Archive (Page 4) • A Scammer Darkly • Buttondown

November 12, 2021

Salmonella This is not a sentence you want to read, under any circumstances: So supermarkets and restaurants continued selling chicken tainted with drug-...

Marks to Market

November 5, 2021

Zillow Back in August, people were saying there was an “arms race” to buy up as many US homes as possible because the real estate market was overheated and...

Into the Metaverse

October 29, 2021

Facebook If you read this newsletter with any regularity, you know I often write about Facebook. Last month, the WSJ released what it called the Facebook...

Speak the Truth

October 22, 2021

TRUTH You may have seen headlines this week about Donald Trump’s new social media company, TRUTH Social. Behind TRUTH Social is a company called Trump Media...

Show Your Stripes

October 15, 2021

Deep Voice Two years ago (!) when I started this newsletter, one of the first stories I wrote about was a British company being scammed out of money by a...

October 8, 2021

Frozen Fish If you ask the average person where fish sticks come from, a reasonable response would be something like - the fishermen catch it, send it to a...

Forgive and Forget

October 1, 2021

PPP When Congress passed the Paycheck Protection Act, they told large, profitable companies not to use it to take out loans they didn’t need. And if they...

September 24, 2021

Facebook Yeah, it’s going to be one of those weeks. The Wall Street Journal has released five pieces in the Facebook Files, and more scandals have dropped...

Honesty is a Virtue

September 17, 2021

Tenet Healthcare We talked about the ways Tenet contributed to the shuttering of Hahnemann hospital in Philadelphia, but did you know they’re also currently...

Outside the Box

September 10, 2021

Text Spam We have talked a few times about robocalls, and how they’re out of control and nearly impossible to stop. Guess what! Text spam is bad now, and...

Treating Parasites

September 3, 2021

Ivermectin Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug, most commonly used in livestock, who deal with a lot of parasites. It’s in the news because lots of people...

August 27, 2021

Afghanistan If you didn’t hear, the US pulled troops out of Afghanistan this month, and the Afghan government we had been propping up failed in a matter of...

August 20, 2021

Farm Bank Remember Farmville? For those who don’t, it was a Facebook game that allowed players to run a farm, tending crops and raising animals. Many of...

Claiming Ignorance

August 13, 2021

Unemployment Claims We have talked about unemployment claim fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic. ProPublica has now provided us with an in-depth look into the...

Randall Emmett As COVID-19 forced movie theaters to shut down, a lot of movies delayed release, and others decided to release on streaming services. Mixed in...

Set It and Forget It

Vanuatu Vanuatu is a small island nation in the South Pacific. It looks beautiful in photos, and is probably a lovely place to visit. One way the government...

College Rankings For the parents of any high school senior, choosing the right college is a big decision. Each year, US News publishes its US college ranking...

Therapy Apps Understandably, in the last year and a half the use of therapy apps has increased significantly. For the companies behind the apps, business is...

Tuna Fish By now, you’ve probably read a news story or heard a joke about the tuna in Subway’s sandwiches. As a devoted chronicler of food labeling scams, I...

Seeking Redemption

Gift Cards I’ve written about gift cards, and how - before cryptocurrency - they were a popular way for criminals to launder money. Bloomberg tells the tale...

Collecting Coins

Debt Collection We talk a fair amount around here about debt collection. It’s a murky industry, filled with unscrupulous characters. Many Americans have...

Dearth of Taxes

The IRS Files ProPublica shook things up last week when it released secret IRS records of some of the country’s richest men. It compared the taxes paid to...

Non-Verbal Cues

Lemonade If you’ve never heard of the “AI-driven” insurance startup Lemonade, that’s okay. Insurance is boring, and most people avoid it like the plague. I...

Flamin’ Hot Cheetos For years, a guy named Richard Montanez has been credited with inventing the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. He was a janitor, the story goes,...

Airbnb As travel restrictions lift around the world, hospitality companies are banking on a surge in vacationers. Airbnb, the quasi-legal flophouse rental...

Colonial Pipeline Last week, a hacker group compromised the network of Colonial Pipeline, a US gasoline giant: The hackers had started their blitz on...

Travis Kalanick What is Travis Kalanick, disgraced former CEO of Uber, up to these days? He’s got a new “stealth” startup called CloudKitchens. Has he...

Slander Websites Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill write about how nasty things spread online: They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and...

Super League If you are a fan of soccer, you’ve spent your week following Super League news. If you are not, this NY Times piece explains what happened: And...

Archegos We talked a couple weeks ago about Bill Hwang and Archegos, his hedge fund that exploded in spectacular fashion last month, rocking the markets....

Checking the Boxes

This is the first time I’ve had to add this disclaimer but - we’ve got a long one this week, so you might have to click out of your email to read the entire...

Jersey Institutional Investor tells this absolutely wild story about Jersey - the island, not the state - and an elaborate fraud network allegedly run by a...

Curative Once the US - sort of - came to grips with the fact we were in a global pandemic, it rushed to increase COVID-19 testing capacity. We’ve talked...

A Stacker Darkly

NFT Heists I had been waiting to write about NFTs - non-fungible tokens - because it’s an emerging technology (for us normies) and also I did not want to...

Lawyers Win Again

Robocalls I have written about robocalls, and given my background in marketing, I thought I had a good grasp on what was causing the robocall plague, and how...

Texas By now, most of the world has had time to point and laugh at Texas. The brief backstory is that Texas has its own state power grid, which it walled off...

February 26, 2021

Tether Remember Tether? It’s the so-called stablecoin behind a lot of Bitcoin trading. Its detractors seemed certain that once the NY Attorney General’s...

February 19, 2021

Castoreum After my post last week about brands mislabeling vanilla in their food, some helpful friends on Facebook informed me one source of artificial...

Flavor of the Month

February 12, 2021

Vanilla Flavoring Back in 2019, a lawyer from New York launched a crusade against food companies. His mission was to hold them accountable for mislabeling...

February 5, 2021

Vaccine Tourism Since the COVID-19 vaccines started receiving FDA approval in December, it’s been a mad rush to try to get needles in arms before doses...

Performance Anxiety

January 29, 2021

Philly Fighting COVID I live in Philadelphia. It’s a great place to live for a lot of people, many of whom look like me. It’s also the nation’s poorest major...

All Fun and Games

January 22, 2021

The OCC The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is not a government agency that typically makes news outside the finance world. The OCC creates rules...

A Little Less Conversation

January 15, 2021

Voice of America It doesn’t often make domestic news, but the United States government owns a group of television and radio networks via the Agency for...

January 8, 2021

Vaccines Wealth inequality in America has been rising steadily for 50 years, so it was only a matter of time before we got news reports of rich people...

January 1, 2021

Everyone v Facebook Facebook has been engaged in a…bizarre PR campaign against Apple for the last month. Apple announced it was going to require iPhone users...

The Night Before Griftsmas

December 24, 2020

The Smash and Grab Bag Since this is the final newsletter of the year, I’ve cleared out my bookmarks and provided you, dear readers, a list of stories I...

December 18, 2020

Google Boy! It’s been a busy year for Google. In October, the government accused it of illegally creating and protecting a monopoly over web search. Earlier...

Indecent Proposition

December 10, 2020

Prop 22 While most of the country was celebrating a Biden victory, millions of gig workers in the state of California were losing any hope they’d earn a...

December 4, 2020

Last week the newsletter took a break to enjoy the holiday and give thanks that 2020 has nearly come to an end. I hope you’ve recovered from the...

Return to Sender

November 20, 2020

The Postal Service The US Postal Service has been in the news lately. Though it’s consistently the most popular service the American government provides its...