John Blavo ran Blavo & Co. solicitors. He specialised in mental health law and clinical negligence.
But his real speciality was creating fake legal aid cases and charging the government for non-existent cases.
In fact, over 23,000 such fake cases in three years.
He and his family lived the high life – mansions, supercars, holidays around the world etc.
His company doesn’t seem to have been especially talented at making the fake cases – but the Legal Aid Agency carried on paying out even when there were no records of the cases he was claiming for.
Eventually the Legal Aid agency did begin to suspect and started to investigate.
Between April 2012 and March 2015, he claimed fees from for representing clients at mental health tribunals in 24,658 cases but only 1,485 cases had actually happened.
In November 2015, Blavo & Co. was shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
A high court judge ruled that although Blavo & Co was doing about 1,000 cases per year they were claiming for about 9,000.
As sole shareholder of Blavo and Co, John Blavo was ordered to pay back £22 million but he has not actually been convicted of any offence yet. He is under investigation, but why are the Police taking so long?
No wonder the legal aid is so high if this shows the quality of checks they make before paying out.
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In the UK, nearly 60% of women have tried to lose weight in the last year and the same is true of about 40% of men.
This is largely because 57% of women are overweight or obese and so are 66% of men.
Clearly there is a very big problem.
The easy availability and affordability of high calorie foods, busy lifestyles with little time for any exercise, comfortable cars and heavy advertising of delicious but unhealthy foods have led most of us to be far too fat.
We turn to diets and exercise and try to find that magic approach that leads to the pounds falling off but takes little will power or self-denial.
So in step the criminals. They know we want a magic answer so they offer one.
It may be a magic ingredient known only to the Incas or some new scientific find or an old wives story or a lost Tibetan plant or a secret kept by the government or an ancient invention kept hidden by the diet industry or a simple set of exercises or some new piece of technology or an APP or anything.
They don’t care what the product is – just as long as gullible people buy into it.
And sadly they do – in that search for better health and a better body.
The only methods that work for losing weight are to increase your exercise and cut down on consumption of calories. Joining a club, following your doctor’s advice, following one of the few tested and proven diets and generally eating healthily will help.
But, there is no magic answer – it took time to put on the weight and will always take time and effort to shift it off.
Be sensible and don’t listen to gurus, advertisement, spam emails etc. They only relieve you of the money in your wallet not the pounds on your waistline.
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This fraud is where criminals pretend to be a well-known UK retailer and order goods from suppliers (usually overseas). The goods are delivered but payment is never made as it’s the criminals who received the delivery.
A recent example of this fraud was perpetrated on Moon Buggy which is a German company making child buggies.
Moon Buggy were contacted by a man they believed to be the purchasing director for John Lewis and they sent him 2 lorry loads of buggies worth £214,000 to a warehouse in South London.
They should have noticed that the man’s email address wasn’t @johnlewis.co.uk but @johnliwes.com and they should have checked he was the real deal but they didn’t check sufficiently and are out of pocket for a serious amount of money.
The Police response to the crime was not convincing and Eddie Prendergast working in the UK for Moon Buggy started to search for the stolen prams.
He found them on sale on eBay and bought one so he could check the serial number – he had found the stolen prams. He identified names and addresses of the sellers and reported this to the Police.
Again, little response from the Police – just ongoing investigations.
There are numerous examples of this distribution fraud – always make sure to verify who you’re talking to where shipments of any kind are concerned.
If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.
An email supposedly from ‘Your Painful Joints’ but is really from arthritis @recamark.xyz.
The xyz domain is meant to be used for organisations that do not fit in the normal categories of business, personal, charity, blogs etc. and does not match a specific domain suffix such as .london or .net or .road
In this case it’s almost certainly used as it’s an easy and cheap one for scammers to buy, whereas some domains are restricted on who can buy them.
The subject is “#1 worst fruit for arthritis & inflammation (do not eat)’
It goes on about how the author’s best friend is a doctor who cured himself of arthritis and now wants to give away free books about how to reverse arthritis.
It also says that he cured himself by just not eating 7 specific foods.
If so, that would make for a very short book as it only needs one page – the list of those foods.
In reality, it’s just a phishing scam trying to get people’s names and addresses to sell on to other scammers.
There is lots of information about arthritis on the Internet and in books and about which foods can affect it and so on – no need to resort to unknown people peddling rubbish by email.
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The message title is “Lose 10 lbs in 7 days” and is from fatloss @arienthea.us.
The subject is “Stop eating these healthy foods if you want to lose 10 lbs in 7 days”
It’s a typical scam aimed at people desperate to lose weight who are looking for a magic way to lose that weight with little or no effort.
Sadly there is no such approach but the scammers keep inventing yet more stupid weight loss scams to catch people out.
This particular version of the scam involves conspiracy, a warning that this message will be removed shortly and claims the involvement of the prestigious Mayo clinic.
“This private bombshell expose shows how ‘health foods’ from Costco, Whole Foods, Safeway and others actually make you fatter, sicker and devoid of all energy. Turns out that 74% of these ‘healthy foods’ are laced with a dangerous poison”.
The use of language shows the level of stupidity involved.
e.g. ‘dangerous poison’ – but all poisons are dangerous.
“74% of these healthy foods” – a meaninglessly exact figure.
“devoid of all energy” – anyone devoid of all energy would be dead.
The closing line of the scam message is “avoid this poison to lose 10 lbs per week”.
No – you should avoid scams like this one to avoid losing money.
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Commercial Combined Insurance offers me the chance to combine all of my insurances in one policy suited exactly to my needs. But the email is from brand-manage.today so it’s just a Marketing company hunting for leads to sell.
Info @unveilthe.bid claims to be about Solar Chargers and has 223 power packs to give away for free. Nope – just a basic scammer after your personal details.
Recent research by the Nutrition University of California has found that an ancient Japanese herb will make you lose that Oestrogen belly fat. No – just a scammer guessing that an ancient Japanese herb sounds convincing to use in her scam.
“Now you can carry your backup weapon comfortably anytime with the new ankle holster”. Seriously – is this real? Do people sell these things as if they are normal items of clothing? Save us from these nutters.
Gerald Urich (with an email address of contest @diagence.us) wants me to join Profit Injector. After all, the initial beta testers have been making over $1000 per day and he has my personal access ready. He doesn’t know my name of course – just an email address and there is no such product. Just a dumb scammer trying to steal from people using a quick scam.
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The UK parliament has been trying to hold Facebook to account following its lack of control on data sharing and the massive data breach in 2017 which affected 87 million people.
Cambridge Analytica
The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal in early 2018 revealed that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of people’s Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political purposes. This was a shock to many people and showed Facebook had no regard for its user’s privacy or confidential information.
Six4Three
Six4Three are the makers of the app Pinkini and Pinkini was one of many businesses that shared data with Facebook until 2015, when Facebook changed its policies on how information was shared and this meant developers of the app were restricted in accessing data and culminated in the loss of business for Six4Three.
Six4Three then began a year long battle with Facebook.
The company claims Facebook misled developers by encouraging them to build applications based around promised access to data controls and privacy settings and then restricted access to that data.
Emails written by Facebook’s chief and his deputies show the firm struck secret deals to give some developers special access to user data while refusing others.
It is also clear that Facebook deliberately made it difficult for users to be aware of privacy changes to its Android app.
Damian Collins (UK Government chairman of the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee)
There was believed to be a secret cache of emails between Mark Zuckerberg and other executives that shows that Facebook knew about flaws in its privacy policy and allowed them to be actively exploited before the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
MPs discovered the documents were in the possession of an American software executive visiting London on a business trip and sent an official from the House of Commons to his hotel to retrieve them.
Parliament
It appears from documents that Facebook had been aware that an update to its Android app that let it collect records of users’ calls and texts would be controversial. To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features.
Facebook is also known to have used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat
Conclusion
Another example of how Facebook ignore their user’s right to privacy in the belief that the information provided by the users belongs to Facebook and that Facebook can do anything it wants with that data and can treat other businesses as badly as it wishes to.
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Students are not known for their wealth, but sadly many scammers do target students thinking they can be easy pickings.
Here are the most common scams faced by new students.
New Student’s friend
This scam uses social engineering techniques to identify potential victims and contact them through social media at University. Once in contact, the scammer gains their victims’ trust. However it is a scam – befriending people, then stealing money as well as gaining bank account and credit card details which can be sold to other scammers or they can just empty your bank account, max out your credit card and take out loans in your name.
You should review the security and visibility settings on your social media accounts to make sure that only the people you want to share information with can see your profile, contact details and postings.
The Student Loan Scam
The most common form of this is through emails at the start of the financial year. The messages claim to be from the Student Loan Company asking for confirmation of some details. You have to provide your details to get the money so you give the personal information and then the scammers can try to access your real student loan and other accounts you may have.
Part-Time Jobs
Many students take part-time jobs while studying, to reduce the need for loans etc. Scammers offer irresistible part-time jobs that pay well above the norm. The ads may be via email, social media, newsletters or other means..
These scam jobs may not exist or may be illegal e.g. being paid for receiving packages and re-posting them on to new destinations (drugs or other contraband) or accepting payments and forwarding them (money laundering).
Stay safe by only trusting people in the real world or online when you are sure they are who they claim to be and what they want is legal and correct.
If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.
Fifty Scams and Hoaxes is a new book by Martin Fone and is described as a light-hearted investigation into some of the worst examples of financial skulduggery, medical quackery and ingenious hoaxing from history. Along the way we will come across a Pope advocating a drink based on cocaine, a pill to avoid hangovers, a woman who gave birth to rabbits, the man who broke the bank twice and the first examples of insurance fraud and scam emails.
“Author Martin Fone explores the psychology and methodology deployed by the scammers and shows what can happen when avarice preys on credulity and gullibility. The key characteristics he unearths amongst his despicable gallery of scammers includes; incredible claims, creative use of advertising, playing on people’s fears and aspirations, unscrupulous business practices and, when it all goes wrong as it often does, a propensity to flee the scene and leave others to pick up the pieces”.
It’s an easy book to read and is entertaining. We tend to think of scams as either the modern scourge of email, text and Internet scams or the large scale financial fraud such as Ponzi schemes but Martin Fone steers clear of the most well-known scams such as people selling Tower Bridge repeatedly, the South Sea bubble etc. and instead finds nuggets in the world of scams.
People have been scamming each other I suspect since humans began trading and Martin has found some very early examples of scams we think of as modern day.
Such as the 419 scams that we all get via email where the scammer offers a fortune but there is a catch and the victim ends up repeatedly paying small amounts until they realise there is no fortune to be had. Martin found examples of this scam from the days of the French Revolution where prison guards would get names of wealthy people across France and create stories of a servant and his master trying to escape Revolutionary France with a trunk of gold but needs the recipient to look after valuable items temporarily for him. There are no items of course and the wealthy person is conned into handing over modest monies in return for the said fortune which doesn’t exist.
My favourite story in the book is of a diamond mine scam in the middle of the Alaskan Gold Rush. People already hunting for gold are a good target for further scams and many were tricked till a diamond expert realised the find of diamonds and gems in the same location was an impossibility.
Diabetes is one of the scammer’s favourite health problems.
Many millions of people across the Western world suffer from Diabetes type 1 or II or are diagnosed as pre-diabetic meaning they need to change their lifestyle and lose weight to avoid becoming diabetic.
So, many scammers put out messages claiming to have a diabetes cure – perhaps some exotic fruit or unusual combination of foods or they claim to have found the real cause of diabetes (too many people are easily duped with the idea of a conspiracy) or maybe access to new research that provides an answer.
There are endless possibilities for the scammers and many targets for their lies.
A latest such scam claims to be from Karen Reddel, President of Omnivista Health Learning.
She claims that taking one teaspoon per day of a natural substance cures diabetes. But if you stop taking it then your diabetes comes right back. Plus there’s no need for exercise or a diet.
Next it claims that the substance is 400 times stronger than the best medicine.
There is no medicine to cure diabetes – for diabetes type I the only answer is taking insulin and for diabetes type II doctors recommend dietary changes and exercise.
There are some drugs doctors prescribe in cases where the diabetes is type II and diet and exercise haven’t been able to provide sufficient improvement.
These drugs are effective in reducing the symptoms for some people but have only a marginal effect for others.
It is cruel to tell people they can cure diabetes type I. Diabetes type II is predominantly a lifestyle illness and people with it MUST change their diet and take more exercise. Anything else is madness and a supposed instant diabetes cure is just a cruel trick to play on sick people.
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