Word: scam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Industry representatives support uniform regulation but hope officials don't go too far in their zeal to crack down. "It's a critical option that every terminally ill person should have," says Valerie Cooper, executive director of the NVA, who claims scam artists don't represent the bulk of law-abiding viatical providers, like Page & Associates and the Ardan Group. Gloria Wolk, chief consumer advocate for viaticals www.viatical-expert.net) is worried that money for legitimate viatical settlements could disappear: "Fraud can destroy this industry and leave patients high...
Over at Avalon, the creepy/yuppie club on Lansdowne St., the mindless, clamorous techno beats on. Aging rocker wannabes in the audience and their girlfriends hide sagging bellies with leather jackets and thinning hair with attitude. Punks look around nervously for their mothers and try to scam some beer. Others pretend to dance to the woompwoomp, and laugh. Yuppies sup, and eye each another. More waiting, more techno. Woompwoomp. Thickening, moist air. Finally: stringy guy with no body fat--like, none at all--and long hair walks out. Rockers, punks, yuppies, et cetera ecstatic. And Iggy Pop begins to play. Acoustic...
...While the industry has largely cleaned up its act, it is still plagued by the occasional scam artist. Most recently, shady sales brokers have been preying on would-be sellers, charging up-front fees of $500 or demanding a 30% to 40% commission. Stewart and Peggy Spangler of Pawleys Island, S.C., have already spent more than $800 trying to sell their property near Fort Lauderdale...
...visitor calling up these pages would automatically be shunted to their porn site. Once there, the visitors often could not leave: "mousetrapped," with their computers' "back" and "close" commands disabled. Users were thus caught in what the FTC called "an unavoidable, seemingly endless loop" of pornography. Motive for the scam: to boost the number of visits to the porn site--and thus charge advertisers more...
...group of clever hackers from Portugal and Australia is co-opting AltaVista searches and rerouting users to pornography sites. When a web user types in a search - "computer games," for example - they are zipped over to a cyber porn site, with little possibility of escape. Victims of the scam report that efforts to use their browser?s Back or Forward keys, or to close their browser altogether, are in vain. For many, the only way to extricate themselves is by turning off their computer. The FTC is ticked off in part because legitimate web commerce is suffering, as potential online...