean time, it is summer and it works fine as a good replacement. So there you have it. My personal workaround for the corruption in the olive oil industry.
You know what this reminds me of? The Mormon church which I grew up in. They actually tell their people not to trust the Bible because parts of it have been changed over the years. They only read the King James Version (at least when I was a member thats what they did) and they believed that parts of it were corrupt. To me, even at the time, that meant that since I had no way of knowing which parts were supposedly corrupt and which parts were accurate I could trust none of it. What a mess.
Im glad I found out the truth and became a Christian who can read and trust all of the Bible from cover to cover. I have found the evidence that I needed to ease and clear my mind concerning the Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls give strong evidence that the Books in the Bible we are reading now are nearly identical to the ones stored away for three thousand years and hidden in a cave. There are other proofs that Ive read about too, so I dont worry about it anymore. I know the Bible is the word of God, and that is what I stand on. It is so much more "clean" to trust what I have investigated and found to be authentic. It actually eases my mind and assuages my soul.
My best source of information about the authenticity of the Bible came from a book written by Simon Greenleaf -- here is a link to Amazon.com where you can look inside http://www.amazon.com/The-Testimony-Evangelists-Examined-Evidence/dp/0825427479.
Its only about eight dollars so it wont break the bank. But I must warn you, it is probably not for the casual reader. It is quite interesting to me and very well written in my opinion, but some people dont like technical nor precise reading matter. I like it, expressly for that reason. When I was done looking through his eyes, I no longer had questions about whether the New Testament was authentic or whether I could trust the words of the Apostles which were written there.
Back to the typical fodder of this blog: I went to see my doctor on Thursday but ended up not seeing her at all. I ended up simply walking out of the office and not one person even noticed it or said a thing to me. Not even a friendly "Goodbye." Ill be choosing a new primary care physician from my insurance list, soon. It was an experience that I probably wont forget.
Before I went I knew that my only current health problem that needed to be addressed was my high blood pressure. When I measured it on the morning of the appointment it was about twenty points higher on the upper number than usual so I already knew it was going to be sky high in the office. Of course dreading that, makes it worse, but I did not want to miss the appointment, so I went. As I waited for them to call me, I tried to do deep breathing and relaxation to lower it. It is hard for me to relax in the doctors office but I did my best.
When the perky little girl came and got me and lead me back to the room to wait for the nurse practitioner (I had never really seen the doctor there.) I tried to continue to relax myself, but she wanted to chit chat so I was polite and cheerful. She walked me into the room, sat me down, tore the paper off of the examination table and pulled the blood pressure machine over to me. It all happened so fast I had no chance to breath and the number she got was pretty outrageous. She cheerfully said she would measure it again later and left the room. I got no chance to try to get anything under control and simply sat and waited to see my NP.
As I waited I got out my journal which I always take with me and was reading some things to relax me and the door opened up and another young nurse came in. She too rushed about and wanted to take my BP by hand this time. I know that the cuffs that they have dont work on my upper arm which is really oversized. They not only wont measure me, it is often extremely painful for me to undergo their trying to get it to work over and over, again, so I asked that she take it on my forearm instead of my upper arm. She said she did not know how to do that, so I was stuck. I rolled up my sleeve and asked for an arm support knowing that if they leave my arm in the air and I have to hold it up, that raises my blood pressure, too.
She pulled out the doctors stool and sat down so I could rest my arm on her knee and quickly put the cuff on my arm and started to pump. As she pumped the pain just got worse and worse until I said that I could not take any more pressure and she immediately stopped pumping and let it go. This begins to ease the pain but it does not stop until they take the cuff off. So she let it down and said she got the lower number but did not get the upper one and started to pump it up again. Of course my arm was already in pain and she started pumping it up again harder and harder. At a certain point, I could not take the pain any more and saw that she was oblivious to my torture so I simply reached over with my other hand and undid the cuff as I explained that it was simply way too painful for me.
She actually jumped up off of the stool, leaving it in front of me, and ran out of the room, leaving the door open. The next thing I heard was her talking about me to someone in the hallway as if I had committed a crime. She seemed very shocked. I suppose she never ran into someone before who believes that they are in charge of their own body and not the nurse or the doctor. Well, when I heard her talking about me, I realized that I needed to get out of there before they wanted to torture me some more -- but I really wanted to talk to the NP, so when I made the decision to leave, I did it slowly. I caully put my gloves and glasses on and got out my keys and waited. I sat there a few moments waiting but no one came in to talk to me.
I slowly stood up, fully expecting to see my NP coming into the room, but when I got to the door way and looked out, all I could see was the shocked nurse still talking to some other nurse farther down the corridor. So I got my walking stick and started to move slowly down the hall, fully expecting someone to approach me. No one even noticed me. I walked past the check out desk which was empty and pushed the green button to open the door and walked out. I did it all slowly in case someone wanted to say anything to me but no one came after me, and I just left. I then knew I would need to find another doctor.
Im not asking for agreement that I did the right thing. Perhaps it was the wrong thing. As Ive been thinking about it, Ive come up with reasons to justify finding another doctor. For one thing, I really have never once even seen the doctor there, I dont even know what he looks like. Id rather go to a doctor that I can see and talk to.
Their BP equipment is faulty and even from the comments of the nurses using it, it seems that they have a hard time using it. Ive also never liked having to carry my urine specimen in an open container -- my previous doctor had cups with caps that prevented spillage or contamination. And when they take blood from me, it is in the middle of the nurses station rather than in a private place.
Those things may not seem like much, but I had been putting up with all that because I liked my NP, but I really dont like being treated like I am "cattle." I really do think that, all things together, I will just find another doctor.
And about the HBP. I know how to lower my BP. It is with walking. So I shall manage it with walking. The only time in my entire life that I had normal blood pressure was after I had started walking a long time ago. I also saw how my BP came down when I did a stress test a few years ago so I know that walking will make the difference. It makes me wonder why my water arerobics has done nothing for the problem. I had been hoping it would, but my BP seems to be staying particularly high, so I will start the walking thing and see if that still helps.
In the mean time, I want to find a doctor with his eye on his patients and not on his bottom line or the elegance of his office. I really did not like the "factory" format they had so maybe I can find a more personal doctor. Id really like to go back to my old one, but she does not take medicare, so Ill keep looking.
BTW I was surprised to see a weight loss this morning. Im below 318 today. Still losing weight. Thank you Lord Jesus!!
Be back soon,
Marcia
It seems that olive oil fraud has been around since day 0001 but it only came to my attention today in an e-mail from a guy who wants to sell me real extra virgin olive oil. I get so many e-mails from websites that are trying to sell me something that I dont often pay attention to them anymore, but this one caught my eye. I did not want to read the advertising for his expensive product so I searched out the source of information in an article that he erred to which was written in 2007 in The New Yorker magazine. (Here is a link if you are interested: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mueller )
After reading about all the corruption and mislabeling I am about to go off of extra virgin olive oil. There is no guarantee that what I am buying at my local grocery store, whether it be Kroger or Whole Foods, is even olive oil. It could be anything from soy bean oil to hazelnut oil. I only started using extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) because it was supposed to be so healthy for my body -- if I cannot be sure that what I am buying is actually EVOO, then why bother?
I can use extra virgin coconut oil (EVCO) instead. I tried using it in the salad dressing that I make myself and it actually tasted better than the EVOO from the plastic bottle under my counter. Plastic Bottle. That should be a dead give away that what is inside could be anything and the longer it sits (even if it actually is EVOO) the more rancid it gets. I dont need it. Out she goes.
The only problem I foresee with using EVCO for salad dressing is that in the winter time it tends to harden while sitting on the counter in my kitchen. It needs to be above about 75 degrees in order for it to be liquid form which works well in the pourable salad dressing. Ive been considering placing my bottle of dressing near the pilot light on my gas stove to keep it at a liquid temperature but I have no idea what that will do to my dressing. Perhaps I should put it in a different shaped container so I can spoon it out. I really dont know and will have to wait for winter time to experiment with that.
In the mean time, it is summer and it works fine as a good replacement. So there you have it. My personal workaround for the corruption in the olive oil industry.
You know what this reminds me of? The Mormon church which I grew up in. They actually tell their people not to trust the Bible because parts of it have been changed over the years. They only read the King James Version (at least when I was a member thats what they did) and they believed that parts of it were corrupt. To me, even at the time, that meant that since I had no way of knowing which parts were supposedly corrupt and which parts were accurate I could trust none of it. What a mess.
Im glad I found out the truth and became a Christian who can read and trust all of the Bible from cover to cover. I have found the evidence that I needed to ease and clear my mind concerning the Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls give strong evidence that the Books in the Bible we are reading now are nearly identical to the ones stored away for three thousand years and hidden in a cave. There are other proofs that Ive read about too, so I dont worry about it anymore. I know the Bible is the word of God, and that is what I stand on. It is so much more "clean" to trust what I have investigated and found to be authentic. It actually eases my mind and assuages my soul.
My best source of information about the authenticity of the Bible came from a book written by Simon Greenleaf -- here is a link to Amazon.com where you can look inside http://www.amazon.com/The-Testimony-Evangelists-Examined-Evidence/dp/0825427479.
Its only about eight dollars so it wont break the bank. But I must warn you, it is probably not for the casual reader. It is quite interesting to me and very well written in my opinion, but some people dont like technical nor precise reading matter. I like it, expressly for that reason. When I was done looking through his eyes, I no longer had questions about whether the New Testament was authentic or whether I could trust the words of the Apostles which were written there.
Back to the typical fodder of this blog: I went to see my doctor on Thursday but ended up not seeing her at all. I ended up simply walking out of the office and not one person even noticed it or said a thing to me. Not even a friendly "Goodbye." Ill be choosing a new primary care physician from my insurance list, soon. It was an experience that I probably wont forget.
Before I went I knew that my only current health problem that needed to be addressed was my high blood pressure. When I measured it on the morning of the appointment it was about twenty points higher on the upper number than usual so I already knew it was going to be sky high in the office. Of course dreading that, makes it worse, but I did not want to miss the appointment, so I went. As I waited for them to call me, I tried to do deep breathing and relaxation to lower it. It is hard for me to relax in the doctors office but I did my best.
When the perky little girl came and got me and lead me back to the room to wait for the nurse practitioner (I had never really seen the doctor there.) I tried to continue to relax myself, but she wanted to chit chat so I was polite and cheerful. She walked me into the room, sat me down, tore the paper off of the examination table and pulled the blood pressure machine over to me. It all happened so fast I had no chance to breath and the number she got was pretty outrageous. She cheerfully said she would measure it again later and left the room. I got no chance to try to get anything under control and simply sat and waited to see my NP.
As I waited I got out my journal which I always take with me and was reading some things to relax me and the door opened up and another young nurse came in. She too rushed about and wanted to take my BP by hand this time. I know that the cuffs that they have dont work on my upper arm which is really oversized. They not only wont measure me, it is often extremely painful for me to undergo their trying to get it to work over and over, again, so I asked that she take it on my forearm instead of my upper arm. She said she did not know how to do that, so I was stuck. I rolled up my sleeve and asked for an arm support knowing that if they leave my arm in the air and I have to hold it up, that raises my blood pressure, too.
She pulled out the doctors stool and sat down so I could rest my arm on her knee and quickly put the cuff on my arm and started to pump. As she pumped the pain just got worse and worse until I said that I could not take any more pressure and she immediately stopped pumping and let it go. This begins to ease the pain but it does not stop until they take the cuff off. So she let it down and said she got the lower number but did not get the upper one and started to pump it up again. Of course my arm was already in pain and she started pumping it up again harder and harder. At a certain point, I could not take the pain any more and saw that she was oblivious to my torture so I simply reached over with my other hand and undid the cuff as I explained that it was simply way too painful for me.
She actually jumped up off of the stool, leaving it in front of me, and ran out of the room, leaving the door open. The next thing I heard was her talking about me to someone in the hallway as if I had committed a crime. She seemed very shocked. I suppose she never ran into someone before who believes that they are in charge of their own body and not the nurse or the doctor. Well, when I heard her talking about me, I realized that I needed to get out of there before they wanted to torture me some more -- but I really wanted to talk to the NP, so when I made the decision to leave, I did it slowly. I caully put my gloves and glasses on and got out my keys and waited. I sat there a few moments waiting but no one came in to talk to me.
I slowly stood up, fully expecting to see my NP coming into the room, but when I got to the door way and looked out, all I could see was the shocked nurse still talking to some other nurse farther down the corridor. So I got my walking stick and started to move slowly down the hall, fully expecting someone to approach me. No one even noticed me. I walked past the check out desk which was empty and pushed the green button to open the door and walked out. I did it all slowly in case someone wanted to say anything to me but no one came after me, and I just left. I then knew I would need to find another doctor.
Im not asking for agreement that I did the right thing. Perhaps it was the wrong thing. As Ive been thinking about it, Ive come up with reasons to justify finding another doctor. For one thing, I really have never once even seen the doctor there, I dont even know what he looks like. Id rather go to a doctor that I can see and talk to.
Their BP equipment is faulty and even from the comments of the nurses using it, it seems that they have a hard time using it. Ive also never liked having to carry my urine specimen in an open container -- my previous doctor had cups with caps that prevented spillage or contamination. And when they take blood from me, it is in the middle of the nurses station rather than in a private place.
Those things may not seem like much, but I had been putting up with all that because I liked my NP, but I really dont like being treated like I am "cattle." I really do think that, all things together, I will just find another doctor.
And about the HBP. I know how to lower my BP. It is with walking. So I shall manage it with walking. The only time in my entire life that I had normal blood pressure was after I had started walking a long time ago. I also saw how my BP came down when I did a stress test a few years ago so I know that walking will make the difference. It makes me wonder why my water arerobics has done nothing for the problem. I had been hoping it would, but my BP seems to be staying particularly high, so I will start the walking thing and see if that still helps.
In the mean time, I want to find a doctor with his eye on his patients and not on his bottom line or the elegance of his office. I really did not like the "factory" format they had so maybe I can find a more personal doctor. Id really like to go back to my old one, but she does not take medicare, so Ill keep looking.
BTW I was surprised to see a weight loss this morning. Im below 318 today. Still losing weight. Thank you Lord Jesus!!
Be back soon,
Marcia
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