Hasta La Gadget!

An Illinois man named Howard Leventhal persuaded a company to help finance “Heltheo’s McCoy Home Health Tablet”. Yes it sounds as bad as it is. This is a fake health device that’s based loosely on the medical Tricorder that McCoy used on Star Trek. Leventhal was arrested for fraud on Oct. 22, not surprisingly he did not have the tech to beam himself out of dodge.

Last year, Leventhal told executives at Paragon Financial Group, Inc. that Health Canada was backing his “home health tablet” and that it was based on the Star Trek tricorder. The company gave him $800,000 in funding. Apparently no one bothered to check this guy or his story out. So then Leventhal forged contracts between his fake company Neovision USA and the Canadian government to secure even more funding. He even forged Deputy Health Minister Glenda Yeates’ signature. The contract was made to look like it promised him $8.2 million in funding directly from Canadian government.

This guy had big brass cojones, I’ll give him that. However, this whole thing was very stupid. He had to know he would get caught. And he did. After he tried to get $2.5 million more in funding, he gave the fake contracts to an undercover agent. Right now, he is out on a $100,000 bond, with a hearing on Oct.30. What a maroon. Seriously, they need to study this guy and see what makes him tick. Maybe they can learn some things and head off this sort of thing in the future.

On the other hand, I suppose the investors deserve what they got if they were that bad at their due diligence. All they had to do was investigate his story in the first place before coughing up their dough.

[via Gizmodo via Nerd Approved]

When you’re looking to buy an Apple iPhone off a classifieds ad, you expect certain things. Like it having a working touchscreen. Like it maybe be in one piece. Like it actually being an Apple iPhone and not… just an apple. A woman made the dear mistake of buying two apples in an iPhone box when she really wanted two iPhones. Oof.

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See that guy? The one in the bubble? He’s probably up to no good. Thanks to President Obama, however, he’s going to have a much harder time duping innocent young ladies like the one also shown here. Per The Hill, the POTUS has just signed into law the Safe Web Act, which extends the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to “clamp down on Internet fraud and online scammers based abroad.” In simpler terms, it enables the entity to share data about “cross-border online fraud with foreign law enforcement authorities” through September of 2020. According to an unnamed official within the FTC, the existing edition of this act has allowed it to conduct over 100 investigations into cross-border fraud and scam, but it’s unclear how much crime was stopped and how many people were needlessly annoyed. We kid, we kid.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Next Web

Source: The Hill

Robocalling is considered a plague in the modern phone world, especially during an election year — and while you likely won’t get rid of all the pitches from political candidates anytime soon, most of the commercial calls are outright illegal. The Federal Trade Commission has devised a unique contest to help cut back on those law-breakers without having to chase down every shady debt relief offer. It’s offering a $50,000 reward for the cleverest solution to blocking the banned variety of robocalls. The only requirement is that you be an adult US resident: if you can invent a surefire remedy in your basement, the FTC wants to hear from you. Entries will be open between October 25th and January 17th, with word of a winner around April 1st. We’re hoping that the champion has a truly effective cure in use before long, because we’ll undoubtedly have reached our breaking point on robocalls by… oh, around November 6th.

[Image credit: SarahNW, Flickr]

Filed under: Misc

FTC offers $50,000 prize for stopping illegal robocalls, we could have used this a few months ago originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Most Android malware lives in the margins, away from Google Play and the more reliable app shops. It’s nonetheless a good idea to be on the lookout for rogue code, and McAfee has stepped in with thorough explanations of how one of the most common scamware strains, Android.FakeInstaller, works its sinister ways. The bait is typically a search-optimized fake app market or website; the apps themselves not only present a legitimate-looking front but include dynamic code to stymie any reverse engineering. Woe be to anyone who’s tricked long enough to finish the installation, as the malware often sends text messages to expensive premium phone numbers or links target devices to botnets. The safeguard? McAfee would like you to sign up for its antivirus suite, but you can also keep a good head on your shoulders — stick to trustworthy shops and look for dodgy behavior before anything reaches your device.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

McAfee shows how major Android scamware ticks, prevents us from learning first-hand originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Oct 2012 06:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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