Raping the public… legally

Posted on January 25, 2013 by The Old Wolf

About a decade ago, my identity was stolen. An insurance card I had given to a family member was lost in the state of Florida, and some drone got his hands on it. All of a sudden I was being contacted by debt-collection companies for things like trips to a hospital in an ambulance, 9 months worth of rent, cell phone accounts with T-Mobile, and a host of others.

It took me about 4 years to get my credit reports cleaned up, and countless hours of time on the telephone, writing letters, and filing police reports. Through it all was dealing with the collection companies, and it was brutal. These people are relentless bullies, and they care about only one thing… collecting. Explaining to them that I did not owe said debts was fruitless. Explaining that I had been the victim of identity theft was wasting breath. Even after multiple explanations, I had agents offer to discharge the debt if I was willing to pay 50¢ on the dollar. Nothing I said made a difference. They kept calling until I informed them, by law, that they were no longer allowed to do so. ^[1]

Now comes word of a new scam being perpetrated on the public by a company called Corrective Solutions, and others like them. This article in LA Weekly outlines how DA’s offices have partnered with some very ugly, very mean people to terrorize consumers into paying stiff fees for bounced checks, all in the name of “diversion” – meaning keeping cases out of the court system – but really for only one purpose – increasing the flow of revenue into the DA’s coffers.

An extract from the article outlines the sad tale of Carole Hirth:

In fact, it was banker scheming that landed Carole Hirth in trouble last year. More than a dozen major banks have paid multimillion-dollar fines for reordering purchases and delaying deposits solely in order to generate overdraft fees. In Hirth’s case, PNC was holding her direct deposits until it withdrew her outgoing charges — effectively overdrafting her account so it could charge extra fees.

She knew none of this at the time she wrote a $393.86 check to Dominick’s, a Chicago grocery story. The 59-year-old was in the hospital being treated for Crohn’s disease when the check bounced. For some reason, the store never tried to redeposit it, which most merchants do. If it had, Hirth says, the check would have cleared. Instead, the Safeway-owned chain sent her a letter.

“I had been back from the hospital for just four days when I checked the mail and thought, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” she says.

Hirth went straight to Dominick’s, wrote a new check and paid a $35 bounce fee. She considered the problem fixed.

But four months later, she received a letter from the Cook County state’s attorney. It said that she’d been accused of deceptive practices and that she faced up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The only way to avoid this fate was to pay $649.86, which included penalties and a diversion course.

“I already paid them,” Hirth says. “I contacted [the grocery store’s] ethics department and said this was just wrong. I spend enough money there. I told them they should work with me. I told them to look up my Safeway card. I’ve been shopping with them for the past 30 years!”

Safeway said there was nothing it could do. She’d have to contact the state attorney’s office.

Hirth called the toll-free number on the letter but got nowhere.

“They accused me of committing a fraudulent act. They said that if I don’t pay everything and take their class, I could be arrested and end up in jail. He was very, very mean,” she says. “I told him that I didn’t understand how that could happen. I said I’d already handled it, it should be cleared up, but he just went on and on and on.”

Hirth wrote another letter to Safeway, begging the grocer to contact the prosecutor’s office on her behalf. The letters and phone calls kept coming.

It wasn’t until she got in touch with Arons that she discovered she wasn’t being threatened by Cook County. It was Corrective Solutions, which has contracts with 21 counties in Illinois.

Notice three major instances of douchebaggery in this one single story:

Bank malfeasance (reordering deposits and withdrawals to create deliberate overdrafts and charge fees)
Corporate insouciance (once a charge has been submitted to collections, nobody gives a rat’s south-40 – there appears to be no one inside a massive corporation who cares or who can deal with human situations)
Consumer intimidation by Corrective Solutions using the name of Cook County to perpetrate their scheme, but fully with Cook County’s blessing.

The Napa Valley Register filed an article in October of 2012 describing a class-action suit against Corrective Solutions and another company, and outlining practices similar to what happened in Hirth’s case above, but the news is not good – most consumers won’t even benefit from any possible settlement, and the companies will likely continue to operate in one form or another. Indeed, Corrective Solutions is a rebirth of American Corrective Counseling Services, which lost a class-action suit against it, filed for bankruptcy, paid nothing, and began operating a few months later under a new name, free and clear, as reported in the LA times article.

The fight against this kind of corporate and governmental misbehavior continues. The war will be long and hard, and there will be bodies left on the battlefield, many belonging to innocent victims who made honest mistakes and found themselves caught up in a web of greed. The good news is that many legal advocates are aware of what is happening, and will continue to fight until this sort of program is outlawed by statute.

In the meantime, the more people who know what’s happening, the more ammunition they have to fight back. Read the linked articles. Be careful with your finances, and don’t roll over for the bullies.

This has been an Old Wolf public service announcement.

[1] A recent example: A family member has set up payment arrangements with a collection company in Idaho, in order to pay off a medical bill. The payments have been kept current for the last 18 months. Despite that, this letter is sent out monthly:

No mention of current account status, no “thank you for your payment,” just the constant threat of legal action. I’ve written the office to complain about this lack of courtesy and ethics, and no one has ever bothered to respond.

You can’t discuss it, but I can.

Posted on January 21, 2013 by The Old Wolf

From MSN News:

Kindergartner suspended for comment on toy bubble gun

MOUNT CARMEL, Pa. — A 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl who told another girl she was going to shoot her with a pink toy gun that blows soapy bubbles has been suspended from kindergarten.

Her family has hired an attorney to fight the punishment, which initially was 10 days but was reduced to two.

Attorney Robin Ficker says Mount Carmel Area School District officials labeled the girl a “terrorist threat” for the bubble gun remark, made Jan. 10 as both girls waited for a school bus.

Ficker says the girl didn’t even have the bubble gun with her and has never fired a real gun. He says she’s “the least terroristic person in Pennsylvania.”

School district solicitor Edward Greco tells pennlive.com that officials are looking into the case. He said school officials aren’t at liberty to discuss disciplinary actions.

You aren’t at liberty to discuss disciplinary actions, but I am.

You are douchebags.

Idiots.

Paranoid schizophrenics with delusions of relevance.

For your gratuitous information: A child of 5 has no conception of reality when it comes to gun violence. They play with water guns and bubble guns and toy guns and parrot what they see on television. They have no idea what a real weapon can do to a human body. They play.

When reasonable adults hear a child of that age say something inappropriate, they take them aside and explain it. They offer benefits and consequences. Maybe she loses recess and goes home with a note pinned to her jacket.

But you don’t sodding call her a terrorist and suspend her from school for ten days, you asswaffles!

You blistering simpletons, you have done more to warp that little girl’s world view than anything she might have seen on television. She will never forget this event, and it is likely that she will never understand why such a firestorm of stupidity ignited around her. She will only know subconsciously that she did something horribly wrong. and will never look at another firearm in the same way again, even though carrying a legal one might save her life when she’s older.

Here’s a piece of unsolicited advice: Stick to chasing ambulances, and leave 5-year-old girls alone. Better yet, find a profession far, far away from people, where you can do no more damage with your pompous self-importance.

The Old Wolf has discussed.

Remembering Aaron Swartz

Posted on January 13, 2013 by The Old Wolf

Official Statement From the Family and Partner of Aaron Swartz

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. ^[1] Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

How not to get a tattoo

Posted on January 9, 2013 by The Old Wolf

A buddy of mine over at Facebook posted this picture which made me laugh out loud – really, I’ve sworn not to say “LoL” unless I really did:

But that got me thinking, because so many people in this country (and probably others) get Chinese/Japanese characters tattooed in various places on their bodies, thinking their tats mean “bravery” or “samurai” or “golden lovebird” or “Tadgh Ó Suilleabhain”, only to find out when they bump into a native speaker that it really means something else again, or nothing at all.

An example from the wonderful website “Hanzi Smatter,” dedicated to identifying bad tats and what they mean (or don’t):

The customer wanted a tat that said “Fast and Furious”, but what they got was “Fast Foolish”

This one, on the other hand, is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s based on a gibberish asian font which was deciphered by Alan Siegrist, a professional Japanese-English translator and member of both Japan Association of Translators (JAT) and American Translators Association (ATA); with Alan’s help, tian (writer of Hanzi Smatter) compiled this chart, which has been widely circulated around tattoo parlors:

(note this website, which is currently selling this chart along with some other character sheets for $64.99).

The very clever user DavidR created this website, where you can generate your own garbage tattoo text for your amusement. But for the love of Mogg’s holy grandfather, don’t use it! (Note: At this writing, only the “to nonsense” function works – the other direction throws a DB error.)

If you’re still not quite sure what’s going on, have a look at these pictures, which give you an idea of what a native speaker might see if they looked at your sic tat:

This girl thought her tattoo says “Lord of the Dance”

She was hoping for “Grace Under Pressure”

“You mean, it doesn’t say ‘passion’?”

“But you swore this meant ‘Hot Stuff’!”

So why does this happen with far-too-common frequency? First of all, we can’t heap coals on the head of the average tattoo artist, no more of whom are total idiots than you would find in the average business establishment (law firms excepted). The answer appears to lie in the fact that kanjis (or hanzi) look cool to many non-Asians, but take a gruntload of specialized education to understand properly – and that would hold true even if you didn’t speak the language but were simply trying to understand the general concept of ideographic writing, and what it would take to incorporate that into your artwork in a professional way. But the fact remains that when you extract the vast majority of well-meaning and honest tattoo artists out there,

Some of them are downright malicious, and think it’s funny to write “醜” (bad looking; shame; ugly; unclean) on some young lady’s arm;
Some of them have no more than a third-grade education to back up their admirable art skills, and just have no idea that the character chart they bought online is worth less than the powder to blow it to Hell with;
And some of them are incompetent and just draw crap, hoping the customer will never know the difference.

So what’s a body to do? Here are some helpful hints:

If you want a character tat, find someone you trust (and I mean, really trust, not your buddy who will draw dicks all over your face the next time you pass out at a party) who speaks the language, and let them help you design something that both looks good and means what you want it to mean.

Don’t trust a dictionary, either hardcopy or online. Dictionaries are only useful in direct proportion to your knowledge of the target language. That’s why

is not a good thing to use if you want “freedom,” because it means “free”, as in “no charge” – it’s also poorly drawn.

Take your artwork to the tattoo artist of your choice, and have them design on paper what you’re going to have emblazoned on your body forever and ever worlds without end (remember these suckers are permanent unless you have more money than Donald Trump) and take that design back to your expert to make sure that a) it means what it’s supposed to mean, and b) it looks good. Doing this will mean working with a tattoo artist who doesn’t have severe ego issues and will be willing to work with you. Remember, it’s your money and your body, so you have the right to make sure you get what you expect.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Life Insurance: Spam ‘n’ Scam

Posted on January 5, 2013 by The Old Wolf

The Internet is a perfect place to steal people’s money legally. All you have to do is write something, post it, and the equivalent population of Belgium will take it as gospel truth. There’s a lot responsible for this phenomenon, but lack of education appears to be the primary culprit.

This appeared in my mailbox last night, typical of the kind of UCE (junk mail) that Comcast’s filters allow to slip through.

Warning: NEVER buy life insurance from Globe Life, this is not an endorsement!

I could smell the rotting fish almost before I opened my malibox this morning. Red flags:

The fact that they’re spamming at all. Ethical companies don’t spam.
The “marketer” or affiliate being paid to send out this putrescence is “Future Modern Logistic” which has no internet presence and a UPS Store PO Box for a mailing address
The bait-and-switch tactic using a huge headline plus an asterisk^[*] followed by lots of small print is immediately suspect.
A quick search of “Globe Life Insurance” brings up page after page of consumer complaints.
Using shills to promote the company, even if the writer couldn’t get a “C” on a third-grade composition. Have a look at this “endorsement” I found at nationwide-insurance.org – the website is a black-hat SEO spamdexing site which provides no useful content but rather spurious data and backlinks to other sites in an effort to boost their search ratings:

“Globe Life Insurance Scam-Our Honest Review

There are some insurance companies that do scam except is the globe life insurance scam legit? Globe life insurance corporation is a great company who offers a great insurance policy. When we are asked if we think they are one of the insurance scams our answer is no. They have great insurance deals and if you seem up insurance reviews you will notice their reviews are great. Plus you can go online and get free insurance quotes for life and health insurance. When you get an insurance quote make sure you select the right semester life insurance. Also they supply event insurance in case you want to connect to two. We also have a protective life insurance company scam you might want to check out”

Bad punctuation, horrid grammar, and it goes on for about 8 more paragraphs of the same kind of liquid dung. I mean, who in the name of Mogg’s holy grandmother would consider doing business with a company that descends to this kind of tactic? Perhaps the kind of people who believe the “Cash4Gold” infomercials…

The Internet is a huge place, and I don’t anticipate that a small voice like mine, crying in the wilderness, will have a large impact. But if one single person reads this and as a result, refrains from doing business with Globe Life or another disreputable company of the same caliber, it will have been worth the time.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

*Like this. By reading this blog post you are legally obligating yourself to send $50,000 per year to the blogger in perpetuity, and to eat nattō three times a day without complaining about how slimy it is.

The Religious Chain Letter

Posted on January 2, 2013 by The Old Wolf

Occasionally I will get this sort of thing in my mailbox. I have to say I remember my mother typing chain letters with carbon paper and sending them to myriads of people in the 50’s… but now with electronic communication, it’s possible to annoy millions without effort or cost.

Look at this Picture Closely

The President of Argentina received this picture and called it “junk mail”: 8 days later his son died. A man received this picture and immediately sent out copies: His surprise was winning the lottery. Alberto Martinez received this picture and gave it to his secretary to make copies but she forgot to distribute it – She lost her job and he lost his family. This picture is miraculous and sacred.”

You were chosen to receive this novena (prayer).

The moment you receive it, say :

[Insert the Lord’s Prayer here]

GOD WANTED ME TO TELL YOU, It shall be well with you this coming year.

No matter how much your enemies try this year, they will not succeed.
You have been destined to make it and you shall surely achieve all your goals this year.
For all of 2013, all your agonies will be diverted and victory and prosperity will be incoming in abundance.
Today God has confirmed the end of your sufferings, sorrows and pain because HE that sits on the throne has remembered you.
He has taken away the hardships and given you JOY. He will never let you down.

I knocked at heaven’s door this morning.
God asked me, “My child! What can I do for you?”
And I said, “Father, please protect and bless the person reading this message.”

This is a Novena from Mother Theresa that started in 1952.

It has never been broken. Within 48 hours send 20 copies (Or as many as you can – God does know if you don’t have 20 people to send it to – it’s the effort and intent that counts) to family and friends.

Do not send it back to the person who sent it to you.

This is a powerful Novena. Can only help. All prayer is powerful.

Please do not break it.

Now: I have nothing against sending out good energy, or prayer. I appreciate people who exercise their faith on my behalf. But I have serious issues with this kind of email because they’re – to be charitable – a crock of .

I’m supposed to believe that

I was “chosen” to receive this special communication (along with the countless other “unspecified recipients”)
Some stock photo taken off the Internet is miraculous and sacred
Some really bad writing can be attributed to Mother Teresa in 1952
The chain has never been broken
If I send it to 20 friends, I’ll have amazing luck
If I don’t send it on, I’m opening myself to apocalyptic consequences, loss of job, family, life, and limb. (The idea that a prayer for the blessing of people would automatically morph into a curse if not sent onwards defies logic. Oh wait, we’re talking about religion, excuse me.)

People! In the name of anything you hold sacred or worthy of respect, if you want to send good energy to your friends, great. Pray for them privately (see Matthew 6:6 if you’ve forgotten the admonition), but please don’t forward hqiz like this. Above and beyond all the things I mentioned above, some of the folks in your address book will invariably be humanists or atheists, and you don’t want to send them to the hospital with intense pain caused by prolonged and forceful eye-rolling.

The Old Wolf has spoken.