Con artists in desperate need of money

Although I've gone for the last several years with extremely few illegal prerecord telemarketing calls, I've received three to my cell phone in the last three weeks, all scams. (I wonder how many of these people were working in the mortgage business until recently?) Two of them came from faked caller IDs that look like UK telephone numbers (starting with +44), but which appear to actually be from Florida, a popular location for all kinds of scammers. The first call, on January 30, came from 44-207-490-6113and was selling auto warranties, no doubt at far above market prices, and was phrased in such a way as to attempt to deceive the recipient into thinking they needed to renew an existing warranty that is expiring. When I got to a human operator and asked to be put on their do-not-call list, the woman hung up on me. I need to learn to be more subtle in my questioning to get more information from these con artists.

The second call, on February 12, gave caller ID of 866-526-9732, and said that I had won a no-catch, all-expenses-paid vacation for two, and asked me for my name and number so that I could be called and told where to pick it up. Unfortunately, it hung up on me while I was trying to provide a fake name and real phone number, so that I could identify the caller and sue them.

The third call, today, gave caller ID of 44-207-414-4370 and was offering a credit card deal to "reduce my interest rate." Again the wording expressed urgency about a limited-time offer and made it sound like it was with regard to a card I already hold. This time, I asked the human operator (after waiting quite some time to get one) what company he's with. I had to ask three times--he kept repeating his script about "any Mastercard or Visa," and I kept saying "no, what company are YOU with." Finally, he said "United Debt Aid," which is no doubt a fake name. I asked him to put me on their do-not-call list and again was hung up on as I was telling him he was working for a bunch of criminals. I didn't get a chance to ask for a written do-not-call policy from any of these three, but I'm sure they don't have them since they're violating the law in several ways already. Prerecord calls with advertising to cell phones are flat out illegal, just as prerecord calls with advertising to residential phones is illegal (without an existing business relationship, according to the FCC, which has incorrectly added an exception not present in the actual statute). So is falsifying caller ID information, so is failing to identify the business calling or on whose behalf the call is being made. So is failing to put me on their do-not-call list, and so is failing to send a written do-not-call policy upon request.

If anybody happens to come across more information that might identify who is behind these calls, let me know--I'd love to sue them.

UPDATE (February 25, 2008): I got another auto warranty one today, Caller ID said 442074791697 and it began "Your auto warranty has expired" and claimed they had been trying unsuccessfully to contact me via mail--two lies in the first two sentences. I pressed 1 to talk to a live operator, who immediately asked me for the year and make of my car. I asked what company is providing the warranty, and he hung up on me. Apparently any questioning at all is reason for these scammers to proceed to the next call recipient.

UPDATE (March 27, 2008): I received two more of these in quick succession--one on March 17 (auto warranty call from 505-217-2684) and one on March 19 (credit card rate reduction call from 305-654-1842).

ConsumerAffairs.com has a story about ripoff auto warranties sold by companies in St. Louis.

Verizon Wireless has filed a law suit against John Does to go after these auto warranty calls.

UPDATE (April 7, 2008): Another auto warranty one, from 305-672-6663.

I believe that at least some of these calls are coming from businesses run by former associates of Fax.com, a defunct broadcast fax and prerecord telemarketing business that received a $5,379,000 fine from the FCC in 2002 which was never collected, and was successfully sued by the D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling for $2.3 million in 2003, which I believe was also never collected. The legal system is not good at dealing with these sorts of criminals, because it's all being left to civil enforcement, when these are the kind of people who need to be thrown in jail.

UPDATE (April 10, 2008): Another from "Heather at account services," caller ID 561-482-7092, for credit card rate reduction. The human being I spoke with confirmed that she's in Boca Raton, FL--on a previous call the company was identified as "United Debt Aid" in Boca Raton.

UPDATE (August 11, 2008): There's a wealth of information about these calls and who's behind them at the Stopping Heather Forums.

Scientology critic Shawn Lonsdale dies

Shawn Lonsdale, who began picketing the Church of Scientology in Clearwater, Florida in 2006, was found dead in his home of an apparent suicide. A garden hose was run from his car's exhaust into a window of his home, and a suicide note was found.

His protests against Scientology had declined last year, when he didn't renew the domain registration for his critical website and stopped posting much on his blog. His conflict with Scientology began and peaked in 2006, when Scientology-hired PI's dug up and publicized his two misdemeanor convictions for lewd and lascivious conduct, and subpoenaed him for a deposition regarding their claim that he was an agent of a group prohibited from protesting in downtown Clearwater. I would guess that the group in question was the Lisa McPherson Trust, and that the prohibition was the result of a legal settlement.

Lonsdale appeared in the BBC Panorama episode on Scientology, which can be found on YouTube in its entirety.

Michael Shermer on Anonymous protest of Scientology

Monday's Los Angeles Times featured a short op-ed piece by Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society about Anonymous' protests against Scientology, which is rightly both critical of Anonymous and Scientology.

Cayman Islands bank gets Wikileaks taken offline

As reported in Wired's blog:

Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline last week by its U.S. host after posting documents that implicate a Cayman Islands bank in money laundering and tax evasion activities.

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company and domain registrar for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." A judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court.

The Julius Baer Bank, a Swiss bank with a division in the Cayman Islands, took issue with documents that were published on Wikileaks by an unidentified whistleblower, whom the bank claims is the former vice president of its Cayman Islands operation, Rudolf Elmer. The documents purport to provide evidence that the Cayman Islands bank helps customers hide assets and wash funds.

After failing to convince Wikileaks to take down the documents, the bank went after its U.S. hosting service, which responded by agreeing not only to remove the Wikileaks account from Dyndadot's server but also to help prevent Wikileaks from moving its site to a different host.

Wikileaks is actually still online, even though its domain has been taken out of its control in this highly unusual and inappropriate move by the courts. Bank Julius Baer and its attorneys are making a huge mistake that is now going to drive far more attention to the documents in question than they would have received otherwise.

Wikileaks publishes the correspondence between the organization and the bank's attorneys, in which they refuse to identify their client or the specific documents that they take issue with.

Wikileaks board member Julian Assange (author of the security tool "strobe" and technical advisor and researcher for the excellent book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, by Suelette Dreyfus), has been quoted saying that Wikileaks will continue to publish:

"The order is clearly unconstitutional and exceeds its jurisdiction," Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange said in the e-mail statement issued from Paris on Monday. "Wikileaks will keep on publishing. In fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."

Wikileaks was set up primarily to allow the leaking and publishing of documents from non-Western authoritarian regimes, but it has gotten the most press for its earlier leak of the Guanatanomo Bay operating manual and now for this report of a Cayman Islands/Swiss bank's activities.

In my opinion, Wikileaks is subject to abuse--just like the Internet in general, as well as newspapers and other forms of publication--but that organizations which attempt to use trade secret and copyright law as a tool to conceal illegal or immoral activity should not be permitted to succeed. This particular case appears to be somewhat complex and based on a particular whistleblower's account, and if it only involves tax avoidance (as opposed to evasion), then it doesn't involve the violation of any laws. It is, however, clearly inappropriate for the entire site to be shut down just because of a few specific documents from one case--that would be like shutting down Wikipedia because of the content in one set of articles, or shutting down Blogger because of material posted on one blog. That's the kind of censorship we have seen from some authoritarian regimes in response to critical material, but it's not how the law should work in the United States.

UPDATE (March 4, 2008): Judge White wisely reversed his decision and Wikileaks.org is back at its own domain name.

Malware in digital photo frames

The Mocmex virus and other trojans have been found on digital photo frames from China sold at Target, Costco, Sam's Club, and Best Buy. The photo frames are connected to a computer via USB to load photographs; on a Windows machine this will cause an executable stored on the photo frame to run, infecting the computer.

The SANS Internet Storm Center has documented more details here and here.

As more and more devices have built-in storage and can be connected via USB to PCs, we'll see more and more attacks like this.

Spies who love you

Mark Fiore helps teach kids about the importance of warrantless wiretapping.

(Hat tip to Bob Hagen.)

FBI responds to "shoot to kill" claims about InfraGard

The FBI has issued an official response to Rothschild's Progressive article (PDF), which says, in part:

In short, the article's claims are patently false. For the record, the FBI has not deputized InfraGard, its members, businesses, or anything else in the program. The title, however catchy, is a complete fabrication. Moreover, InfraGard members have no extraordinary powers and have no greater right to "shoot to kill" than other civilians. The FBI encourages InfraGard members -- and all Americans -- to report crime and suspected terrorist activity to the appropriate authorities.

The FBI response also states that Rothschild has "refused even to identify when or where the claimed 'small meeting' occurred in which issues of martial law were discussed," and promises to follow up with further clarifying details if they get that information.

I've updated my own response to Rothschild to include the above information.

Pentagon-commissioned Rand report on Iraqi occupation

A Pentagon-commissioned study from the Rand Corporation on U.S. military occupation in the Middle East, titled "War by Other Means: Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency," argues that the U.S. military efforts are "at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible":

The United States should instead focus its priorities on improving "civil governance" and building "local security forces," according to the report, referring to those steps as "capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces," said David C. Gompert, the report's lead author and a senior fellow at Rand. "Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge."

The report argues for some of the things that have been done as part of the "surge," such as training and equipping local security forces, but maintains that this needs to be done by professional police trainers, not by the military. Building local governments, an efficient and fair justice system, and accessible mass education are also recommendations. A bullet list of recommendations:

American military forces can't keep up with training local militaries to match the growth of Muslim insurgent groups and that must improve. Police should be trained by professional police trainers.

American military prowess should focus "on border and coastal surveillance, technical intelligence collection, air mobility, large-scale logistics, and special operations against high-value targets."

A new information-sharing architecture should be created. This "Integrated Counterinsurgency Operating Network" would promote "universal cell phone use, 'wikis' and video monitoring." [They could call it InfraGard Iraq.]

"Pro-America" themes should be dropped "in favor of strengthening local government" and emphasizing the failure of jihadists to meet people's needs.

U.S. allies and international organizations, such as NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations could help the United States in areas such as "building education, health and justice systems, and training police and" military forces that perform civilian police duties.

Dave Bird, RIP

Noted Scientologist critic and tireless picketer of Scientology's London Org, Dave Bird, died on Sunday, the same day as the largest London Scientology picket that has ever occurred.

David Gerard has posted a nice couple of obituaries and some photos at his blog.

Dave Bird had a crazy mountain man look, and I thought his postings and tactics were sometimes over the top, but he also had a gift for showmanship and entertainment, as you can see from the photos of his props that he brought to protests. He was one of the protesters that Scientology took seriously enough to attack on their "Religious Freedom Watch" website (which seems to still be offline since being attacked by "Anonymous").

Chasing ghosts with joint terrorism task forces

The latest issue of Rolling Stone has an excellent article by Guy Lawson, "The Fear Factory," about how joint terrorism task forces across the U.S. are engaging in wild goose chases and exaggerating the terrorist threat to justify their existence.

A companion article, Tim Dickinson's "Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts," reports on the real stories behind repeated terror scares that have been used to elevate the DHS advisory system over the last five years.