General

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Did you ever notice how unscrupulous people are always trying to trap us? I received a few emails lately that stated that a package from the United States Postal Service couldn't be delivered, because it had a wrong address and the email instructed me to click a link to see the entire message. Well I am not one to click on these links, but in a way the purveyors of viruses won. Oh they didn't get a chance to infect my computer, but they did cost me a lot of time since I do get a lot of packages and I had to check through all my emails to see if there were any packages from the date indicated that I didn't get. The problem is that this type of message looks very real and you can never be sure whether it is a hoax or not. If a package from that date have been outstanding I still would not have clicked on that link, I would have gone to the postal website and tried to find out info on the package from there. This is the type of behavior that we have all been reduced to if we want to avoid malware.

It makes you wonder. Schemers have been with us for probably as long as man has been on the earth and some of them are quite convincing. What did the first con men look like and how did they operate. Thousands of years ago there were different values and people were a lot simpler then. Did they go up to someone and say, “hey look at that in the sky” and when someone looked up, did they steal his food or take a bead or two? Maybe they scared people by saying the sun god told them to take a particular item from a person and if they person objected, the sun god would kill them? People were said to have been very superstitious and maybe something like that would have worked? Maybe if we traced Nigerian con men back thousands of years we would find that they were doing this type of thing in the caves, after all they are responsible for a good portion of the fraudulent email?

One con game that is very popular has been played since the middle ages. You can probably see it in every large city in the world. It is known as the shell game. That is where you have a pea and you put it under one of three shell and shuffle them and people bet on which shell the pea is under. It is called a short con, because it is over so fast. The game can not be won if the operator of the shells has experience. It is entirely a fraud. Sometimes a shill, a person in on the game, is put into the crowd and “wins” a few rounds until the crowd builds up and then he leaves, or loses with everyone else. The shill is used to get people to bet because they figure they will bet the same as him since he is winning. This is exactly what the operators of the game want you to think. Needless to say that these games are illegal.

There were all sorts of criminal activities in ancient Rome. This is very surprising because the punishment, if found guilty, was so harsh. Let me give you an example of that. If one were found guilty of stealing, he might be sent to the arena. This meant that he could be tied to a pole and wild animals released to maul and eat him, while the crowd clapped and ate their snacks, enjoying every minute of this gruesome display. It is hard for us to imagine such punishment today, but to the ancient Romans, it was just entertainment. It has to make you wonder how many innocent people were condemned to this type of death for political reasons, or because someone of power didn't care for them?

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I think that one of the oldest types of crime has to be picking one's pocket. It probably started by taking things when no one was looking and then cutting purses off of belts and worked its way up to pockets when they came out. The Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott coined the phrase, "being caught red handed" in 1819 and meant that you were caught with blood on your hands in the act of murder, but it quickly changed to a meaning that meant you were caught with stolen goods or in the commission of a crime.

There are just so many con games out there. All of these frauds are designed to steal. They will steal from you, from the government, from businesses, or from other con artists. The criminals are not particular where they get their money from. One type of fraud is to pass counterfeit money, or even altered money that has other values pasted over the numbers. You would think that no one would fall for the pasted stuff, but go into a busy store, or busy supermarket and bury those bills between authentic ones and many times they will pass through the hands of a checker, because they are rushing and only glance at the money and yet when we take our time and look at these bills they look ridiculous to us. Another scam is the change scam. A stolen bank check is used to make a purchase that is for a lot less than the amount of the check. A phony drivers license is used as ID. Change is made and the check doesn't bounce for a couple of days.

When we get into organized crime the scams are a lot more sophisticated An example of one is when the mob takes a percentage of a business. They usually get it because the owner borrowed money form one of their loan sharks. What they do next is proceed to loot the business. They charge all the accounts to the maximum by ordering expensive liquor, merchandise, cigarettes and such. As the stuff comes in, it is sold for a price that will assure that it will move. The money owed to the accounts is never paid back and the business either goes bankrupt or maybe it is every set on fire for the insurance money. Anyone that went into the business and used a credit card, had their numbers stolen. Every phase of the business was taken into account and turned into cash.

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Then there are those offers that want us to go into partnerships with supposed overseas businesses. Yeah sure I will take three! It is getting to the point where we are being flooded with criminal fraud. I have to think that even the old lawless wild west was a lot tamer than our inbox. It seems that about half the world is trying to take advantage of the other half. One has only to look at the pirate situation in Somalia to see what I mean. The pirates see nothing wrong with seizing ships and have stated that it doesn't hurt anyone, because the ships are insured. Talk about trying to rationalize a criminal act, wow.