I Created A Fake Business To Get My Math Tests In Advance, And More Of The Week's Best Scam Stories
It seems like we're living in a society that's full of scams, hoaxes and questionable practices committed by individuals or corporations these days. Some scams are purely horrible, some are more incredible than egregious, and some are just really, really weird.
Welcome to Cons And Pros, a weekly roundup of the most outrageous scam stories we have come across this week.
I Created A Fake Business To Get My Math Tests In Advance
There's the stealthily-bringing-a-calculator level of cheating on your math test, and then there's what this 33-year-old man did: setting up a fake tutoring and proctoring business so he could receive his test exam questions in advance:
The way it works with these online classes is that they ask you who your proctor is at the beginning of the semester, and you have one week to send it over. So I set up a tutoring website through a popular website provider, which made it very cheap to do. I got an email that made it look official, and I really populated the page, and then made it look like proctoring was something we did on the side.
[Vice]
Blame It On The Coffee
According to personal finance expert Suze Orman, your coffee-drinking habits are partly to blame for your poor finances. In fact, she described going out to buy a coffee every day as essentially "peeing $1,000,000″ down the drain" and that if we were better at buying things that we truly needed, instead of what we wanted, we would have money to invest in for retirement.
Orman's advice generated a lot of social media backlash and inspired this GQ article from Kashana Cauley, which breaks down the erroneous assumptions in Orman's claims and how the personal finance industry is very much a scam:
Orman claimed in the CNBC video that if someone invests $100 each month in a Roth IRA for 40 years, they'd end up with a million dollars. First of all, this assumes that you have 40 years left to live. Second, she assumes a 12 percent rate of return on our often volatile stock market, when pretty much everyone else quotes a historical rate between 7 and 10 percent, which would tack at least a decade onto that estimate. It requires you to know what a Roth IRA is, which 67 percent of Americans don't.
[GQ]
Catfished By Jacob Wohl
Writer Lexi Pandell offers us an unprecedented look into the strange story of Carolyne Cass, the woman at the center of far-right conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl's failed sexual harassment plot against Robert Mueller.
According to Cass, she had been tricked into making sexual assault allegations against Mueller by Wohl, whom she'd met on Craigslist and who had identified himself to her as "Matthew Cohen," a private investigator who had reportedly received Israeli intelligence training.
Pandell's story gives us a fuller picture of how Cass came into contact with Wohl and the lead-up and the fallout of Wohl's botched scheme to smear Mueller:
The two kept in touch for months after the Mueller debacle. She even went to Wohl's place in Irvine a few days after their lunch meeting, where Cass says he pressed her to come forward with the false Mueller accusations (she refused), and she pressed him to refund her the money she'd paid for his PI services and some of the $50,000 payout he'd promised for her involvement in the scheme (she recalls him scoffing, "I won't give you free money"). She says they still had sex that night. Looking back on the encounter, Cass has a hard time finding words for what made her want to stay by Wohl's side, except that she felt desperate to believe that he was more like good-guy "Matthew Cohen" than Jacob Wohl; that despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, he did really care for her.
[GEN]
The Bodysnatchers
Having to deal with the grief of losing a loved one is already horrible, but imagine how that grief is compounded when you learn that their cremated remains are actually not them and that their bodies had been sold — without your consent — to a shadowy body-brokering market.
Elena Saavedra Buckley from High Country News writes about how the shady practices of one particular funeral home, Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors in Montrose, Colorado, has affected those who have the bodies of their loved ones stolen from them.
According to more than 50 stories from interviews and legal documents, those contacted by the FBI had experiences similar to Schum's: discounted or free cremation services in exchange for a donated organ, with little attention paid to the lack of forms or receipts. Others never agreed to donate anything. Many remembered Hess as a warm, sweet woman who put them at ease. Some families kept the ashes they received at home, while others buried them next to a spouse in Florida, or scattered them under a tree in Oregon, or flew them to an ancestral village in Ireland. Months or years later, in 2018, they learned they might be the victims of a crime.
Dial P For Pest Control
Journalist Christie Aschwanden recounts the mystery of having her phone number listed as the number for Orkin Pest Control, an Atlanta-based pest control company, and whether or not that listing is part of a larger scam:
The really weird thing was that the number that displayed when you clicked on the Orkin result was not my number. Except for the area code, it wasn't anything close to my number. And yet, if you dialed that number, either by tapping the call icon displayed next to the result or by dialing the number directly, the call went to my phone.
While Aschwanden eventually had the mixup fixed so that strangers were no longer calling her up asking about pest control services, the mystery remains as to whether this was a mistake, a scam or something even more nefarious, such as a discreet way of communication for criminal organizations, as some readers have suggested.
You Can Be Whoever You Want To Be
Guy Lawson's profile of Jeremy Wilson is the story of a fraudster who had taken up so many identities over the years — a war veteran, a Scottish journalist, an MIT graduate, a trained assassin — that he'd eventually lost sense of who he really is as a person:
Jeremy's knuckles bear the tattooed Gaelic words mair fior, which translates to "stay true"—but to whom, or to what? After all our letters and conversations over three years, I hope he finds a way to solve the mystery of his identity, but it occurred to me that the ultimate victim of his decades of lies might well be the con man himself; Jeremy's final mark was Jeremy. As of the time of this writing, no one knows who Jeremy truly is—not even Jeremy.
[GQ]