How the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology became a multimillion dollar organization promoting bullshit science through fake conferences and journals.
Tag: fraud
Added by PressForward
👓 Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff. What Happens When It Gets Called? | Daily Intelligencer | New York Magazine
For almost 25 years, Shane Smith’s plan was that, by the time the suckers caught on, he’d never be stuck owning the company he co-founded.
A fantastic article.
This reminds me a lot of the recent Theranos stories and book. It’s sad how companies don’t do enough due diligence on potential investments like this. When I think about how much basic work and discussion Marcus Lemonis does for $100,000 investments, I’m appalled to hear what people are doing for multi-millions. It’s stunning that a company can get to this size and be worth nearly nothing. Using the relative size (ie number of employees) of business units like human resources and legal within a particular industry could be a reasonable guide for the internal management of a company.
This is also a good example that while investments may give a company a particular valuation, it can rarely be the actual potential present value of the company. As a result, workers who are working for near free plus stock should be paying closer attention to company internals to know that their stock portion is going to be completely worthless.
Worse, I’m always pained to hear that young people (rich or otherwise) are essentially giving away their work and sweat equity away for free to big companies that could easily pay them. Eventually the pendulum is going to swing back the other way and companies are going to need to pay more.
One of my favorite quotes from the piece:
Syndicated copies to:“Shane would always say that young people are the No. 1 bullshit detector, which was annoying once you realized that the thing he mastered is getting young people to buy shit,” says a recently departed senior employee.
👓 The Theranos Story and Education Technology | Inside Higher Ed
A great new book has me thinking about ed tech.
This is an interesting and useful analogy.
In ed tech, schools are the customers, but students are the users.
This also reminds me of the market disconnect between students and their textbooks. Professors are the ones targeted for the “sale” or adoption when the actual purchasers are the students. This causes all kinds of problems in the way the textbook market works and tends to drive prices up–compared to a market in which the student directly chooses their textbook. (And the set up is not too dissimilar to how the healthcare industry works in which the patient (customer) is making a purchase of health care coverage and not actually the health care itself.
Syndicated copies to:👓 Real People Are Turning Their Accounts Into Bots On Instagram — And Cashing In | BuzzFeed
Verified accounts turning themselves into bots, millions of fake likes and comments, a dirty world of engagement trading inside Telegram groups. Welcome to the secret underbelly of Instagram.
Eventually there will be so much noise on these platforms that they will cease to have any meaning for the business purposes that people are intending to use them for.
Worse, they’re giving away their login credentials to outsiders to do this.
Syndicated copies to:👓 Perspective | Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes. | Washington Post
Posing as ‘John Barron,’ he claimed he owned most of his father’s real estate empire.
A liar to create perceptions about himself for decades and decades…
Syndicated copies to:👓 Theranos CEO Holmes and former president Balwani charged with massive fraud | CNBC
👓 ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee | The Daily Beast
Months after losing his wife, the 95-year-old comic book legend is surrounded by charlatans and mountebanks.
Apparently we need stronger laws to protect the elderly and infirm.
Syndicated copies to:👓 Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. Were Close to Being Charged With Felony Fraud | ProPublica
New York prosecutors were preparing a case. Then the D.A. overruled his staff after a visit from a top donor: Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz.
Why are we not surprised at this? What happened to the generally higher moral ground that used to be held by public officials? These days I’d take a soupçon of Aristotelian-ism…
Syndicated copies to:🎧 Criminal, Episode 61: Vanish (2/17/17)
People have faked death to escape criminal convictions, debts, and their spouses. In 2007, a man named Amir Vehabovic faked his death just to see who showed up at the funeral (answer: only his mom). It’s an appealing soap-opera fantasy, but actually disappearing requires an incredible amount of planning. How do you obtain a death certificate, a believable new identity, or enough money to start a new life? Today — the answers to those questions, stories of fake death gone wrong, and a man who spends his life bringing back the dead.
Brings up a lot of interesting “what if” questions. I’ll bet that if web browsers opened up some of their data, the data exhaust one spews on a daily basis could be easily used to track one down.
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