Dallas police warn citizens about phone scam 5:22 PM CDT
Dallas Morning News (subscription) – TX,USA
Dallas police are warning the public about scam artists posing as representatives soliciting money on the department’s behalf. …

DPD: Don’t Fall for Donation Scam
MyFox Dallas – Dallas,TX,USA
DALLAS — The Dallas Police department says someone is trying to scam people out of their money by pretending to take donations in honor of a fallen officer …

Gaston police warn of scam
Charlotte Observer – Charlotte,NC,USA
On March 21, two men came to the woman’s Gastonia home on Penny Park Drive, police said. The men said they were building the new subdivision behind her home …

(more…)

Came across this fascinating scam – selling battery-farmed eggs as ‘Free Range’.

British consumers are eggstremely conscious about where their food comes from. (Way more so than Americans who like not to think of such yukky subjects).

So – Big thumbs down to GMOs (Genetically Modified foods), and a rather hard stare (ala Paddington Bear) to those who farm animals with disregard to their comfort and safety. So imagine the horror when it is revealed that the purchasers of ‘animal-friendly’ eggs, supposedly from Free-Range chickens turns out to be just the usual mass-produced crud from the despised battery farming methods (cramped cages, de-beaking, chemical feeds, miserable life cycle).

Anyway, here’s the story from the Newcastle, UK based Northern Farming Journal

Egg sales scam is much bigger than feared

A scam involving eggs laid by battery hens in Europe being sold as free-range or organic in UK supermarkets is 10 times bigger than previously feared.

Consumers may have been duped into paying higher prices for more than 500 million mislabelled eggs over five years.

Investigators from Defra are continuing their investigation into the scale of egg fraud in Britain, although they stressed that they do not believe mislabelled eggs are still being traded. However, free range egg producers in the North-East said it was important that the fraudsters were caught and brought to justice.

Christine Jackson of Sunny Hill Eggs, near Berwick, said: “It is very important for the goodwill of our consumers that we have integrity in the production of Sunny Hill Eggs, follow all the welfare codes we adhere to and also have integrity in the marketing and retailing of our product.

“So you can be sure that at Sunny Hill Eggs all of our eggs are produced and marketed according to strict Lion Code and Freedom Food Practice and at Sunnyhill all of our hens are happy hens.

In their biggest strike ever against online investment scams, US regulators on Thursday shut down trading in 35 over-the-counter stocks that have been the subject of spam e-mails touting their investment potential.

Christopher Cox, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, estimated that more than 100m stock-touting e-mails are sent each week.

The majority are pump-and-dump schemes in which stock promoters buy penny stocks and try to resell them to gullible investors at higher prices. The most successful campaigns can significantly move stock prices.

My honeypot email accounts attract way too many of these emails. The quality of the spam machinery for distributing and creating these emails is very high which shows that the scam is working and making someone a lot of money.

To you and me, the ‘pump and dump’ spam emails just look like poor quality mages (See inset) in a misleading email message and subject but there’s a good reason the image is ‘grainy’. It’s to disguise the digital fingerprint of the image, making it all but impossible to identify them with anti-spam software.

According to the SEC website, you can forward any of these emails you get direct to them for investigation:

• Spams - Forward investment-related spam e-mails to enforcement@sec.gov.