Great Moments in Mail Fraud

April 24th, 2018

This story is pretty amazing, featuring equal parts of both stupidity and chutzpah:

The timeworn apartment building in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood hardly looks like the corporate headquarters of one of the world’s largest shipping companies.

But for a few recent months, that’s essentially what it became — at least as far as the U.S. Postal Service was concerned.

Federal court papers unsealed last week revealed an astonishing but ultimately bungled scheme to file a change-of-address form claiming that shipping giant United Parcel Service had moved its headquarters from a bustling business park in Atlanta to a tiny garden apartment.

Not only did the change go through, but it also took months for anyone to catch on. In the meantime, so many thousands of pieces of first-class mail meant for UPS poured into Apartment L2 at 6750 N. Ashland Ave. that a mail carrier had to bring in a tub to hold it all, a search warrant application filed in U.S. District Court disclosed.

Among the correspondence were letters meant for the company’s CEO and other executives, sensitive documents containing personal information, as well as corporate credit cards and tens of thousands of dollars in business checks, according to an affidavit from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service submitted with the warrant.

It wasn’t until the resident, Dushaun Spruce, allegedly deposited nearly $60,000 in UPS checks into his bank account in late January that UPS was alerted to the alleged scam, court papers say.

In a brief interview last week with a Chicago Tribune reporter, Spruce acknowledged that authorities had served a warrant on him in January and seized mail, checkbooks, bank records and other documents from his apartment.

“They took things they weren’t supposed to,” said Spruce, 24, standing barefoot at the building’s main entrance.

While not disclosing Spruce’s name, the unsealed warrant contained other clues to his identity: both his current apartment number at the Ashland address as well as his previous address in the 1900 block of West Fargo Avenue. Public records listed both addresses for him.

Spruce has not been criminally charged and denies any wrongdoing. The investigation by postal inspectors and federal prosecutors continues, law enforcement sources said.

A spokesman for UPS confirmed that the company was recently notified that mail intended for UPS employees had been “redirected by an unauthorized change of address by a third party.” He declined further comment.

Snip.

It wasn’t until Jan. 16 — nearly three months after the address changes — that a UPS security coordinator caught on to the alleged scheme and notified postal inspectors, the court records show.

The security coordinator notified investigators that not only had UPS not authorized the change but it also appeared that about 150 corporate American Express cards in various employee names — including the CEO and members of the board of directors — had been issued under the Ashland Avenue address, the affidavit said.

It was later learned that only five cards had actually been shipped, and none had been misused, according to the affidavit.

The day after the alleged fraud was detected, postal inspectors interviewed the carrier who delivers the mail to Spruce’s building. The carrier said “voluminous” amounts of UPS mail had been coming to the apartment for months, far more than would fit in the small boxes assigned to tenants, the affidavit said.

To accommodate the deluge, the carrier “had to place the mail in a USPS tub and leave it at (Spruce’s) door,” the affidavit said.

The carrier, who at times also handed mail directly to Spruce, identified him from a photograph shown by the agents, according to the affidavit.

A week later, postal inspectors returned to the building and began retrieving “several thousand” pieces of first-class and registered mail addressed to UPS at Spruce’s apartment, the affidavit said. Agents found that some of the mail “contained personal identifying information of UPS employees as well as business checks mailed to UPS and accounts payable invoices,” according to the affidavit.

That same day, investigators at Fifth Third Bank notified postal inspectors that more than 10 checks addressed to UPS were deposited to a personal account belonging to Spruce. The checks totaled more than $58,000, according to the affidavit.

Agents reviewed bank surveillance footage and matched the person making the deposits to Spruce’s driver’s license photo, according to the affidavit.

The search warrant served on Jan. 26 contained a list of items to be seized from Spruce, including “all mail, parcels and packages” and any credit cards, checks, invoices or financial records “of any kind” that were linked to UPS.

Agents also planned to seize “all items associated with identity theft, including personal identifying information (and) devices used to manufacture credit cards,” according to the warrant.

Spruce has no felony convictions in his background. But a year before his alleged UPS scam began, he was arrested twice in a matter of days by Evanston police on minor drug charges and allegations of bank fraud, records show.

On Nov. 20, 2016, Evanston police pulled over Spruce’s Hyundai and found an open container of alcohol as well as at least 30 grams of marijuana, according to Cook County court records. He was charged with misdemeanor drug possession and driving on a suspended license — a case that prosecutors agreed to drop in exchange for 40 hours of community service.

It’s obvious that Mr. Spruce is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you can’t say he lacks ambition. Protip: If you’re going to commit interstate mail fraud, do not use your home address. You use a third party mail address, address for a dummy company (I would have gone with “United Package Systems”), which is in turn registered to a another dummy company in the Cayman Islands. You deposit the UPS checks in the “United Package Systems” account, then transfer the money to a Cayman Islands account, and then to your secret Swiss bank account, and you shut everything down and skip town at the first sign anyone’s caught on.

Geeze, do I have to tell you people everything?

Mr. Spruce does not seem to have put this much (or indeed any) forethought into his little caper, and he’s very lucky that he’s not headed to a federal prison even as we speak. I’m guessing that both UPS and USPS are trying to figure out how such a stupid fraud worked for any length of time at all. Did UPS just not receive any mail for a few months and not notice?

And did not Mr. Spruce’s local mail carrier express suspicions the first time they deposited a tub full of mail addressed to UPS to his apartment?

Paris Attack Suspect Given 20 Years (And The MSM Still Can’t Say “Jihad”)

April 23rd, 2018

Let’s take a look at this BBC story:

Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving suspect from the 2015 Paris attacks, has been jailed for 20 years in Belgium over a gunfight that led to his arrest.

Abdeslam, 28, and co-defendant Sofien Ayari were both convicted of terror-related charges of attempted murder.

Ayari, 24, was also given a 20-year sentence. Both fired on officers who raided a flat in Brussels in 2016.

Abdeslam is being held in a jail in France and is due to face trial there over the Paris attacks themselves.

He had refused to answer questions from the judge in the trial in Brussels, and eventually refused to attend the hearings.

Neither he nor Ayari, a 24-year-old Tunisian national, was in court as the verdict was read out on Monday. Both received the maximum 20-year term requested by prosecutors.

The judge, Marie France Keutgen, said that “there can be no doubt” about the two men’s involvement with “radicalism”.

“Radicalism.” No mention of what kind of “radicalism” yet…

She added: “Their intention is clear from the nature of the weapons they used, the number of bullets they fired and the nature of the police officers’ wounds. Only the officers’ professional response prevented it being worse.”

On 15 March 2016, Belgian police hunting Abdeslam carried out a raid in the Forest area of Brussels.

They targeted a flat believing that the suspect – who by then had been on the run for four months – had been there.

When they moved in they exchanged fire with the three occupants. One of the three was killed and three officers were wounded.

Abdeslam and Ayari managed to escape, but Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found in the flat, confirming his presence there.

He was picked up days later in a raid in the nearby Molenbeek area, and later transferred to France.

He is a French national who was born in Brussels to French-Moroccan parents.

He was involved in petty crime in Belgium as a youth, and is believed to have become radicalised along with his brother Salim around 2014.

There’s that “radicalism” again.

Both then reportedly joined a French-Belgian network linked with the Islamic State group (IS), which later claimed the Paris attacks.

And there it is! Some 16 paragraphs into the story, the BBC finally deigns to tell us what these “attacks” and “radicalism” were all about: Islamic terrorism. But it only get mentioned because it’s in the name of the Islamic terrorist entity Abdeslam is affiliated with.

The network was involved in both the Paris attacks and bombings that struck the Brussels metro and airport on 22 March 2016, just days after Abdeslam’s arrest, killing 35 people.

In Monday’s ruling, the court denied a request by victims from those attacks that they be regarded as a civil party to the case, saying no link had been established with Abdeslam and Ayari.

He is believed to have played a key role on 13 November 2015 – when militants targeted a concert hall, stadium, restaurants and bars, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds more.

“Militants.”

It’s been nearly two decades since 9/11, and mainstream western media outlets still insist in speaking in code-words when it comes to Islamic terrorism.

Pat Condell on Progressivism and Cultural Marxism

April 22nd, 2018

Pat Condell nails modern progressivism for its naked intolerance.

If not for the spiteful underhand nastiness and shallow vindictiveness of the progressive mindset, the sanctimonious moralizing, the phony liberality the assumption of moral superiority, and the arrogance in that assumption, not to mention the instinctive recourse to deliberate misrepresentation slurs insults and maliciously slanderous labels in place of argument; if not for all that I wouldn’t have such a problem with progressives because, unlike them, I’m a liberal kind of guy.

Snip.

Try publicly advocating liberal values like freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, free speech, individual liberty democracy. secularism, civil rights; you know, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and you are guaranteed to be called a far-right extremist, a hate monger, a bigot, a racist, a fascist or a Nazi, yes, a Nazi, by progressives.

Condell seems to be refrencing either classical liberalism, or a form of liberalism that has became all but extinct in the modern world, replaced in tot by progressivism’s victimhood identity politics.

Progressivism is Marxism attempting to wear a liberal mask and failing. The militant Marxist and the militant progressive are birds of a feather. They have the same aims they share a common purpose.

Watch the whole thing.

Possible Coup in Saudi Arabia? (Update: Probably Not)

April 21st, 2018

Twitter has recently been abuzz of reports of gunfire outside the Saudi royal palace in Riyadh, and the Jerusalem Post seems to be the first major news outlet to have a story up about it:

Gunfire and explosions have been reported outside the home of the Saudi king in Riyadh, the country’s capital. Sources on Twitter have posted photos and videos of the situation and have said that the gunfire is part of a coup attempt. The king has reportedly been evacuated.

The Jerusalem Post has not been able to independently verify these claims.

A sampling of tweets:

Something certainly seems to be going on…

Update: Some reports say it was just a toy plane that got too close to the palace and was shot down.

Not sure if I believe that, but Twitter reports seem to have died down, and I’m not seeing any additional videos or new reports of gunfire, so whatever it was, it does appear to have died down for now.

Update 2: Official Saudi sources are confirming the toy drone story.

DNC Jumps On Shark, Then Jumps Another Shark

April 21st, 2018

If the DNC was run by normal people, someone might have gone “Hey, maybe we should back off all this Trump-Russia collusion fantasy.”

The DNC is not made up of normal people.

The Washington Post reports that The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.

The lawsuit alleges that in addition to the Russian Federation, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0, top Trump campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and pretty much everyone else who has been mentioned in the same paragraph as Trump….

ZeroHedge also swipes this swell graphic to make his point:

This move reeks of desperation. The Mueller campaign is getting nowhere fast, the RNC fundraising numbers continue to set records, while the DNC recently took out another $2 million loan to keep the lights on, despite all the anti-Trump fervor. With the economy humming along, and both job numbers and trumps own poll numbers up, the posited “blue tsunami” in November is looking more and more like a ripple. The lawsuit looks like a last-ditch effort to keep their base fired up until then.

Just think of all the discovery Donald Trump’s legal team will be able to compel from Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, all the DNC staffers who colluded to screw Bernie Sanders, etc.

This has all the hallmarks of a publicity stunt that will backfire badly.

LinkSwarm for April 20, 2018

April 20th, 2018

Finished my taxes! Now I need to go back and do all the stuff I let slide while I was doing my taxes…

  • The Syrian strike and Russia’s crummy air defense systems:

    The attack on April 13th went up against a 21st-century Russian superweapon–the S-400 Triumf air-defense system, a mobile state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and missile network featuring four distinct missile types targeting aircraft in any performance envelope from treetop level to high altitude – including stealth aircraft (at a range of 150 miles, yet). For a decade we have been assured by military analysts that the S-400 is a game-changer – a system that could rend the heavens in twain and call into question the very concept of air power under battlefield conditions.

    And yet, last Friday, the epoch-making Triumf failed to let out so much as a peep as 105 cruise missiles trashed Bashar Assad’s chemical warfare plants. Not a single SAM left the rack while the attack was proceeding. (The Syrians did fire over 40 missiles at nothing, but only after the attack was completed. This is standard behavior among Arab armed forces – the Libyans and Iraqis did the same thing.) The Russians claim to have shot down over 70 of the attacking cruise missiles. How do we know this isn’t true? First, because the targets were utterly destroyed, and second, because the French were involved. If the Russians had shot down any U.S. missiles at all we would be hearing from Paris that American “missiles de croisière” are useless, and that’s why we had to turn to the French, who invented the cruise missile in 1689. (This is scarcely an exaggeration – Emmanuel Macron has gone on record to state that it was he, le président de la France, who persuaded Donald Trump to carry out the strike.)

    Some might argue that the new AGM-158 JASSM stealth missile foxed the S-400, but half the missiles launched were actually thirty-year-old BGM-109 Tomahawks, the equivalent of Colt Peacemakers as far as the world of missile development is concerned. If the mighty S-400 can’t shoot down a thirty-year-old missile, what can it do?

    Also this: “Russia today is what it always was – a Potemkin village hiding a nation in a state of suspended collapse.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • President Donald Trump’s approval ratings hit 51%.
  • Republicans: “Hey, how about you vote on these Trump nominees?” Democrats: “Ha ha! Slow walking! Filibuster!” Mitch McConnell: “Well then, I guess we’ll just have to keep the senate open on weekends during campaign season.” Democrats: “Uh…”
  • Democrats: Give Us the House so We Can Raise Your Taxes.” You would think they would have learned from Walter Mondale’s example…
  • “Trump overrules Sessions: DOJ won’t target marijuana in states like Colorado where the drug is legal.” Good. The federal government should stay out of the marijuana prohibition business on Tenth Amendment grounds.
  • Rush Limbaugh enumerates some of the many conflicts of interest among mainstream media members with ties to the Democratic Party.
  • In the UK, a machete attack every 90 minutes.
  • How gentry liberals really hate the poor. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Mark Steyn remembers Enoch Powell, who got more right than wrong.
  • UK Prime Minister Theresa May is concentrating on: A.) Brexit, B.) Muslim rape gangs, or C.) Plastic drinking straws?
  • Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members.”

    Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.

  • Everything is hackable.
  • “Pasta Is Good For You, Say Scientists Funded By Big Pasta.”
  • Egg McMuffin’s vaunted honesty and integrity evidently doesn’t extend to his campaign filing timely FEC reports. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • More on the same theme:

    Former presidential candidate Evan McMullin owes his former campaign staff members tens of thousands of dollars and most believe he has no intention of ever paying them, a former campaign worker tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.

    Right before McMullin’s failed bid for president in 2016 as the conservative alternative to President Donald Trump, the campaign was inundated with debt. The disastrous fiscal situation was a combination of frivolous spending by McMullin and his campaign manager Joel Searby, according to the former staffer.

    McMullin received news weeks before Election Day 2016 about how dire the campaign’s finances were, and he had “no remorse” and said “I have qualms about this thing ending badly in debt,” the former staffer claimed. McMullin’s cavalier attitude towards the campaign’s spending struck many as a surprise, particularly because he billed himself as a fiscal conservative, he added.

    The staffer also claims the campaign never paid him somewhere between 12-15 thousand dollars on top of a few thousand dollars in reimbursements. While he has since recovered, he expressed concern about former staffers with “families and children.”

  • “911 operator who hung up on emergency calls is sentenced to jail.”
  • The Littlest Weasel accomplished one thing: he raised Laura Ingraham’s ratings by 20%.
  • “Three New Plaintiffs Join James Damore’s Discrimination Lawsuit Against Google.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Here’s a cool piece by Houston Rockets center Clint Capela talking about what it was like to move from Europe to Texas:

    I’ll never forget the first time I went to a steakhouse here. I thought I’d eaten steak before. I was expecting this small, flat circle of meat, maybe a couple of fries on the side. Fine. C’est bon.

    So in Texas, steak is a different thing. I’m at this restaurant and they put this plate in front of me, and, well, there was barely any plate visible — all I saw was this was this big, big piece of meat. I look around, maybe I had been mistaken in what I ordered. Maybe this waiter was playing a prank on me. It looked like a whole farm animal in front of me. But everyone with me laughed and nodded and told me that in Texas, this is a steak.

    Then I was introduced to these other foods I’d never seen before but were totally amazing. Mac and cheese, man. Guys, you are blessed for having mac and cheese here. It’s a work of art. Bravo, guys.

    And that was the first time I thought, O.K. O.K., I think I can get used to this place.

    But if he really wants to be “King of Books,” he should know that road runs through me

  • Pro-tip: If you’re trying to smuggle hundreds of pounds of cocaine, it is best not to document your expensive vacation travels on Instagram. (Hat tip: Jammie Wearing Fool’s twitter feed.)
  • First they came for the buxom barmaids
  • The next horror movie monster: Tumbleweeds:

  • A tweet:

    Seems an overreaction. Let he who has never taken a sacred oath using a dinosaur handpuppet cast the first stone…

  • Hurst, Texas House Explodes on Dashcam

    April 19th, 2018

    And sometimes blogging is just “Whoa! I’ve got to post that!”

    Story here. Thankfully, no one was killed, though one woman remains in the hospital.

    Also this: “The driver was not hurt, but was taken into custody for not having a license, then transferred to federal custody on an immigration hold.”

    Barbara Bush, RIP

    April 18th, 2018

    Former First Lady Barbara Bush, wife of one President and mother of another, has died at age 92.

    She was a class act as First Lady, pretty much universally loved and respected, and she will be missed.

    A few quick reactions:

    Even the overwhelming majority of Democrats on Twitter were polite and respectful.

    A few were not:

    Most people would avoid making the death of a First Lady an occasion to score political points.

    Most people.

    Note: I’ve limited the Bush Derangement Idiocy to the Blue Checkmark Brigade…

    UN: Hey, Let’s Inspect This Entirely Peaceful Site Hit By Missiles. Syria: Die In A Fire

    April 17th, 2018

    Syria has sworn up and down that missiles from the United States, the UK and France only hit peaceful sites of toys for crippled orphans a baby milk factory a cancer research center (no really, that’s their story this time) rather than a chemical weapons facility.

    So naturally, they would have no problem with UN inspector’s visiting the site, right?

    We all know exactly how that movie turned out:

    The international chemical weapons watchdog that sent a fact-finding team to Syria said Monday that Syrian and Russian officials blocked efforts to reach the site where rebels claim government forces unleashed chemical weapons against civilians.

    The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the team arrived in Damascus on Saturday and met with government officials to work out a plan for deployment to Douma.

    The Syrian and the Russian officials informed the team that “pending security issues” needed to be worked out before the group went to Douma, the organization’s director general, Ahmet Üzümcü, told an emergency meeting of the group’s executive council in The Hague, Netherlands.

    Of.

    Course.

    Some other Syria strike news:

  • Hezbollah says that “Syrian air defenses had intercepted three missiles aimed at Dumair military airport north east of Damascus.”
  • ZeroHedge is reporting that Israel just hit Syrian sites near Homs. Not seeing any confirmation right now.
  • Speaking of ZeroHedge reports on Israel strikes against Syria, they also reported another Israeli airstrike two days ago I haven’t seen other confirming reports of. “I know what you’re thinking, punk. Did I hit Syria six times, or only five? In all this excitement, I sort of lost track myself…”
  • In fact, this New Yorker piece asserts that Israel has launched more than a hundred trikes in Syria since the civil war began.

    Israel has hit a wide range of sites, including convoys of Hezbollah or Iranian fighters near the Golan, trucks ferrying missiles and rockets destined for Hezbollah en route to Lebanon, bases for Iranian drones, and an Iranian command-and-control center.

    “We are facing now a determined decision by Iran to take advantage of the vacuum in Syria, the coming victory of Assad, and the defeat of ISIS to extend Hezbollah’s stand in Lebanon at the expense of Syrian territory, especially in the Golan Heights,” Amos Gilead, a retired Israeli major general who now heads the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, told me. “This is a strategic threat. It’s an intolerable plan. We are trying to preëmpt them and protect Israel.”

  • Israel confirmed it hit Syria on April 9, as previously reported.
  • French President Emmanuel Macron says he convinced President Donald Trump to join in on strikes against Syria. France wants to initiate military action in the Middle East about as often as Henry Youngman’s wife wants to have sex. (She died in 1987, so: Not often!) But France has a continuing relationship with both Syria and Lebanon, having administered the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon between 1923 and 1946. France still has extremely close relations with Lebanon, and has been royally pissed with Assad’s consistent meddling there, especially the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.
  • New York Times is Shocked, SHOCKED To Find Out There’s a Public Pension Crisis

    April 16th, 2018

    The New York Times was kind enough to notice that public employee pensions are bankrupting many portions of the country:

    A public university president in Oregon gives new meaning to the idea of a pensioner.

    Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension.

    It is $76,111.

    Per month.

    That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year.

    Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster. More government workers are retiring, including more than 2,000, like Dr. Robertson, who get pensions exceeding $100,000 a year.

    Left out of that list: California, New York and Illinois.

    The bill is borne by taxpayers. Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System has told cities, counties, school districts and other local entities to contribute more to keep the system afloat. They can neither negotiate nor raise local taxes fast enough to keep up. As a result, pensions are crowding out other spending. Essential services are slashed.
    Continue reading the main story

    “You get to the point where you can no longer do more with less — you just have to do less with less,” said Nathan Cherpeski, the manager of Klamath Falls, a city of about 21,000 in south-central Oregon.

    Klamath Falls’s most recent biennial bill from the pension system, known as PERS, was $600,000 more than the one before. PERS has warned that the bills will keep rising. Mr. Cherpeski has had to cut back on repairing streets and bridges.

    Even as the American economy is humming, many states and cities are still hurting from the 2008 financial meltdown. The crash hammered their pension funds and tax revenues, but didn’t reduce the amounts they owe retirees.

    It wasn’t until 2016 that average state tax collections returned to pre-2008 levels. In the meantime, states and cities have had to rebuild pension funds to cover the rising numbers of retirees drawing benefits. That has left less money for the police, school sports programs and everything else. Local residents might not know why, but they are paying more taxes and getting scantier services in return.

    Golly, if only the New York Times had been reading conservative and libertarian new source like BattleSwarm and Pension Tsunami, they could have found out this starting information years or even decade ago.

    In related news, Illinois courts are already imposing mandated tax hikes on various municipalities to shore up underfunded public pension programs.

    However, I bet that the next links in the logic chain (that all these locals seem to be controlled by the Democratic Party, and that fat pensions are a naked political payoff for the support of public employee unions who donate to and vote for Democrats, at the expense of the poor and middle class who see public services cut to pay for those fat pensions) will somehow continue to elude the New York Times