In case you needed another reason to only do online transactions locally, comes this story out of Massachusetts, and Indiana.
in 2009 a Massachusetts man sold a used printer to a man from Indiana for $40. This was done through an online classifieds site that has a reputation for attracting people who may be, to put it politely, not all there. The man from Indiana is said to allegedly be one of those people. He is 54-year-old Gersh Zavodnik of Indianapolis who makes his living off of what some may describe as frivolous lawsuits. The Indiana Supreme Court is so familiar with him that he is sometimes called a “prolific, abusive litigant.”
Mr. Zavodnik is suing the Massachusetts man for $30,000 claiming breach of contract because the printer allegedly did not work. This case has bounced around in courts for so long that the seller of the printer has racked up $12,000 in legal fees from fending off Mr. Zavodnik’s legal attacks. The case could be dismissed later this year, then again with some of the stranger lawsuits that have happened in the past, it might not be.
If you’re selling something relatively inexpensive and innocuous and someone from halfway across the country offers to buy it, when it’s obviously something that they could buy in their own region, you may want to question their reasons before ending up in a mess like this.
Possibly inspired by the Minnesota mom who sold her daughter’s truck for skipping class, a Florida father recently sold his son’s truck online. A Jacksonville, Florida, man recently sold his son’s Ford Explorer online because of the 16-year-old’s penchant for smoking weed and ‘acting all thug’ in the father’s words. To add a little insult to injury the father offered to take $250 off the price if the buyer lived in the same neighborhood so his son could ‘see it every now and then and be reminded of how good he had it’.
The father continues…
“Now he can put those Jordans to use walk his a** off on these hot summer days!” his father wrote in the post.
The sale of the truck seems to be working as the father has said that his son has approached him about turning over a new leaf.
How do you feel about the viral ad? Is online embarrassment of an unruly teen really the way to go for parents? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.
Even with the advent of the internet, phone scams are still as prevalent as ever. Whether it’s someone posing as the IRS, your bank or credit card company, or winning sweepstakes company they’re all looking for the same thing. They’re all looking for just the smallest bit of personal information to use to try to steal your money. Now you may think that you’re clever enough on how to deal with these scammers but you may be inadvertently providing them with the exact information that they’re looking for.
This article from Forbes by tax attorney Kelly Phillips Erb advises not to engage in any way with these scammers. She says that your best bet is to just hangup on them. She goes on to say that of you engage them in any way you may be providing them with just enough information for them to try to either steal your identity or your money. She goes into detail about a number of the possible outcomes that could happen when engaging a scammer.
Much like our post about being careful of your reflection it only takes just a tiny crumb of information for scammers to be able to overturn your life.
43-year-old Jennifer Streit-Spears was recently stabbed to death. Her boyfriend and alleged killer, 45-year-old Kenneth Alan Amyx, posted a picture of her dead body on her own Facebook account. Members of Streit-Spears’ family tried to get Facebook to remove the photo off of her profile but the photo remained on her profile for 36 hours. Facebook offered the following explanation….
“Facebook has long been a place where people share their experiences and raise awareness about important issues,” a rep told the newspaper. “Sometimes, those experiences and issues involve violence and graphic images of public interest or concern.”
While Jennifer Streit-Spears’ murder is indeed tragic and the length of time it took to remove her photo unfortunate, Facebook was at least able to provide a somewhat reasonable explanation as to why it took them so long to remove the photo.
During their investigation of Ferrer, Nightline placed an ad on Backpage, with police assistance, that was blatantly advertising a prostitute who was underage. Here’s how it was reported by Nightline…
Det. Lincoln posted an ad for an 18-year-old escort, adding in a line that said she had “a younger friend” who was available as well. Minutes after he posted the ad, calls and texts started streaming in. The ad was up and running.
The ad remained up for about 36 hours, leading to dozens of phone calls, texts and even an arrest captured on “Nightline’s” cameras. The ad was only taken down after “Nightline” sent an anonymous email to Backpage’s dedicated email address for suspected child trafficking. It took eight hours to receive a response, which said to contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. The ad was taken down shortly after Backpage’s email response was sent.
Backpage later told “Nightline” in a statement that even though they thought that the ad did not clearly advertise that a girl under 18 was involved, their moderators did take it down and they say they banned the account. They also reported the ad to NCMEC.
So according to Backpage an 18-year-old prostitute who says that she has a younger friend isn’t advertising a girl who was under 18. Either they have no concept of the term ‘younger’ or they have abysmal math skills.
Facebook provides a reasonable explanation as to why a murder victim’s picture stayed up for 36 hours and the media is all over it. Backpage gives what can be best described as a half-hearted excuse as to why an ad for child prostitution stays up on their website for 36 hours and barely anyone bats an eyelash.
Granted that the child prostitute in this case was fictitious, but how many girls have been peddled on Backpage without them even taking a second look at the ad once they have their money?
These two stories are equally egregious yet only one of them got the media attention that they both deserved. How many women and children have to be sold into sexual slavery in not just our country but most of our cities and towns before we finally decide to speak out about it? There’s been too many victims of Backpage already.
Thanks Trench. Please also watch the following report from Nightline about Backpage’s involvement in the sex trade and the victims it has left behind.
An apartment complex in Salt Lake City recently found themselves in hot water after giving notices to their tenants that they were required to like their Facebook page or possibly face eviction. As should have been expected, the tenants did not care for this and fired back at the apartment complex. Not only did they rate the apartment complex badly on their Facebook page but they also took to the media which in turn made this into a national story. The apartment complex has since revoked this requirement and has said they were doing this to make sure that pictures from a community pool party would be allowed to be posted on their Facebook page.
Have Facebook likes become the new metric when it comes to business? Have they become more important than actual customers? Instead of focusing on Facebook likes maybe companies should focus on better products or services then the likes will follow. Trying to generate false or forced likes tends to make you look like a corporation of phonies.
In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Peter Thiel and the Gawker lawsuit, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has said that Thiel can and will remain on the board of Facebook. Thiel has been a long time member of the Facebook board and there were some concerns about his standing after it was made public that Thiel was personally funding his alleged vendetta against Gawker. Not only is Gawker a media partner with Facebook but Facebook has had their own issues with supposedly manipulating featured news stories.
At the Code Conference, held in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Ms. Sandberg stated that since Mr. Thiel did not use Facebook resources in his fight with Gawker It’s not a Facebook issue, but isn’t it? What if Facebook all of a sudden decides that Gawker is no longer a featured media partner? How could that not be seen as anything but a conflict of interest? If anything it feels like Facebook is not only condoning what Thiel is doing to Gawker but protecting him as well.
Everyone wants to root for the good guy. Even more, everyone wants to be the good guy.
Take Terry Gene Bollea, more famously known as Hulk Hogan, for example. For the better part of his professional wrestling career Hulk Hogan played the good guy against the series of villains who always fell to the power of Hulkamania. Behind the scenes Hogan wasn’t all that much of a good guy. Due to his success he had massive political pull within the World wrestling Federation. He often used his clout to not only protect and promote his friends but he would often also refuse to work with up and coming stars who he felt threatened his position at the top of the company. As most of you may know Gawker.com leaked a sex tape of Hogan and his best friend’s wife that was recorded without Hogan’s knowledge. A second leak of the tape showed Hogan talking to his bedmate about his daughter’s singing career and during that conversation Hogan let a few racial epithets fly. Because of the second leak Hogan lost a very lucrative ‘legends’ deal he had with World Wrestling Entertainment and has been persona non grata in the pro wrestling business. In interviews Hogan still tries to portray himself as the good guy who was victimized. Hogan sued Gawker on the grounds of privacy invasion and was awarded a $140 million settlement. That amount is being appealed by Gawker since if they have to pay that amount to Hogan they’ll essentially be out of business.
Recently it was made public that Silicon Valley investor and big-wig Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit to the tune of $10 million. Thiel feels like Gawker’s sister blog Valleywag outed him as being gay in 2007. By most accounts Mr. Thiel had only told a number of close business confidants and friends but didn’t advertise his sexual preference, although it was said to be known to most movers and shakers in the alley. SInce then he’s been allegedly ‘helping’ people who have been supposedly wronged by Gawker Media. Thiel seems to think that he is the good guy by trying to shut down this supposed media menace in Gawker Media.
In reality neither of the above mentioned entities are the good guy. So who is? Much like in pro-wrestling storylines the good guy has to face what seems like insurmountable odds before triumphing over the man or men that wronged him. The underdog good guy in this scenario is the First Amendment.
While what Gawker did may seem distasteful, Thiel is continuing a dangerous tradition that harkens back to WIlliam Randolph Hearst. Thiel is using his money and influence to strong-arm Gawker Media out of existence simply because he doesn’t like them. You may say that Gawker deserves it but where does it end? Say that there’s a strangely coiffed billionaire running for federal office and a large media outlet that has a large influence in the country decides to endorse his opponent. In theory that billionaire could buy that media outlet and heavily influence what stories they report about him. Before you know it other billionaires get into the game and have the news skewed in their favor. If you don’t think that will happen you may already be too late. While he has yet to commit any egregious overreaches of journalism Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. A better example might be Las Vegas business magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who bought an entire newspaper that was often critical of him in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Reports have said that Adelson is squashing any story that may be critical of him. Before you know it most media will be skewed one way or another, not necessarily by political view but by how it can benefit their billionaire owners.
For those reasons the $140 million settlement awarded to Hogan should be denied on appeal. If not it will set a dangerous precedent where those with the money can buy any kind of news coverage they want. While some of us were worried about the government possibly curtailing the free speech of journalists we should have been paying more attention to the financially elite. Sometimes a bad guy needs to win so the good guy’s triumph is more impactful.
Do you remember MySpace? You know, the sparkly animated background plagued social network of the mid 2000s. Admit it, you had one but you abandoned it after the advent of Facebook. Recently it was made public that the former king of the social networking world had been hacked and hundreds of millions of usernames, email addresses and passwords have been compromised.
So what does this mean to you? Well, that depends. Are you still using the same password that you were using with MySpace? If you use the same password on multiple websites or apps you are in danger of having all your information compromised. Internet security experts often say that you should use different passwords for all your different accounts and to aid in doing so you should use a password manager like Lastpass or KeePass to keep them all straight and passwords should be changed routinely.
Even if you’ve abandoned your MySpace account and haven’t logged into it in years there still could be personal information attached to the account that could potentially lead to identity theft. If you no longer use a service you’re better off deleting the account than letting it sit out there as a potential target for identity thieves.
You can never predict what goes viral on the internet. This past week Texas mother of two Candace Payne took the internet by storm after she livestreamed herself on Facebook Live trying on a Chewbacca mask from the Star Wars franchise of movies. This video is as follows…
Candace’s video shortly became the most watched video on Facebook exceeding 134 million views. The lighthearted four-minute video led to a star-studded whirlwind tour in Ms. Payne’s life. Not only did she get a tour of the Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, California but she also received a tour of Lucasfilm Studios and got to meet new Star Wars head JJ Abrams and Peter Mayhew who portrays Chewbacca in the movies.
What do you think of the ‘Wookie Mom’? Are you happy for her, totally jealous or both? Please leave your comments below and have a great and safe Memorial Day Weekend.
The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was designed to bring affordable healthcare coverage to US citizens who previously couldn’t afford it. Even with Obamacare there are still a vast number of Americans who can’t afford health coverage. Many of those desperate for some kind of coverage may respond to one of the many ads for discount healthcare coverage that they may have found online, on TV, or even on a roadside sign that promises great benefits at a cut-rate price. As is the norm in many of these cases, the promises of great coverage for your family go largely unfulfilled.
A lot of these healthcare plans aren’t insurance but they’re what’s called discount programs. In some cases these programs make a deal with a local or national PPO network and will allow you to see doctors at the same discounted rate that fully insured people get however the plan doesn’t actually pay any money on your behalf to your doctor. You only get a discount and still have to pay the majority of your bill to the doctor’s office. Many healthcare professionals may be in-network with the PPO plan named on the discount card but a great number of them won’t even accept any patients using only a discount plan. That’s not even mentioning that these discount plans don’t fulfill the Individual Mandate requirements of Obamacare that say those that don’t have sufficient health coverage will be fined by the government.
Here’s a tip on how not to be fooled by these programs if you’re looking for real healthcare coverage. There’s one word you need to keep an eye out for and that word is ‘insurance’. If the ad does not use the word insurance then it isn’t healthcare coverage that you need. Back in the days when fax machines were more prevalent than the internet these plans would spam fax machines with these same promises but in very small print at the bottom, sometimes blurred out by poor quality faxes, would be a disclaimer that said ‘This is not insurance.’
While these ads may use words that sound like they may be insurance, unless they use the actual word they’re not.
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