Tag: con

Oh Snap: NY AG Sues EX-Bank Of America CEO For Fraud

Posted by Nexus – 05/02/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Andrew Cuomo has announced a lawsuit against Bank of America’s former CEO Kenneth D. Lewis, its former CFO Joseph L. Price, and the company itself, for “duping shareholders and the federal government in order to complete a merger with Merrill Lynch.” Uh oh!

According to the lawsuit, the AG alleges that Bank of America intentionally didn’t disclose massive losses at Merrill Lynch so that its shareholders would approve the merger. Once it was approved, the lawsuit alleges that the management tricked the government into “saving the deal with billions in taxpayer funds by falsely claiming that they would back out of the deal without bailout funds.”

Read the full post

America’s Biggest Rip-offs

Posted by Nexus – 05/02/2010

[via cnn.com]

Are you infuriated every time you open your cell phone bill? Livid when you buy a snack at the movies? These are nine of the rawest deals around.

Text messages – 6,500% markup

Text messages are short, quick and cheap to transmit. So why are they adding so much to your wireless bill?

The messages are such a tiny piece of data that they cost carriers only about one-third of a cent to deliver, according to computer scientist Srinivasan Keshav, who testified before U.S. senators on the issue last summer.

Read the full post

The Debtor Debt Collectors Hate To Call

Posted by Nexus – 26/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Craig Cunningham has made $20,000 from 18 lawsuits he’s filed against debt collectors for violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). In fact, it’s something a part-time job/hobby for him. To ensnare his first FDCPA-violating collector, with voice recorder running, he called back the number they left on his answering machine, and asked:

“Can you garnish my wages if I don’t pay?”
“Yes,” said the debt collection rep.
“Can you put a lien on my house?”
“Yes,” they said.

Read the full post

Another Reason To Avoid Giant Megapixel Point-And-Shoot Cameras

Posted by Nexus – 23/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Photo by usblsb

By now you hopefully know that more megapixels don’t necessarily make a better camera. For one thing, you can almost double the megapixels of a camera while only gaining about a 40% increase in resolution. For another thing, it takes a lot more than just sheer number of pixels to produce a decent image. Nevertheless, point-and-shoot cameras with ginormous megapixel stats (now topping 12 MP) continue to hit the market. But Ross at Petavoxel says there’s another reason to avoid huge MP point-and-shoot cameras: something called the Airy disk.

Read the full post

Congressman Demands FTC Probe Of Cash4Gold

Posted by Nexus – 20/01/2010

[via nytimes.com]

Representative Anthony D. Weiner denounced what he called the predatory practices of Cash4Gold in New York’s diamond district on Tuesday.

The flashy ads have become a staple on late-night television, sometimes featuring figures like the late Ed McMahon or M.C. Hammer, trumpeting promises of quick dollars in exchange for bits of old gold jewelry.

The company behind the ads is called — plainly enough — Cash4Gold, but on Tuesday afternoon, Representative Anthony D. Weiner said that the company’s business practices were not always straightforward.

Read the full post

The ‘false’ pandemic: Drug firms cashed in on scare over swine flu, claims Euro health chief

Posted by Nexus – 11/01/2010

[via dailymail.co.uk]

The swine flu outbreak was a ‘false pandemic’ driven by drug companies that stood to make billions of pounds from a worldwide scare, a leading health expert has claimed.

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organisation’s decision to declare a pandemic.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring ‘enormous gains’, while countries, including the UK, ‘squandered’ their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease.

Read the full post

Verizon Tried A TV Service Bait-And-Switch On My Parents

Posted by Nexus – 06/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Photo by Felix Pomerantz

Corey, who is trying to help his Brooklyn parents improve their TV setup, feels his folks were baited and switched by Verizon, displaying a cheap deal on its site that went away after he entered his parents’ address.

He writes:

Verizon just wired my parents’ apartment building in Brooklyn with FIOS and they were looking to switch from Cablevision because FIOS seemingly offers more channels at a similar price and plus my mom is really angry with Cablevision because of the Food Network dispute.
So I figured I would help them out with setting up FIOS, since they do not use the internet and I figured they had a better offer online. I went to the FIOS website and clicked over to the “FIOS TV Plans” page, which can be found here.

Read the full post

5 Reasons Not to Apply for a Loan Modification in the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP)

Posted by Nexus – 06/01/2010

[via wisebread.com]

The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) rolled out last year currently has over 700,000 people in trial modifications and a little over 30,000 in “permanent” modifications. The program has been plagued with consumer complaints of lost paperwork and denials. Here are some reasons why many consumers are better off skipping this program all together.

1. The “permanent” modification is not so permanent.

Read the full post

Best Buy: We won’t replace your broken netbook, but we will “service” it

Posted by Nexus – 05/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Photo by Ian Muttoo

The anonymous Best Buy Netbook buyer who says was thrown out of the store twice when he tried to get the store to honor his protection plan checked in with an update: Best Buy won’t replace his netbook as a CSR originally promised, it will only service it.

He writes:

Here’s what’s happened so far: the representative in customer service who gave me the $25 gift card also assured me that I could “exchange my computer at any Best Buy.” It turns out he misspoke, and that I can merely get my computer serviced, not replaced. I’m back to square one, resorting to the manufacturer’s warranty. I also called the executive switchboard, but I did not receive any help besides a general “we’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

Read the full post