Wednesday, November 30, 2022

How 1800’s bunco artists scammed people’s money in the shell game; the tricks they used are still working

 analysis: Did the royal commission fix banking or are banks back to behaving badly?


Good news for a change!  Enforcement efforts by the FTC, FCC and DOJ seem to be making a difference. FTC releases annual report about Do Not Call list; robocalls down by half in 2022, from 3.4 million in 2021 to 1.8 million in 2022 
 
BBB updates online shopping fraud study; complaints and losses are very high
 



Consumer tip of the week:  Many people shop online for gifts at this time of year, and all too often the only method they use to make sure it is a real company that will ship the items actually advertised are online reviews.  Please alert the public that these are NOT reliable.  Reviews, even on supposedly independent sites, are often faked.  Check companies out at BBB.org, and be sure to use a credit card so you can challenge the transaction if it goes bad.

 
New links!
Fraud Studies: Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraudromance fraud; BEC fraudsweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraudromance fraud money mulescrooked movers, government impostersonline vehicle sale scamsrental fraud, gift cards,  free trial offer frauds,  job scams,  online shopping fraud, and crypto scams
 
Fraud News Around the worldHumor FTC and CFPB  Virus Benefit TheftSocial mediaBusiness Email compromise fraud Ransomware  Data Breaches Bitcoin and cryptocurrencyJamaica and Lottery FraudRomance Fraud and SextortionPeople:        
Former FTC Chairman Mike Pertschuk dies at 89

ICIJ Trafficking Inc and More

 



It’s been nearly three years since ICIJ’s Luanda Leaks investigation exposed how decades of corrupt deals turned Isabel dos Santos into Africa’s wealthiest woman – and drained hundreds of millions in public money out of one of the world’s poorest countries.

Since then, the Angolan billionaire’s business empire has largely been dismantled, battered by investigations in multiple countries, frozen assets, lawsuits, audits and more sparked by ICIJ’s reporting.

Now, Isabel dos Santos herself is wanted for arrest by the international police organization Interpol.

The agency issued a “Red Notice” request, which is a call to law enforcement worldwide “to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.”

Dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s ex-president who autocratically ruled the country for decades, has homes in Dubai and London and is believed to visit Portugal often.

Sources in Lisbon report that in the warrant, Interpol alleges dos Santos created corrupt financial mechanisms “with the intention of obtaining illicit financial gains and whitewashing suspicious criminal operations.”

The Luanda Leaks investigation meticulously showed how unscrupulous deals were cut and lucrative assets funneled away through a labyrinth of companies and subsidiaries, many of them offshore, with the help of Western financial advisers. One of the standout insider deals was made with Angolan state oil company Sonangol.

Interpol’s warrant reportedly accuses dos Santos of acting upon information she had obtained as then-head of Sonangol.

SHADOW DIPLOMATS WORLDWIDE
ICIJ media partners investigated honorary consuls tied to their countries, unearthing cases of wrongdoing by the part-time diplomats and a critical lack of government oversight.

INVESTIGATIVE TRAINING
ICIJ’s research editor Emilia Díaz-Struck will be taking part in upcoming training opportunities for investigative journalism. On Wednesday, Nov. 23, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism is hosting a webinar on how to involve non-data journalists in collaborative data reporting (in English and Arabic). And on Saturday, Nov. 26, ICIJ partners in Chile are hosting Festival CIPER for citizens interested in investigative journalism (in Spanish).

LAST WEEK TONIGHT
ICIJ’s recent Trafficking Inc. investigation was highlighted in a segment of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about human rights violations committed against foreign workers involved in Qatar World Cup efforts and the role of the kafala system in the labor behind the games.

Thanks for reading!

Asraa Mustufa

ICIJ's digital editor

P.S. If you've enjoyed our coverage this week, remember to tell your friends and family and share our work on social media. Send them an email now!

 

 

 

 

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Abuses on US bases in Persian Gulf ensnare legions of migrant workers

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‘Even one hour after we published we started to receive threats’

 

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Magazine spread of ‘most beautiful house in America’ conceals allegedly stolen Cambodian relics

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Flurry of seizures intensify pressure on the Met over allegedly trafficked artifacts

Czech Museum of Literature

Knowledge is having the right answers. Intelligence is asking the right questions. Wisdom is knowing when to ask the right questions.


Chalmers: "Dolly Parton wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love you in 1 day. It took shadow treasurer 19 days to write that question."


       What used to be -- for almost seven decades -- the National Literature Memorial has now moved and recently re-opened as the Czech Muzeum literatury, and at Radio Prague International Ruth Fraňková reports on it, in Museum of Literature opens in Prague








  1. “Utilitarian longtermism is objectionable. Longtermism sans consequentialism is another matter” — Elliott R. Crozat (Purdue Global) considers deontological longtermism
  2. “Most of Earth thus mobilized toward figuring out what is widely thought to be the easiest problem of the three: the line between Anna and not Anna” — a story by Patrick House about how to delineate the boundaries of consciousness
  3. “Aesthetic value makes the world worthwhile, and… a good life is lived in pursuit and reflection of that aesthetic value” but “evil forces a significant qualification to aestheticism” — Tom Cochrane (Flinders) defends aestheticism but lets some moralizing in
  4. “Your love of pleasure, Callicles / Is like a jar that always leaks / Like a jar that leaks and then gets filled again. / Leaking, filling, running wild / Like a tyrant, like a child / Ceaseless wanting is, in fact, a kind of pain” — a song by Luisa Cichowski about the dispute in Plato’s Gorgias between Socrates & Callicles over the place of pleasure in the good life
  5. “The last unit we cover is on ‘The Ethics of Horror,’ and we discuss whether there is something morally dubious about watching and enjoying horror” — Kenneth L. Brewer (UT Dallas) describes his course on the philosophy of horror films


  1. Feel like you’re not good enough to be an academic? Turns out it’s because your parents weren’t good enough at encouraging you — a new study finds that “the less encouragement a doctoral student received from their parents in childhood and adolescence, the more likely they were to suffer impostor feelings”
  2. “It might sound strange, or even offensive, to suggest that writing about threats to free speech could make people afraid of speaking. The thing is, we know this is how behavior works in other domains” — Eve Fairbanks on the gap between talk of cancel culture and its reality

THIS IS BOTH IMPRESSIVE AND DISTURBING: Meta researchers create AI that masters Diplomacy, tricking human players.

I’ve been playing Diplomacy since middle school, and there are no random elements like dice or cards — it’s all human interaction.

Even before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, board games were a useful measure of AI achievement. In 2015, another barrier fell when AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol. Both of those games follow a relatively clear set of analytical rules (although Go’s rules are typically simplified for computer AI).

But with Diplomacy, a large portion of the gameplay involves social skills. Players must show empathy, use natural language, and build relationships to win—a difficult task for a computer player. With this in mind, Meta asked, “Can we build more effective and flexible agents that can use language to negotiate, persuade, and work with people to achieve strategic goals similar to the way humans do?”

The resulting model mastered the intricacies of a complex game. “Cicero can deduce, for example, that later in the game it will need the support of one particular player,” says Meta, “and then craft a strategy to win that person’s favor—and even recognize the risks and opportunities that that player sees from their particular point of view.”

At the same time, this technology could be used to manipulate humans by impersonating people and tricking them in potentially dangerous ways, depending on the context. Along those lines, Meta hopes other researchers can build on its code “in a responsible manner.”

Meta claims to have taken steps to prevent Cicero from being abused (or from becoming abusive, I suppose), but the source code is also open-sourced on GitHub.

From the comments at Ars: “Unbelievable. Training a non-conscious AI to ruthlessly deceive, manipulate and enlist humans towards the achievement of an arbitrary value function no matter the cost, as one of the first AI functions to develop. It’s like these guys want a paperclip-optimising singularity apocalypse.”

And yet: META WORKS ON AN AI, INSTEAD PRODUCES a “random bullshit generator.”


Tania, Nique Irena on mEdia dRagon

 On 25 November 2022, the Hon Virginia Bell AC delivered the report of her Inquiry into the Appointment of the Former Prime Minister to Administer Multiple Departments to the Prime Minister, the Hon Anthony Albanese MP.


Former High Court justice Virginia Bell described as “improbable” and “difficult to reconcile” some of Scott Morrison’s versions of the secrecy around his multiple ministries as she sought and failed to get a face-to-face meeting with the former prime minister.

A press conference and two Facebook posts by Morrison formed the bulk of his assistance to the inquiry despite Bell offering him a three-week window in which to talk directly to her, either in Sydney or his Canberra office.

Former High Court judge Virginia Bell sought to hear directly from Scott Morrison about the secret ministries affair.

Former High Court judge Virginia Bell sought to hear directly from Scott Morrison about the secret ministries affair.CREDIT:GILLIANNE TEDDER

Instead, Morrison relied on a solicitor to respond to Bell’s queries, including through a letter this week that warned Bell she would be unable to make any “inferences or conclusions” around national security issues because she would have to rely on incomplete information.

The review by Bell was ordered by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese after it was revealed in August that Morrison had himself secretly sworn in to administer the departments of treasury, home affairs, health, finance, and industry, science, energy and resources during his last term in government.


Bell’s inquiry shows the extent to which she went to hear from Morrison.

Bell wrote to Morrison on September 19 to “seek his assistance” with the inquiry. She proposed a meeting to hear directly his “account of the facts and circumstances” of his ministerial appointments, saying she could meet him on any date in the three weeks from September 26…

Former PM’s accounts of his decisions ‘difficult to reconcile’: Bell


 Analysis: Did the royal commission fix banking or are banks back to behaving badly?


Ex-MP Daryl Maguire charged with criminal conspiracy over visa scheme



France, investigation into illicit financing of Emmanuel Macron’s electoral campaign: his assignments at the McKinsey company are in the sights (Google Translate) Il Fatto Quotidiano (DJG). Imagine that!

“Researchers, governments, and civil society must come together to help. This paper explores how CERN can serve as a model for developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment (IRIE).
By connecting disciplines and providing shared engineering resources and capacity-building across the world’s democracies, IRIE will scale up applied research to enable evidence-based policymaking and implementation. Where CERN “exists to understand the mystery of nature for the benefit of humankind,” IRIE will exist to understand the mystery of the information environment for the benefit of democracies and their citizens. 
While the laws of physics change slowly, the conditions within the information environment are little understood and changing rapidly through the addition of new technology. Additionally, studying the information environment will require analysis of personal and at times sensitive data of internet users, increasing the need for international collaboration. As CERN did by inventing new collaboration tools, IRIE will leverage those same technologies to unlock the collective genius of researchers and practitioners from a variety of fields to strengthen democracy, alongside interested citizens who contribute their own data and expertise. While there are obvious differences between the field of physics and those emerging to study the information environment, aspects of CERN’s development can guide the creation of IRIE, an institution that can uniquely address the growing needs of researchers.”


EFF: “This week, EFF’s Atlas of Surveillanceproject hit a bittersweet milestone. With this project, we are creating a searchable and mappable repository of which law enforcement agencies in the U.S. use surveillance technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, automated license plate readers, and face recognition. It’s one of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever attempted.