Scamming the Nigerian scammers

Paul Kinsella is a fascinating fellow. Though he is not with any branch of law enforcement, he has taken it on himself to delve into the tactics of the Nigerian scammers. You know, they might as well be called Nigerian spammers. And, believe it or not, though most of us simply delete those emails, over the course of a year many people fall for the scam and they lose substantial money in the process. Kinsella is featured in "Master Baiter," a detailed and entertaining article written by Nicolas Phillips and published in this week's Riverfront Times. Kinsella, a 37-year old Illinois native as well as a father of two, scams the scammers with gusto. And he loves to tell them that they've been scammed by him. Kinsella has often tried (and sometimes succeeded) in convincing the scammers that he wants to work with them to rip off victims. Check out Kinsella's website (419hell.com)to see many of the flavors of the scams, along with the people running them. Quite impressive. He must spend incredible numbers of hours running his operation. The payoff? He has learned of the identities of 26 potential victims and prevented 14 of them from actually paying the money. To see the FTC's warnings about the Nigerian scams, go here. Kinsella is multifaceted. He intentionally dropped 100 fake-lost-wallets to see how honest people were (74 were returned), resulting in a lot of publicity. He's also a cartoonist and . . . oh yeah, consider this other service he offers:

He also created AfterLifeTelegrams.com, which works like this: For $5 a word, you write a telegram to a deceased loved one. Kinsella then arranges for a terminally ill person to memorize the message and pass it along.

As I learned from my days working as an Assistant Attorney General, it takes a scammer to catch a scammer. Check out the article in the RFT. It's full of facts, figures and entertaining vignettes about Kinsella, the Nigerian scams and much more.

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Torture as a tool for manufacturing evidence

McClatchy has now found a most intriguing (and, in retrospect, a most predictable) connection.

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Read more about it at Koz. And also check out the new disclosure that the Bush Administration did its damndest to destroy a memorandum highly critical of the legality of its decision to torture prisoners. And now we know that Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney personally approved waterboarding. Finally, consider this conversation involving FOX's Shepard Smith and Judith Miller (the Judith Miller), who unrelentingly attack the memos for trying to justify torture. Maybe Miller is in a redemptive phase . . . THEN, listen carefully at exactly 5:07 of the video to hear a walloping Freudian slip by the conservative think-tanker, Cliff May, a guy who claims that waterboarding is fun and games, who accidentally admits that the Bush-approved techniques WERE torture (listen for the critical word is "it"). Yes, Cliff, it was torture and you (and everyone else in the country) know it. Miller raises the point that even Israel, which knows a thing or two about interrogating prisoners, outlawed waterboarding long ago because it is torture. But there's still more. Consider Republican strategist and Cheney-admirer Phil Lusser's "magic eyeballs" in a conversation with Lawrence O'Donnell and Norah O'Donnell. Go to the end of this video and you'll hear Lawrence O'Donnell clean Lusser's clock. It's all falling apart like a house of cards. After years and years of insanity, it's finally happening. Yes, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

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Flimsy eyewitness testimony

You often hear people claiming that the case is strong because there was an "eyewitness." It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that eyewitness testimony is often worse than useless. Modern DNA testing has exposed just how weak eyewitness testimony can be, as presented Radley Balko, in Reason:

Law and Human Behavior, false eyewitness testimony contributed to 77 percent of the 230 wrongful convictions exposed by DNA evidence over the last decade (the number of exonerations has grown since the study was conducted). These of course are only those cases for which DNA testing was available, which are usually murder and rape cases—crimes for which, generally speaking, there is also usually other evidence available. In crimes where investigators are more likely to rely only on eyewitnesses, robberies or muggings, for example, it’s likely that the problem is even more pronounced.

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Casual Mistaken Arrest

A friend has recently blogged about her experience being informally arrested and handcuffed around the corner from her apartment in the afternoon. She was going for a walk, and police pulled up, told her they had a warrant, handcuffed her, and then began checking her identity. She certainly wasn't who they were looking for, nor did the incident last a long time. I think that her peaceful Zen attitude, presumably nun-induced, kept it from being an experience worth suing about.

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Conservative Judge: the most harmful thing about marijuana is jail.

Judge James P. Gray is a trial Judge in Orange County, California, a former attorney in the Navy JAG corps, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles; he has also been a civil litigation attorney for a private law firm. In these two videos, he talks about marijuana and our "failed and hopeless drug policy" in America. According to Gray, it's easier for kids to get marijuana than alcohol because alcohol is regulated by the government and marijuana is regulated by drug dealers on the street. These are excellent videos, caused by a thoughtful judge who is in a position to know. If we started treating marijuana as we do alcohol, we would see five immediate benefits:

California would save $1 Billion in state expenses currently used to prosecute marijuana offenses.

California would generate $1.3B in take revenue per year in California (marijuana is currently the number one cash crop in California, with grapes being #2).

We'd make marijuana less available than it is now, and the quality of marijuana would be better regulated than it is now.

The entire medical marijuana controversy would go away--the Federal government is currently acting like a "bully" harassing sick people.

The hemp industry is a viable industrial crop, more valuable than cotton. You can get more paper from an acre of hemp than an acre of trees, and it's much more environmentally friendly. The diesel engine was originally designed to run on hemp. The sails of the ship "Old Ironsides," The U.S. Constitution were made of hemp fibers. The original copy of the founding document, the U.S. Constitution was made of hemp. It is an extremely valuable crop that we fail to exploit.
. Why don't we treat marijuana like alcohol, even though the majority of people are willing to do this? Why does the federal government care? Here's Judge Gray's belief: At least 75% of everyone in the U.S. who uses any illicit substance uses only marijuana. By legalizing and regulating marijuana, the federal government would no longer justify our "colossal prison-industrial complex." Many government jobs depend on the "war on drugs." Two Congressmen have admitted to Judge Gray that "the war on drugs is not winnable, but it's imminently fund-able." He concludes that the federal government is "addicted to the drug war funding." For more on the harmlessness of marijuana, see this earlier DI post. These videos were produced by Lee Stranahan, a writer, photographer and independent filmmaker. He also blogs for The Huffington Post .

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