Archive (Page 5) • A Scammer Darkly • Buttondown

November 13, 2020

Judges In June I wrote a series of pieces about structural racism in America. Judges play a central role in perpetuating bias in charging and criminal...

Hungry Alligators

November 6, 2020

Sierra The name Sierra may conjure fond memories for people who grew up in the 80’s or 90’s - for a time, they were one the biggest video game manufacturers...

October 30, 2020

The Epoch Times In 2016, a publication emerged on Facebook and YouTube, pushing a pro-Trump, anti-China narrative via paid ads and a network of “news” pages....

October 23, 2020

Trumpcare So! This week, ProPublica published a story about selling junk health insurance plans on Facebook and Google and if you read it you might have...

Tales From the Loop

October 16, 2020

Loop Industries Plastic is everywhere. Invented in the early 1900s, the low cost and flexibility of the plastics have made them one of the most urgent...

Remembering Some Frauds

October 9, 2020

Some of the folks I’ve written about have found themselves back in the news. Let’s see what they’re up to, shall we? Trevor Milton Remember the Nikola guy,...

Look Before You Leap

October 2, 2020

Metals.com Last year, I wrote an entire newsletter on Lucas Asher and his website Metals.com, based on an in-depth investigative series at Quartz. The wheels...

I'm Your Pusher

September 25, 2020

Nikola Nikola is a car company that you probably hadn’t heard of until this year, if at all. It’s not owned by Tesla, though you could be forgiven for...

September 18, 2020

Money Mules There are many types of scams out there. I write about them every week! What I do not read about quite so often, however, is how the money gets...

Send in the Trolls

September 11, 2020

Jacob Wohl For those of you not Online enough to have heard of Jacob Wohl, count yourselves lucky. Wohl is a young man who has spent the last few years...

A Year of Scams

September 4, 2020

Happy Birthday ASD This newsletter is officially one year old this week. I started ASD as a way to force myself to write non-work-related stuff each week. My...

August 28, 2020

Acetic Anhydride In addition to a respiratory virus, the US has spent years in the grips of another pandemic: opioid overdose. Some of that can be traced to...

August 21, 2020

The Spy Who Loved Money For a lot of young men, “international spy” seems like a cool job. Most people, however, do not become spies, even though society...

August 14, 2020

Inigo Philbrick In June, US authorities arrested a guy named Inigo Philbrick (real name) on the island of Vanuatu. He was on the run after ripping off...

Cultural Appropriation

The Looting of Syria If I sat down to write a list of the terrible things Facebook has enabled over the last ten years, it’d be quite long. Corruption of...

Pump the Volume

Trading on the Vaccine Despite the economy being in the toilet and most people in America being too afraid to do much to help it, the stock market has...

The Computers Are Still Bad

Amazon It’s been awhile since I wrote about Amazon, but don’t worry, they haven’t stopped being terrible. The Markup has written two pieces on the company’s...

Always Check the Grams

Might As Well JUMP In its flailing rush towards growth, Uber hasn’t only lit huge piles of rideshare and food delivery cash on fire, it’s also acquired a...

Suitcases of Cash Tracking global money laundering is hard. There are dozens of non-profits dedicated to the task, and every major law enforcement body in...

She’s Just Being Kylie Last year, Kylie Jenner sold 51% of her cosmetics line for $600 million, valuing the business at over a billion dollars. Her face was...

Hello again! I appreciate those of you who stuck with me through the last three weeks, as we dove into systemic racism and racial inequality in America. It...

This is America

Amendment 4 In a past life, I wrote a blog post about a thing I did on the Internet. It attracted some attention, and I ended up helping some activists and...

Inside the System

Last week I wrote about how easy it is for black youth and young men to encounter the police, or end up in the justice system. This week I’ll explore what...

From the Cradle

We are living through something, and I’m not sure anyone knows what it really is yet, or what things will look like on the other side. I am going to spend...

Burgerim Over the last 2 years, a company called Burgerim, run by an Israeli named Oren Loni, went from an unknown burger brand to a network of two hundred...

Never Stop Looting

Thou Shalt Not Steal The Museum of the Bible is back in the news - again - because the 3,500-year-old clay tablet they bought from an “unknown auction house”...

Behind Every Great Man is a Great Scam

Napoleon Dynamite It’s difficult to keep track of all the scams going on around us at any given moment - as the author of a newsletter about scams I find it...

He Went to Jared

The Failson Army America currently has an alarming shortage of PPE and other medical supplies. I’ve written about how our leaders in the US have been...

Cheated Gaming Moment

The Bank of Nook I haven’t had a reason to write about Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, because I typically only write about video games when they...

The Marketplace of Ideas

Amazon I’ve written about the shady shit that goes on in the Amazon marketplace, the “third party” portion of the website, which allows independent sellers...

Chopped & Screwed

Do you like nice things? Lots of people do! Fancy cars, exotic watches, expensive sneakers, rare art. Coveted, and very difficult to obtain. But, what if you...

Gleaming the Curve

What the Tiger Saw I know we’ve all had a lot of coronavirus news, so let’s talk about the other plague sweeping America right now - Tiger King. Yeah, I’ve...

Tip of the Iceberg

The Mask Counterfeiters For the time being, it appears I am going to be writing about coronavirus-related fraud and scams. As I predicted last week, they are...

Fraud in the Time of Corona

In light of the global pandemic we’re all sheltering in place through right now, this week’s newsletter will delve into how people deal with bad news, how...

Proverbs 14:14 Ahh, the Museum of the Bible. Remember them? The ones who, like a month ago were embroiled in a scandal because they had bought stolen papyrus...

Turn on the Stabilizers

Laundering Gift Cards Last week I wrote about North Korean hackers who stole a bunch of cryptocurrency, sold and traded a bunch of it, and laundered some of...

OneLife, OneFraud

OneCoin There are a lot of cryptocurrencies in the world. According to Coin Market Cap, a site which tracks prices and trading volumes, there are a hundred...

Eye of the Beholder

February 28, 2020

High Voltaire The value of art, it is said, is what someone is willing to pay for it. It’s part of the reason so many people use paintings to launder money -...

Tech? Still Bad!

February 21, 2020

Taladega Nights We spend a lot of time and energy combating predatory lending here in America, but it’s always good to remember that things are much worse in...

February 14, 2020

The Crisis of Care This week’s newsletter is going to be about America’s health care system. Sound fun? For those of us fortunate enough to be healthy, we...

February 7, 2020

Practice Makes Perfect It will be years before we learn about all the fraudulent and outright criminal behavior that created and fueled the American opioid...

Behind the Curtain

February 3, 2020

Apologies for the delay in this week’s newsletter, I had an unexpected event throw my schedule off but, as you’ll soon learn, it has provided some good...

Get It In Writing

January 24, 2020

The Word of God As humans get better at archaeology, we are able to uncover and - more importantly - preserve some really interesting artifacts of our past....

Solid, Liquid, Polycarbonate

January 17, 2020

Blame it on the Grain Let’s talk about products labeled as “organic”. In theory, products with an organic label adhere to the USDA’s rules about how they are...

Nothing is Real, Except Santa

January 10, 2020

Forbidden Kicks I should say right up front that I am not a sneaker enthusiast. I own a few pairs. Nothing crazy. The most I’ve spent on sneakers was around...

January 3, 2020

The House Doesn’t Always Win Anyone who has set foot in a casino is familiar with the neon glow and incessant chattering of slot machines. They are the top...

The Internet Was a Mistake

December 27, 2019

His Time Online dating is mostly terrible. Despite its increasing popularity, anyone who’s done it knows it’s largely a string of disappointments, punctuated...

It's Cold in the Freezer

December 20, 2019

Robocalls Somehow I have written more than two dozen of these newsletters and have not talked once about robocalls. If you own a telephone in 2019, you...

It's HYIP to be Square

December 13, 2019

A Bit…on the Horn A scooter start-up named - somewhat aspirationally - Unicorn, has gone under. The problem? They took the money people sent them to buy...

Healthy Holly: Fraud is Fun

December 6, 2019

Politics! Political corruption has been around since politics have been around. It’s so ubiquitous, so expected that practically no one in America trusts the...