slamboard

One of the most contentious issues in American politics is military spending.

Around twenty years ago, General Electric was the first and possibly the biggest corporation to face fines and lawsuits stemming from a crackdown on fraud related to contracts with the Pentagon. Maybe it’s time for another crackdown. It could provide a needed boost of revenue for the military.

A little over ten years ago, GE was caught cheating the Military by not adequately testing aircraft components. A GE engineer approached the FBI after the concerns that he expressed within the company failed to result in changes that he felt were necessary. The approximately $7 million awarded in a subsequent lawsuit mostly went to the government, with some going to the whistle-blower and his lawyers as well.

If this is a pattern, it would seem that a payment is overdue. There were also some criminal convictions against GE in 1990 and 1992.

This year, they sold their plastics division to the Saudis.

I don’t want to be accused of cherry picking intelligence for this story. Actually there is no story. I used Google’s own search engine to see if anyone had looked into this possibility. Late last year Loren Baker connected enough dots to make for a fairly sensational report. He put a question mark at the end of his title as well.

He did find web pages on Orkut that were ideologically supportive of Al Quaeda and that were monetized with Google Ads. Supposedly click fraud was rampant and unchecked. Google estimates that $1 billion dollars per year is lost to fraudulent ad clicks. I saw no estimate as to how much of that is comprised of organized crime by terror organizations.

The ideology of individuals in these organization is such that any type of lying or stealing perpetrated towards an infidel is not considered morally wrong. At the time of the report, there were forums that openly encouraged members to repeatedly click the ads.

Diet scams and email based fraud can also potentially be supporting terrorist organizations.

I’m not going to point to any of the videos that have me wondering about the law as it relates to instructional videos. I just finished watching a video that was ostensibly showing innocent people how to unlock their car when they have locked themselves out. This supposed skill has a very obvious illegal purpose.

The various instructional videos related to unlocking iPhones are not illegal as far as I know and the procedure that they advocate is not illegal. It breaks the terms of a user agreement.

A comedy monologue discussing the fact that it is illegal to talk about how to kill a certain World leader has been uploaded multiple times. The copyright infringement is illegal. I have to wonder if the titles that some of the thieves used makes their action a felony.

I can tell you how to get an evening’s worth of entertainment. Just put “how to” into the search bar on YouTube. There is a video about how to wash a cat. I have not viewed it. The fact that it exists was funny enough.

I guess that people can legally promote and demonstrate anything that has a plausible legal purpose. Spoof cards are a good example of this. A service that allows you to call someone and have a false number displayed on their caller ID has some obvious illegal applications. It could assist someone who wants to perpetrate fraud or harassment. The services are legal in the US at this time and most providers point to legitimate purposes. For instance, a doctor can use such a service to phone a patient from his home and have the caller ID display his office number.

I have already published a short post about the increase in reblogging. I delete trackbacks everyday that come from ‘blogs’ that are nothing but a collection of excerpts from real bloggers who are creating real content. Given the automated nature of this method of creating a website that appears to have relevant content to the search engine spiders, I can assume that they occasionally feed off each other. I have noticed in the past few days that the reblogs that are set up to have a little attribution blurb are attributing it to the wrong author. A post that I wrote discussing LAP BAND surgery was incorrectly attributed to CarbWire. This attribution is in the form of unlinked text. The rebloggers get to exist in a gray area of ethics and legality because they link to the original source. They do not add to the discussion in the blogosphere, they simply feed of it to gain ranking for their URL so they can be monetized.

I carry out some customer service everyday for a website that we operate. On those very rare days that I don’t have a page full of people who have forgotten their passwords, I always look at my spam folder. If you have a Gmail address that you have submitted to countless forms all over the internet, your spam probably looks like mine. It’s nasty and it’s relentless and I am glad that everything is working out so that I don’t have to look at it everyday.

I was quite pleased to see that some spammers have been caught by the police and that a judge is sending them to jail. The first US prosecution under new federal anti-spam laws will see two men spending up to five years in prison. Conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene materials were the charges. Authorities were also able to get their hands on $1.3 million of the over $2 million that these guys made over a 9 month period in 2004.

Source: Guardian

This is just a quick post to remind people who have an interest in Kimkins that there is a Slamboard YouTube Channel with a couple of relevant videos.

I chose not to embed these videos on this blog, but they are embeddable for any other bloggers who want to publicize them and comment on them. They are surveillance videos.

I get this same comment almost every day now. I’m not sure if it is legitimately evil or if the spammer is just hoping to take advantage of the greed and dishonesty of others in order to get traffic to their own site.

There is a recent comment spam trend where a coherent sentence with one of my blog post titles inserted into it is submitted for approval. They get easy to spot because the spammers use the same sentence over and over for months.

I did not expect to be offered a lucrative position via my comment spam. Nonetheless, here is an opportunity that I would be a fool to pass up

I find it interesting that while they specifically need someone in my region to do this work, they never actually refer to my region by name. As you can see in this next image, they want quite a bit of information from me…

I have a policy of always using images rather than quoting scams with actual text. Not only am I suspicious by nature, I am also paranoid

Stephen Barrett is the man behind DietScam.org. I have used information from that site as a basis for some of my work before. After reading his relentless attack on the Atkins way of eating, I decided that I should find out more about this guy. He is a prolific researcher and writer with more than his share of critics. I will throw a softball at the litigious man by saying that I personally think his use of a word like ‘quackery’ that has no legal definition is a very convenient strategy. I would compare it to Listerine claiming to kill 99.9% of all known germs (the word germs has no scientific definition).

I think that, from here, on in I will always present any information that I get on his websites as his opinion, rather than established fact.

The thing that really sets Barrett apart is the broad range of health and diet related methods that he criticizes. He labels everything from acupuncture to organic food as ‘quackery’.

Read my Kimkins.com series here and see all the Kimkins-related Slamboard posts here.

Thanks to Kimkins Dangers, we may have some new insight into the truth about Kimmer aka Heidi Diaz. One of their readers found this PlentyOfFish.com profile of “Kimmer2″. PlentyOfFish is a popular free dating site started around 2003. This profile lists Kimmer’s son’s age as 16, which would date it about two years ago.

Could this profile be a hoax? At first, I seriously considered the possibility that the profile was faked. But here’s why I don’t think that’s the case: the uncropped photos on this profile, which appear to be of Heidi and her son Brandon (who is now about 18 years old) have not to my knowledge been seen anywhere else online.

Take a look at the picture with the marina in the background. Heidi send this exact uncropped picture to Catherine to crop and use as her before picture for Kimkins.com. Catherine has never released the uncropped photo to anyone else. Neither of us had seen the uncropped seated photo until now.

If Heidi did indeed create this dating profile herself, it seems quite likely that she is now an older, perhaps heavier version of the woman in the blue sweater. After all, why not post the red dress photo if that is what she looks like now?

Also, the profile says Kimmer is a former foster mom. If Heidi did not really have foster children when she accepted money fundraised in their name (summer of 2006) then she could perhaps find herself facing criminal liability for fraud.

Things are only going to get more interesting.