Tag: stealing

Scumbag Congressman claimed airfare for family rabbit as expense

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❝ Rep. Duncan Hunter is attempting to set up a fund to raise money to pay for lawyers and other costs related to an ongoing FBI criminal investigation into allegations of misused campaign cash, according to documents filed in Congress…

Hunter’s chief of staff, Michael Harrison, did not immediately returns calls and emails seeking clarification about the status of the fund or how much money had been raised or spent…

❝ The Federal Election Commission and the San Diego Union-Tribune first questioned in April 2016 Hunter’s reported spending for video games and for children’s private school tuition. Federal law prohibits spending campaign funds for personal use.

A subsequent investigation by the Union-Tribune found a host of other potentially improper expenses, including for oral surgery, groceries, garage door repair, surfing equipment, dance recital trips, school lunches and airfare for the family rabbit…

Understand that the greed and excess practiced by the thugs imported into our government by the Fake President are nothing new. Pimps and phonies in Congress like Hunter have been stealing like this for decades.

IRS seizes accounts on suspicion, no crime required

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For almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away — until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000.

The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes — in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report.

“How can this happen?” Ms. Hinders said in a recent interview. “Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?”

The federal government does.

Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up…

“They’re going after people who are really not criminals,” said David Smith, a former federal prosecutor who is now a forfeiture expert and lawyer in Virginia. “They’re middle-class citizens who have never had any trouble with the law.”

On Thursday, in response to questions from The New York Times, the I.R.S. announced that it would curtail the practice, focusing instead on cases where the money is believed to have been acquired illegally or seizure is deemed justified by “exceptional circumstances…”

…The new policy will not apply to past seizures.

RTFA. Contemptible policies made all the worse by their spread throughout our government. The NSA and FBI meet the same lowlife standard. Not that they’re copycats. They’re just behaving like the rest of the phony/law enforcement/foreign legion scumbags in our government. Regal, self-serving hypocrites.

Like so many police agencies in American government, they’re above the law.

Thanks, Mike

Cracking the Medicare [over]billing codes

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Judging by their bills, it would appear that elderly patients treated in the emergency room at Baylor Medical Center in Irving, Texas, are among the sickest in the country — far sicker than patients at most other hospitals.

In 2008, the hospital billed Medicare for the two most expensive levels of care for eight of every 10 patients it treated and released from its emergency room — almost twice the national average, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis. Among those claims, 64 percent of the total were for the most expensive level of care.

But the charges may have more to do with billing practices than sicker patients. A Baylor representative conceded hospital billing for emergency room care “did not align with industry trends,” but said that the hospital since 2009 has reined in its charges.

The Texas hospital’s billing pattern is far from unique. Between 2001 and 2008, hospitals across the country dramatically increased their Medicare billing for emergency room care, adding more than $1 billion to the cost of the program to taxpayers, a Center investigation has found. The fees are based on a system of billing codes — so-called evaluation and management codes — that makes higher payments for treatments that require more time and resources.

Use of the top two most expensive codes for emergency room care nationwide nearly doubled, from 25 percent to 45 percent of all claims, during the time period examined. In many cases, these claims were not for treating patients with life-threatening injuries. Instead, the claims the Center analyzed included only patients who were sent home from the emergency room without being admitted to the hospital. Often, they were treated for seemingly minor injuries and complaints.

While taxpayers footed most of the bill, the charges also hit elderly patients in the pocketbook, increasing the amount of their 20-percent co-payments for emergency room care.

Asked if the hospital returned Medicare overpayments, Baylor Irving’s president, Cindy Schamp said it has not. “To date, we have not made any payments back to Medicare,” Schamp wrote in response to questions. “However, continuing to work to do the right thing, we feel it is appropriate to review.”

Long, very detailed, worth reading and re-reading.

I post articles here with some frequency about Medicare fraud, healthcare fraud. The articles that reach the surface of the scum sitting atop American healthcare practices generally concern individual physicians, the odd cluster of group practice thieves, scumsuckers who feed off the lives of ailing and dying Americans. Obama’s lead on digitizing medical records and feeding the info into formats useful for data mining are producing a refined understanding of just how much ethical standards have diminished in the United States.

Grayheads especially have to develop a habit of reading those periodic statements that arrive in the mail or online from Medicare. It’s not uncommon in my experience to find a medical procedure double-billed, triple-billed. It isn’t unusual to find a bill that starts out with two minor procedures expanding to three or four by the time each specialist gets a shot at including their added take.

The Office of the Medicare Ombudsman can help you if you have a complaint about your quality of care. That includes overbilling, false billing, questions you have about the facility you deal with raising the care they provided to a classification above the actual service. Call 1-800-MEDICARE and ask for the OMO – the Office of the Medicare Ombudsman or go online for more details.

Not so incidentally, the Feds will give you a $1,000 reward if you spotted something they truly need to put a stop to.

India’s failed food distribution system gets reviewed – not fixed

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Ranwan, India — In this north Indian village, workers recently dismantled stacks of burned and mildewed rice while flies swarmed nearby over spoiled wheat. Local residents said the rice crop had been sitting along the side of a highway for several years and was now being sent to a distillery to be turned into liquor.

Just 180 miles to the south, in a slum on the outskirts of New Delhi, Leela Devi struggled to feed her family of four on meager portions of flatbread and potatoes, which she said were all she could afford on her disability pension and the irregular wages of her day-laborer husband. Her family is among the estimated 250 million Indians who do not get enough to eat.

Such is the paradox of plenty in India’s food system. Spurred by agricultural innovation and generous farm subsidies, India now grows so much food that it has a bigger grain stockpile than any country except China, and it exports some of it to countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia. Yet one-fifth of its people are malnourished — double the rate of other developing countries like Vietnam and China — because of pervasive corruption, mismanagement and waste in the programs that are supposed to distribute food to the poor.

“The reason we are facing this problem is our refusal to distribute the grain that we buy from farmers to the people who need it,” said Biraj Patniak, a lawyer who advises India’s Supreme Court on food issues. “The only place that this grain deserves to be is in the stomachs of the people who are hungry.”

After years of neglect, the nation’s failed food policies have now become a subject of intense debate in New Delhi, with lawmakers, advocates for the poor, economists and the news media increasingly calling for an overhaul. The populist national government is considering legislation that would pour billions of additional dollars into the system and double the number of people served to two-thirds of the population. The proposed law would also allow the poor to buy more rice and wheat at lower prices…

“India is paying the price of an unexpected success — our production of rice and wheat has surged and procurement has been better than ever,” said Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to India’s Finance Ministry and a professor at Cornell University. “This success is showing up some of the gaps in our policy.”

The biggest gap is the inefficient, corrupt system used to get the food to those who need it. Just 41.4 percent of the grain picked up by the states from federal warehouses reaches Indian homes, according to a recent World Bank study.

RTFA for details of the incompetence, crime and corruption from top to the bottom of this food logistics chain. Everyone steals, everyone profits — and the people get much less than the portion paid for by India’s taxpayers.

TSA agents arrested for stealing from passengers’ bags

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Two TSA agents were busted Wednesday at Kennedy Airport for stealing $39,000 from a passenger’s bag, a law enforcement source said. The rogue agents, Coumar Persad and Davon Webb, have admitted to other thefts of up to $160,000, the source said…

They were charged with grand larceny, possession of stolen property and official misconduct.

The source said the agents worked in tandem. One would watch for money as the bags were screened, then notify the other about the loot. One would swipe the money once the luggage was placed in a baggage room.

Ain’t criminal teamwork inspiring? Especially within a system that is supposed to be dedicated to protection.

Two charged over email address hacking on AT&T network

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U.S. prosecutors have charged two men with stealing and distributing email addresses for about 120,000 users of Apple’s popular iPad.

Investigators accused Daniel Spitler and Andrew Auernheimer of using an “account slurper” to conduct a “brute force” attack over five days last June, to extract data about iPad users who accessed the Internet through AT&T’s 3G network.

Among the possible victims were celebrities, businesses executives and government officials such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and perhaps then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, prosecutors said.

Spitler, 26, and Auernheimer, 25, were taken into custody by FBI agents on Tuesday morning, U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman in New Jersey said in a statement.

Prosecutors said both defendants are associated with Goatse Security, a group of “self-professed Internet ‘trolls'” who try to disrupt online content and services. They said Auernheimer bragged in published interviews about his trolling…

The defendants were each charged with one count of fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Each charge carries a maximum punishment of five years in prison plus a $250,000 fine…

The defendants then supplied stolen data to gossip website Gawker, which published some details, the complaint said.

Nothing like cooperating with scumballs, eh?

Italian police charged with stealing stolen food

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They do everything with style in Naples

Eleven Naples police officers were arrested Friday on charges of stealing about a ton of food from a hijacked truck, authorities said.

The Italian news agency ANSA reported Deputy Police Chief Pasquale Toscano, the head of the Naples flying squad, and 10 other officers are suspected of filing a false report after catching the truck and arresting its five hijackers.

Toscano will be replaced and the 70-member squad reorganized, Naples Chief Prosecutor Giovandomenico Lepore told reporters.

“The rotten apples have been found and eliminated,” Lepore said. “Certain things cannot be allowed, at any level.”

Har! [Yes – a hollow laugh]

Stealing electricity with a meat hook and not too many brains

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This guy was not Benjamin Franklin

German police are investigating a man for theft after he siphoned electricity off a high-voltage overhead transmission line for one month with the help of an ordinary meat hook.

The 36-year old man from Sibbesse in Lower Saxony concocted the plan to steal electricity after the power company cut him off for failure to pay his bills, police said.

The man attached a cable to the meat hook and tossed it onto an overhead power line. He then drew power from the transmission line to his home, located about 150 meters away.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 34-year-career,” said Friedrich-Wilhelm Lach, chief executive of regional utility Ueberlandwerke Leinetal GmbH, told Reuters. “It’s incredibly dangerous and utterly stupid.”

An employee of the utility noticed the meat hook during a routine check. Lach said the man was lucky he is still alive and warned copycats not to try it: “It will kill you,” he said.

I can’t wait for this stunt to be tried by some of the knuckle-dragging gangbangers in my neck of the prairie.

DOJ sues KBR for illegal charges in Bush’s War

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The U.S. Justice Department has sued the Houston-based military contractor KBR Inc for alleged false claims act violations over improper costs for private security in Iraq.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleged that KBR knowingly included impermissible costs for private armed security in billings to the U.S. Army covering the 2003-2006 time period, the department said.

KBR has been the U.S. military’s largest private contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been criticized for cost overruns in Iraq, and lawmakers in Congress last month questioned the Army’s continued use of KBR for logistics work…

The Justice Department said the case, which seeks unspecified damages, was brought as part of an initiative to crack down on procurement fraud.

The contract at issue in the lawsuit provided for logistical support, such as food services, transportation, laundry and mail, for military operations in Iraq. The lawsuit involved the company and 33 KBR subcontractors…

The lawsuit alleged that KBR managers considered the use of private security unacceptable and were concerned the Army would disallow costs for such services. But KBR still charged for the costs of the unauthorized services, the suit said.

Back in the day, when I worked in the offshore oil industry, there were a few companies that owned the United States government. Halliburton and KBR were the leaders of the pack when it came to sucking dollars from American taxpayers.

They were the overseers who said, “Jump, boy!” The Pentagon, Congress – would always answer, “How high, boss?”

Contemptible and corrupt as were those practices in the past, the indifference of the Oil Patch Boys to any prospect of fiscal and corporate responsibility is worse. Throw the creeps in jail!

Janitor used patients’ files for ID theft

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Showing off jewelry from fraudulent purchases – Facebook

In what Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart described as a “sophisticated identity-theft ring,” a janitor stole data from as many as 250 patient files at a Northwestern University physicians’ group and, with the help of her two sisters and friends, used the personal information to charge more than $300,000 in jewelry, furniture, appliances and electronics. They sold the goods to friends and relatives, pocketing the profits.

Seven suspects have been arrested, while three others, including janitor Tijuana Leonard, are wanted on felony warrants, according to the sheriff’s office…

While working the night shift for Millard Cleaning Service, Leonard, 33, of Chicago, stole personal information from patient files in the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation’s offices and passed it along to others, Dart said.

In some cases they would use the personal information to open credit accounts at retailers either online or in the store, Dart said. In other cases they added their names to victims’ accounts. They then often went on an immediate shopping spree — sometimes charging in excess of $5,000 at a time, according to the sheriff.

Dart was critical that the stores weren’t more suspicious when the ring members opened credit accounts and then quickly bought as many as four plasma TVs at a time…

Do you think?

Investigators began noticing that many the victims saw doctors on floors 19-21 of the medical facility and narrowed the search down to Leonard, the janitor assigned to those floors…

The Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation has set up a hot line for patients to call.

Well, the Medical group is really on top of things, aren’t they?