For years, Paul Hansmeier terrorized internet users through his copyright trolling racket Prenda Law, evading the law through shell companies and fraud, until, finally, he was brought to justice and pleaded guilty last August. Read the rest
Reverse mortgages -- complex home loans -- are aggressively marketed to elderly people, especially in African-American neighborhoods, using deceptive tactics that offer false promised to "eliminate monthly payments permanently" with "a risk-free way of being able to access home equity." Read the rest
Despite heavy backing from the big gun manufacturers, the NRA is absolutely dependent on small-money donations from ammosexuals and musketfuckers across America, who donate to fund the political operations of the nonprofit. Read the rest
The payday lending industry is the pinnacle of predatory, corrupt capitalism, unabashed loan sharks who prey on the poorest and most desperate Americans, charging interest rates in the hundreds and even thousands of percent APR, using strongarm tactics including threats of violence and rape to collect on debts, and papering over the whole thing by flooding notice-and-comment proceedings with bot-generated comments and secretly bribing academics to write papers explaining that usury is a social good. Read the rest
In 2016, Pamela Taylor lost her job as director of the Clay County (WV) Development Corporation when she posted a Facebook update that read, "It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady in the White House. I'm tired of seeing a Ape in heels." Read the rest
The "prosperity gospel" (previously) is a religious doctrine that encourages poor people to send specific amounts of cash (usually in the hundreds of dollars) to charismatic preachers, an act the preachers characterizes as "seed giving" -- and the preachers promise that God will reward these gifts by making the givers rich. Read the rest
Donald Trump, a garbage person, promised the credulous dunces in his "base" that he would build a wall along the US southern border at a cost of $12b (the DHS said it would cost $21.6b) and then failed to do so, despite controlling Congress, the Senate and the White House. He blamed the opposition for this failure. Read the rest
“The lithe, 42-year-old tech founder has become a one-man Goop.”
Oh yeah. It's that real. Read the rest
After the 2008 economic crash and the ensuing foreclosure crisis, AbdulAziz HouHou ran a ponzi scheme that bilked other Kuwaitis out of millions that were spent buying and flipping foreclosed houses across America, particularly in hard-hit rustbelt towns like Buffalo and Rochester. Read the rest
John Lambert, a 23-year-old Tennessee man, has been charged by prosecutors with pretending to be a Manhattan attorney and grifting thousands of dollars from his would-be clients.
Oh, and by the way: he was also the co-founder of Students for Trump. Read the rest
Martin Shkreli's poor impulse control continues to land him in terrible trouble: his price-gouging on lifesaving drugs didn't land him in prison, but his profligate boasting about it did (to say nothing of the revocation of his bail after he put a bounty on Hillary Clinton's hair follicles). Read the rest
A report from Bitwise -- an investment firm lobbying for FEC approval for a cryptocurrency based exchange-traded fund -- found that 95% of the trading volume in Bitcoin was fake, ginned up through techniques like "wash trading" where a person buys and sells an asset at the same time. Read the rest
A new paper by a business professor and a contract law professor evaluated the terms and conditions of 500 leading websites and found that the 99% of them required at least 14 years of education to truly comprehend, far more than the majority of US adults have attained. Read the rest
Burning Man has long struggled with the tension between its commitment to "radical decommodification" and grifters and their ultra-high-net-worth marks who organize "turnkey camps" where you can pay giant sums to pretend to be a Burning Man "participant" while being looked after by paid "sherpas" (including, rumor has it, sex workers), in luxury settings designed to repel non-paying attendees (sometimes guarded by private security guards). Read the rest
When Trump FCC Chairman (and former telcoms executive) Ajit Pai murdered Net Neutrality, he told us the slaughter was necessary, otherwise the ISPs wouldn't invest in their networks. Read the rest
