Money Scam Quotes

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Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.
Stephen King (Revival)
The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED.
Alex E. Jones
The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
Nothing awakens the conscience like a lot of money.
Palagummi Sainath
The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
Valentine's Day is just a capitalist scam, designed to make people currently in a relationship spend unnecessary money in a fruitless attempt to ensure undying love and devotion. For those of us not in a relationship, Valentine's Day is simply added pressure to identify ourselves within the context of a romantic relationship, whipping us into a frenzy that only the presence of our soul mates can relieve.
Heather Hepler (Love? Maybe.)
There were no sex classes. No friendship classes. No classes on how to navigate a bureaucracy, build an organization, raise money, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what was important to me. Not knowing how to do these things is what messes people up in life, not whether they know algebra or can analyze literature.
William Upski Wimsatt
The bankers and financiers are badly overplaying their hands, again, and people are starting to catch on to the scam. Real wealth is tangible things produced with tangible effort. Loans made out of thin-air 'money' require no effort and are entirely ephemeral. But if those loans are used to acquire real ownership of real assets, then something has been exchanged for nothing and one party is getting screwed.
Chris Martenson
Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so – pardon the pun – so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.
Stephen King (Revival)
I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They’ve already done it. It’s called a nickel.
Jay Leno
In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who dont; it's the Emperor's New Clothes gone global.
Karen Joy Fowler
People had been scammed by their own politicians, mainstream media, and Big Pharma. Not for money this time, but for their health, and perhaps their souls.
Jack Freestone (The Pures)
And now that I have been scammed once, I felt like it could not happen to me again.
Vann Chow (Shanghai Nobody (Master Shanghai, #1))
People love their devices—they telegraph wealth, fitness, virtue, the idea that they are so important and must be connected every moment. But I see them for what they are—the tools of corporations to keep you wanting, buying, unable to be present, shackled to their plans for you and your money. It’s a con, a scam, and the whole world has bought right into it.
Lisa Unger (The New Couple in 5B)
The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we’d been promised was a scam,
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
Do you want to beat Van Eck?” Kaz asked. Nina blew out an exasperated breath. “Of course.” Kaz’s eyes scanned the room, moving from face to face. “Do you? Do you want your money? The money we fought, and bled, and nearly drowned for? Or do you want Van Eck to be glad he picked a bunch of nobodies from the Barrel to scam? Because no one else is going to get him for us. No one else is going to care that he cheated us or that we risked our lives for nothing. No one else is going to make this right. So I’m asking, do you want to beat Van Eck?” “Yes,” said Inej. She wanted some kind of justice. “Soundly,” said Nina. “Around the ears with Wylan’s flute,” said Jesper. One by one, they nodded.
Leigh Bardugo (Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2))
And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
Okay, yes, I know how bad this looks. Like Taylor Swift, I had no intention of becoming a white supremacist Barbie. Obviously I'm not a Trumper—I voted for Biden! But if these people are hurling money at me, is it wrong of me to accept? Should we not celebrate scamming cash from racist rednecks whenever we get the chance?
R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
It’s time to ask why [the United States] is the only country in the world where we permit our children to be saddled with tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars of debt before they begin to earn a penny.
F.H. Buckley
It seems to me that although they have a respectable sales pitch, this business of a priest having the power to let bygones be bygones and grant us absolution from our scandals is all just one gigantic scam to con loads of money off a haunted and gullible public.
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.” That
Stephen King (Revival)
A venture that doesn’t create value for others is a hobby. A venture that doesn’t attract attention is a flop. A venture that doesn’t sell the value it creates is a nonprofit. A venture that doesn’t deliver what it promises is a scam. A venture that doesn’t bring in enough money to keep operating will inevitably close.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived. The concept is ingenious. Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president. Add Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the presidency really at stake. It’s Western civilization’s very own car wreck. Even if you don’t want to watch it, you will. It’s that awesome of a spectacle. But
Matt Taibbi (Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus)
why rich people like wine so much: “It’s the most consistently reliable way that they can convert money into happiness.
Priceonomics (Everything Is Bullshit: The greatest scams on Earth revealed)
Don't allow chance takes to take chances with your life.
D.J. Kyos
This is a fucking scam—anybody who does this has stolen money,” Belfort told Anne, as the music thumped. “You wouldn’t spend money you worked for like that.
Bradley Hope (Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World)
When America began, government cost every citizen $20 (in [2003] money) per year. Taxes rose during wars, but for most of the life of America, spending never exceeded a few hundred dollars per person. During World War II, government got much bigger. It was supposed to shrink again after the war but never did. Instead, it just kept growing. Now the federal government costs every man, woman, and child an average of $10,000 per year.
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
after the financial crisis, the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead. And being fond of money, the banks took the DOJ up on the offer. Now that’s a great quid pro quo—the DOJ gets to look good, the banks get to keep most of their money, and the liberal nonprofits get lots of funding.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't; it's the Emperors's New Clothes gone global.
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
Money was so tight that the following year, in 1994, Chanel agreed to have some teeth pulled. A dentist in East New York was offering a subway token, worth $1.25, for each tooth. Working from a dingy office on Pennsylvania Avenue, he billed Medicaid for this scam. None of that mattered to Chanel, Roach, Margo, or Joanie, all of whom had teeth pulled. Chanel remembers her body thrashing in pain as strangers held her down in the chair. The dental office charged Medicaid $235 for pulling four of Chanel’s teeth. She left with a few subway tokens.
Andrea Elliott (Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City)
...Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so--pardon the pun--so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.
Stephen King (Revival)
Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can’t reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life. And the greatest of these, of course, was sex. I don’t remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society’s evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy. Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folks as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.
Andrew Klavan (Empire of Lies (Weiss and Bishop))
I had always wondered why people wanted to be rich and famous. If you could be rich and anonymous, that would be fun. To be famous and not rich, the way we were, was the least fun. It takes time and effort to be famous, and if they offer you fame without the money, don’t take it. It’s a scam.
Alan Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned)
In general, those who advertise themselves as having superior moral judgment or unique access to moral truth need to be looked at askance. Not infrequently there is great advantage—in money, sex, power, and self-esteem—in setting oneself up as a moral authority. The rest of us can easily be exploited when we acquiesce in these authoritative claims. Scam artists aplenty proclaim themselves as moral gurus, willing to tell the rest of us how our conscience should behave. They can seem authoritative because they are especially charismatic or especially spiritual or especially firm in their convictions.
Patricia S. Churchland (Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition)
Traders at other banks, many of which had outposts in the twin towers, realized that their first instincts had not been to fret about their colleagues’ well-being or the geopolitical implications of the attack, but instead to hunt for profitable trading opportunities. Then again, didn’t money make the world go round?
David Enrich (The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and a Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off One of the Greatest Scams in History)
So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me. the value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't; it's Emperor's New Clothes gone global. If chimps used money and we didn't, we wouldn't admire it. We'd find it irrational and primitive. Delusional. And why gold? Chimps barter with meat. The value of meat is self-evident.
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
The formula was the same formula we see in every election: Republicans demonize government, sixties-style activism, and foreigners. Democrats demonize corporations, greed, and the right-wing rabble. Both candidates were selling the public a storyline that had nothing to do with the truth. Gas prices were going up for reasons completely unconnected to the causes these candidates were talking about. What really happened was that Wall Street had opened a new table in its casino. The new gaming table was called commodity index investing. And when it became the hottest new game in town, America suddenly got a very painful lesson in the glorious possibilities of taxation without representation. Wall Street turned gas prices into a gaming table, and when they hit a hot streak we ended up making exorbitant involuntary payments for a commodity that one simply cannot live without. Wall Street gambled, you paid the big number, and what they ended up doing with some of that money you lost is the most amazing thing of all. They got America—you, me, Priscilla Carillo, Robert Lukens—to pawn itself to pay for the gas they forced us to buy in the first place. Pawn its bridges, highways, and airports. Literally sell our sovereign territory. It was a scam of almost breathtaking beauty, if you’re inclined to appreciate that sort of thing.
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
Elizabeth actively despises the landline’s inefficiency in regard to their everyday lives. The only calls the phone receives are credit card offers, scam vacation prizes, charities and fringe political groups looking for money, and the occasional mass recorded message from the town of Ames broadcasting the closing of school during snowstorms. When the kids were little, Elizabeth wanted to keep the landline so that they’d be able to dial 911 should “anything bad happen.” That was the phrase
Paul Tremblay (Disappearance at Devil's Rock)
Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC—the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved—and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ‘Losses Through Theft of Service’ and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns’ very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
The godfather’s name is Saul Alinsky. His most famous students are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hardly anyone recognizes this, but Alinsky and the Alinsky method is the hidden force behind the 2008 economic meltdown. The meltdown was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; it was the main cause of median wealth in the United States in the subsequent three years declining nearly 40 percent. While the meltdown is routinely attributed to Wall Street “greed,” its real cause was government and activist pressure on banks and banking agencies—like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to change their lending and loan guarantee practices. Yes, the 2008 crash was actually the result of an Alinskyite scam—actually a series of Alinskyite scams, carried out over many years. Basically the Alinskyites were trying to steal money from the banks and, in the process, force the banks to make loans to people that they had no intention of making loans to. The banks acquiesced, and eventually the whole scheme came crashing down. It was toppled not by greed but by the sober reality that when you loan money to millions of people who cannot afford to pay, those people are very likely to default on those loans. That’s how Alinskyites almost destroyed the U.S. economy a few years ago. If Alinsky had never lived, none of this would have happened.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
The flood of money from Amway’s founders failed, though, to quash an investigation by the Canadian government into a tax-fraud scheme in which both DeVos and Van Andel were criminally charged in 1982. The scandal exploded when Kitty McKinsey and Paul Magnusson, then reporters for the Detroit Free Press, shocked readers accustomed to DeVos and Van Andel’s professions of patriotism and religiosity with an exposé tracing an elaborate, thirteen-year-long tax scam directly to the bosses’ offices. At its highest levels, they revealed, Amway had secretly authorized a scheme creating dummy invoices to deceive Canadian customs officials into accepting falsely low valuations on products the company imported into Canada. Amway had thus fraudulently lowered its tax bills by $26.4 million from 1965 until 1978. Amway
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
Most people think you need tens of thousands of dollars to get started, but you can get there with just a thousand, or less,” Jared told me. “The money isn’t the obstacle. The truth is that ninety percent of the battle is getting your head right and just pushing through all the obstacles, no matter what. You have to make it your mission to find a way.” Jared’s obstacles didn’t end that sleepless Christmas. To this day, competitors copy his ads, and even his products. Some of them are total scam artists who take orders with no intention of fulfilling them. “When I first started, I’d get so angry at the scammers, but that wasn’t helping me,” he said. “Now, if I see someone copying my stuff, I immediately get my lawyers involved and send a cease and desist. It’s part of the game. I’ve learned to just deal with it.
Ryan Daniel Moran (12 Months to $1 Million: How to Pick a Winning Product, Build a Real Business, and Become a Seven-Figure Entrepreneur)
We have a legal system that is a flop — a laughingstock,” says Professor Langbein. “We have a legal system which encourages people not to want to do business in this country.” The American legal system isn’t even working for the lawyers. Even though law is now the highest-paid profession, the lawyers aren’t happy. Many say they went to law school hoping to do good, but now find themselves working incredibly long hours doing tedious work that’s often more about money than justice. A survey of California lawyers found most would change careers if they could. Something’s very wrong when America’s brightest young people are choosing a profession many won’t like, where they’re not building something, not making the economic pie bigger, just fighting over who gets which slice, making each slice cost more, and taking our freedom in the process.
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
So much of what my generation had been promised disintegrated at our touch. Consider the friend, a painter of seascapes, who dreamed of affording waterfront property. On the day the levees broke, the Gulf flooded her studio and painted her walls with costly oils. Consider the friend who worked for six years at a company he hated on the promise of a sabbatical, only to be let go. The friend who complained about family reunions and lost every relative over the age of fifty to a virus. The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we'd been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi—and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have?
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
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Gabriel Devos
While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world. Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies.
Kevin D. Mitnick (The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers)
But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American defense contractors is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the financial industry. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases—insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting—implicated the company’s chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion—or about $45,000 per citizen.
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
When I was a kid, my mother thought spinach was the healthiest food in the world because it contained so much iron. Getting enough iron was a big deal then because we didn't have 'iron-fortified' bread. Turns out that spinach is an okay source of iron, but no better than pizza, pistachio nuts, cooked lentils, or dried peaches. The spinach-iron myth grew out of a simple mathematical miscalculation: A researcher accidentally moved a decimal point one space, so he thought spinach had 10 times more iron than it did. The press reported it, and I had to eat spinach. Moving the decimal point was an honest mistake--but it's seldom that simple. If it happened today I'd suspect a spinach lobby was behind it. Businesses often twist science to make money. Lawyers do it to win cases. Political activists distort science to fit their agenda, bureaucrats to protect their turf. Reporters keep falling for it. Scientists sometimes go along with it because they like being famous.
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
You might wonder how this hurts taxpayers, especially if you’re a liberal and you think these nonprofits fight for worthy causes. So here’s the kicker: that $11 billion meant for consumer relief? Not only did a lot of it go to Democratic-favored nonprofits instead, but it ended up being much less than $11 billion. That’s because the DOJ offered banks a huge discount whenever they “donated” that money to those nonprofits. Most of the settlements gave banks double or triple credit toward their fine for every dollar they donated to these nonprofits—for instance, a Bank of America $1.15 million “donation” to the National Urban League counted as $2.6 million toward meeting its settlement obligation, and every $1.5 million to La Raza counted as $3.5 million of consumer relief. This is so mind-boggling that it’s worth summing up: after the financial crisis, the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead. And being fond of money, the banks took the DOJ up on the offer. Now that’s a great quid pro quo—the DOJ gets to look good, the banks get to keep most of their money, and the liberal nonprofits get lots of funding.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
With all cameras on me, Chip released the blindfold and said, “Ta-da!” I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. A shipwreck, maybe? On the back of a semi? “What is that?” I said. “I got this for you, Jo!” Chip replied. “That better not be for me,” I said. It was the ugliest, rundown-looking, two-story shack of a boat I’d ever seen. “What the heck are we going to do with a houseboat?” “That’s our new home!” Chip said, beaming with pride at his purchase. “What? You are crazy. We are not living on a houseboat.” It quickly dawned on me that this wasn’t a joke and Chip wasn’t even close to kidding. I wasn’t mishearing him. He was dead serious about making that boat our home for the next six months. I just about lost it. “How can we live on the water, Chip? Three of our kids don’t even know how to swim! Did you think this through?!” Then he fessed up and told me how much money he’d spent on it. As it all sank in, I realized I’d never been so mad at him--ever--and that’s saying something. “Come on. At least come look at it. I know this can work,” he pleaded. As soon as we walked a little closer, we could see the holes. Holes. In the boat. We pulled ourselves up onto the flatbed and went inside to find the interior covered in mold. Someone had taken the AC unit out on top and left a gaping hole in the roof, so for years it had rained straight into the boat. We tried turning the engine over, and of course it didn’t start. That’s when Chip got angry. “I think I got scammed,” he said. “Chip, did you even look at this thing before you bought it?” “Well, no,” he said. “It was a great deal, and there were all kinds of pictures. It looked like it was in great shape. Oh, wait a minute. I bet the guy just put up pictures of this thing from when he bought it, like in 1980 or something. That sorry sucker.” “Sorry sucker? Chip…” By this point I’m trying to decide if we could scrap it for parts.
Joanna Gaines (The Magnolia Story)
Variations on a tired, old theme Here’s another example of addict manipulation that plagues parents. The phone rings. It’s the addict. He says he has a job. You’re thrilled. But you’re also apprehensive. Because you know he hasn’t simply called to tell you good news. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Then comes the zinger you knew would be coming. The request. He says everybody at this company wears business suits and ties, none of which he has. He says if you can’t wire him $1800 right away, he won’t be able to take the job. The implications are clear. Suddenly, you’ve become the deciding factor as to whether or not the addict will be able to take the job. Have a future. Have a life. You’ve got that old, familiar sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. This is not the child you gladly would have financed in any way possible to get him started in life. This is the child who has been strung out on drugs for years and has shown absolutely no interest in such things as having a conventional job. He has also, if you remember correctly, come to you quite a few times with variations on this same tired, old story. One variation called for a car so he could get to work. (Why is it that addicts are always being offered jobs in the middle of nowhere that can’t be reached by public transportation?) Another variation called for the money to purchase a round-trip airline ticket to interview for a job three thousand miles away. Being presented with what amounts to a no-choice request, the question is: Are you going to contribute in what you know is probably another scam, or are you going to say sorry and hang up? To step out of the role of banker/victim/rescuer, you have to quit the job of banker/victim/rescuer. You have to change the coda. You have to forget all the stipulations there are to being a parent. You have to harden your heart and tell yourself parenthood no longer applies to you—not while your child is addicted. Not an easy thing to do. P.S. You know in your heart there is no job starting on Monday. But even if there is, it’s hardly your responsibility if the addict goes well dressed, badly dressed, or undressed. Facing the unfaceable: The situation may never change In summary, you had a child and that child became an addict. Your love for the child didn’t vanish. But you’ve had to wean yourself away from the person your child has become through his or her drugs and/ or alcohol abuse. Your journey with the addicted child has led you through various stages of pain, grief, and despair and into new phases of strength, acceptance, and healing. There’s a good chance that you might not be as healthy-minded as you are today had it not been for the tribulations with the addict. But you’ll never know. The one thing you do know is that you wouldn’t volunteer to go through it again, even with all the awareness you’ve gained. You would never have sacrificed your child just so that you could become a better, stronger person. But this is the way it has turned out. You’re doing okay with it, almost twenty-four hours a day. It’s just the odd few minutes that are hard to get through, like the ones in the middle of the night when you awaken to find that the grief hasn’t really gone away—it’s just under smart, new management. Or when you’re walking along a street or in a mall and you see someone who reminds you of your addicted child, but isn’t a substance abuser, and you feel that void in your heart. You ache for what might have been with your child, the happy life, the fulfilled career. And you ache for the events that never took place—the high school graduation, the engagement party, the wedding, the grandkids. These are the celebrations of life that you’ll probably never get to enjoy. Although you never know. DON’T LET    YOUR KIDS  KILL  YOU  A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children PART 2
Charles Rubin (Don't let Your Kids Kill You: A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children)
We began the show by asking: Who did more for the world, Michael Milken or Mother Teresa? This seems like a no-brainer. Milken is the greedy junk-bond king. One year, his firm paid him $550 million. Then he went to jail for breaking securities laws. Mother Teresa is the nun who spent her lifetime helping the poor and died without a penny. Her good deeds live on even after her death; several thousand sisters now continue the charities she began. At first glance, of course Mother Teresa did more for the world. But it's not so simple. Milken's selfish pursuit of profit helped a lot of people, too. Think about it: By pioneering a new way for companies to raise money, Milken created millions of jobs. The ignorant media sneered at 'junk bonds', but Milken's innovative use of them meant exciting new ideas flourished. We now make calls on a national cellular network established by a company called McCaw Cellular, which Milken financed. And our calls are cheaper because Milken's junk bonds financed MCI. CEO Bill McGowan simply couldn't get the money anywhere else. Without Milken, MCI wouldn't have grown from 11 to 50,000 employees. CNN's 24-hour news and Ted Turner's other left-wing ventures were made possible by Milken's 'junk'. The world's biggest toy company, Mattel, the cosmetics company Revlon, and the supermarket giant Safeway were among many rescued from bankruptcy by Milken's junk bonds. He financed more than 3,000 companies, including what are now Barnes & Noble, AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Mellon Bank, Occidental Petroleum, Jeep Eagle, Calvin Klein, Hasbro, Days Inn, 7-Eleven, and Computer Associates. Millions of people have productive employment today because of Michael Milken. (Millions of jobs is hard to believe, and when 'Greed' aired, I just said he created thousands of jobs; but later I met Milken, and he was annoyed with me because he claimed he'd created millions of jobs. I asked him to document that, to name the companies and the jobs, and he did.)
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
May I ask you a question? If you have to hold your breath too long, what is it that makes you desperate to breathe again?” “I’m running out of oxygen, I guess.” “That’s the interesting fact. It isn’t the absence of oxygen. It’s the presence of carbon dioxide. Kind of the same thing, but not exactly. The point is, you could suck up any kind of gas, and as long as it wasn’t carbon dioxide, your brain would be happy. You could have a chest full of nitrogen, no oxygen at all, about to kill you stone dead, and your lungs would say, hey man, we’re cool, no carbon dioxide here, no need for us to start pumping again until we see some. Which they never will, because you’ll never breathe again. Because you’ll never need to. Because you have no carbon dioxide. And so on. So those folks started sniffing nitrogen, but you have to go to the welding shop and the cylinders are too heavy to lift, so then they tried helium from the balloon store, but you needed masks and tubes, and the whole thing still looks weird, so in the end most folks won’t be satisfied with anything less than the old-fashioned bottle of pills and the glass of scotch. Exactly like it used to be. Except it can’t be anymore. Those pills were most likely either Nembutal or Seconal, and both of those substances are tightly controlled now. There’s no way to get them. Except illegally, of course, way down where no one can see you. There are sources. The holy grail. Most of the offers are scams, naturally. Powdered Nembutal from China, and so on. Dissolve in water or fruit juice. Maybe eight or nine hundred bucks for a lethal dose. Some poor desperate soul takes the cash to MoneyGram and sends it off, and then waits at home, anxious and tormented, and never sees any powdered Nembutal from China, because there never was any. The powder in the on-line photograph was talc, and the prescription bottle was for something else entirely. Which I felt was a new low, in the end. They’re preying on the last hopes of suicidal people.
Lee Child (Make Me (Jack Reacher, #20))
Can you send stuff out from Nepal by air, John?’ ‘Ooh! No. No. I can’t do anything like that. No. No. No. Now, I know a man. He knows a man who might know.’ ‘How much would it cost?’ ‘Well, money is the thing, and they always do things for a fair and honest price, I promise you.’ ‘What’s a fair price, John?’ ‘You will tell me, I’m quite sure.’ ‘What will you want out of it, John?’ ‘If I help you do business, I’m sure you will give me a drink.’ ‘A drink?’ ‘Yes. If a man does something for you, you give him a drink. Please, if everything goes well, give me a drink.’ ‘Can you check that the quality will be all right?’ ‘I only smoke Tom Thumb, but I know a man who has a knife.’ I took this as a yes. ‘Can you make it smell-proof?’ ‘Not if God made it smell.’ ‘Do you know a man who can?’ ‘No. But if you do, let him come and do it, or give me instructions.’ ‘How much can they send?’ ‘I should think it depends on when you want to do it by.’ ‘Well, John, the Americans will want to do a ton as soon as possible.’ ‘Now I was in America once, and the thing is that Americans will always want more, and there is no end to their madness. Lovely people, for sure, but you have to keep them in line. When my visa ran out, the Immigration asked me why I wanted to extend it, and I said it was because I hadn’t run out of money. He stamped it and said, “Have a nice day.” So, if the Americans ask for a ton tomorrow, say you will do half a ton when Wales win the Triple Crown. That will deal with their madness, and everyone can get on with their lives. It saves all that tidding.’ ‘Tidding?’ ‘Talking Imaginary Deals.’ Accurately conveying the contents of my conversation with Old John to Ernie wasn’t easy. I told Ernie hashish could be exported from Nepal for about the same price as Robert Crimball charged in Bangkok, but 500 kilos was the most they could do at one time, and someone would have to be sent out to ensure the consignment was smell-proof. Ernie sent his right-hand man, Tom Sunde, with money, instructions, and smell-proof know-how. Tom came to London first before going to Kathmandu to meet Old John. He had been authorised by Ernie to keep nothing from me regarding the intricacies of the New York scam.
Howard Marks (Mr. Nice)
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The value of money is a scam perpetuated by those who have it over those who don't.
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
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GTA Cheats
Why did they insulate us from criticism? Why didn't they load us up with useful tools? Why didn't they teach us to satisfy an audience? I realized I had been scammed. They wanted us to feel as good as possible for as long as possible in order to get as much money out of us as they could. The way to do that was to assure us we were already geniuses.
Matt Bird (The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers)
the whole car insurance industry was a scam. A large, money-making, corporate crime perpetuated by corporations and powers that spanned the world.
Ian C.P. Irvine (Say You're Sorry: Book One (DCI Campbell McKenzie #1A))
Con artists know all about dissonance and self-justification. They know that when people who think of themselves as smart and capable are faced with the evidence that they spent thousands of dollars on a magazine-subscription scam (yes, those still exist) or were lured into a romance with a fraudulent but seductive online Romeo (or Juliet), few will reduce dissonance by deciding they aren’t smart and capable. Instead, many will justify spending that money by spending even more money to recoup their sunk costs—their losses. This way of resolving dissonance protects their self-esteem but virtually guarantees their further victimization
Carol Tavris (Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts)
Crime committed by those living on the edge of survival is one thing. A Nigerian scam artist once told The New York Times that he felt guilty for hurting others, but “poverty will not make you feel the pain.”13 What Gupta and Madoff did is something different. They already had everything: unimaginable wealth, prestige, power, freedom. And they threw it all away because they wanted more.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
Richard [Baker] had done his homework. From the beginning, he pointed out, the Buddhist practice of begging was based on an ancient notion of accumulating merit—not unlike the Roman Catholic indulgence scams. By giving food and money to the monks, wealthy patrons essentially accumulated merit badges, which were redeemable in the next life. Richard wondered if the tradition of begging—on the streets or in board rooms—wasn't corrupt. "Don't we want to avoid the idea of merit?
Michael Downing (Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center)
If a job makes you pay money to work for them, it’s a scam. Period.
Keith Bradford (Life Hacks: Any Procedure or Action That Solves a Problem, Simplifies a Task, Reduces Frustration, Etc. in One's Everyday Life (Life Hacks Series))
You don't have to work to earn money to feed and clothe a body when it's dead. No one can take your dignity away when you're gone. I wish I could say what shuts down that thought is love for myself as a person deserving of life, or the fear of breaking the hearts of those who love me. Those feelings are present, but they aren't enough to shut it up. What makes me turn it off is another sensation that's always with me - a burning rage, sometimes morphing into total hatred. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Fuck you for making me even consider that for a second. You may not want me to live how I need to live in order to be happy, but I won't give you the satisfaction of no longer having me as a problem. I will never stop being a burden on the state when the state decided to make me one in the first place. If I have to scam, commit crimes, and become a nuisance to the taxpayer, so be it. And I'll never once feel guilty. I can't say I didn't try doing things 'the right way'. If you don't allow me to exist as a person, I have no choice but to exist as a problem.
C.R. Houghton
I have a shameful confession to make: Secretly, I am not lazy. I’ve learned that if I do literally nothing for more than a year, two at most, I start to get depressed. I’m not recanting my old manifesto. I still hope to make it to my grave without ever getting a job job — showing up for eight or more hours a day to a place with fluorescent lighting where I’m expected to feign bushido devotion to a company that could fire me tomorrow and someone’s allowed to yell at you but you’re not allowed to yell back. But once I become genuinely engaged in a project, I can become fanatically absorbed, spending hundreds of hours on it, no matter how useless and unremunerative. As a teacher, I edit my students’ writing with a nit-picking precision and big-picture ambition they may likely never experience again. And I don’t believe most people are lazy. They would love to be fully, deeply engaged in something worthwhile, something that actually mattered, instead of forfeiting their limited hours on Earth to make a little more money for men they’d rather throw fruit at as they pass by in tumbrels. It’s no coincidence that so many social movements arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine. One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else. Grade school teachers called it “busywork” — pointless, time-wasting tasks to keep you from acting up and bothering them. ("It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam", The New York Times)
Tim Kreider
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Aneliese Klien
Hello all, Why must we be confused by all this online scammers when we all know that there has never been any other oracle apart from the the great spell casters called lama lama oracle temple, The great oracle and also i my self called kuq ya that is greatest of all, Kuq ya means GREATEST AMONG ALL THE SPELL CASTERS. This oracle has been in existence for so many years even before i was born i inherited it from my great grand father. Since we have been existing we have never failed in solving any kind of problem anyone must have been having cos we know the spirits that we serve we never lets us down, We perform various sacrifice to this spirits from time to time to make our powerful and doings effective. This temple is out on the internet to tell all of you that is wasting your time and also your hard earned money dealing with all this hungry souls that called themselves spell casters by bring cause to themselves by claiming to be what they are not, We advise you all that you should stop it as it is not right to do such, Because those spell casters that called themselves different names / temples are scammers,You will do this greatest oracle good by doing that.They are scammers and all those testimony there are posted by them also and not the people they have help,They are doing all this to get money to fed there-self and there family members !!! BE WARNED ALL OF YOU THAT NEED HELP FROM SPELL CASTERS AS IT IS BECAUSE OF ALL OF YOU WE HAVE DECIDED TO COME ONLINE TO REDUCE AND STOP ALL THIS FAKE SPELL CASTERS, AS WE GOT PERMISSION FROM THE FBI !!.. I have made so many of them online that are spoiling this great temple good work go back to the sea and some blind. I am Dr Kuq Ya the messenger to the great oracle of Nigeria,Indian,Indonesia,Singapore,UK,USA,Uganda,japan,Spain,Germany,Paris,Dubai,South Africa. To mention but a few..We are know well there as the great temple that has helped them get many of there ANCESTRAL problems solve in recent times. But we are also extending this great offer to those that have any kind of problem, when i mean any kind of problem i mean any problem at all you might be having in this life,Such as getting your lover back,you want to be rich, you feel like using charms on someone to get something you like from him or her or getting your scam many back, wining a lottery, to mention but a few. KUQ YA IS HERE FOR YOUR SERVICES AND PLEASE STOP DEALING WITH THOSE SO CALLED SPELL CASTERS THAT HAVE REALLY MESSED UP THIS WORK ONLINE. I HAVE NEVER BEEN ONLINE,BUT THE PRESIDENTS OF THE ABOVE COUNTRIES CALLED ME ON PHONE AND ALSO PERSONALLY HOLD A MEETING AND THEY ASK ME THE MESSENGER TO START ADVERTING AND TELL ALL ABOUT THIS GREATEST ORACLE THAT IS SO DURABLE, PERFECT, MARVELOUS, AND GOOD WORKS TO AVOID THIS SCAMMING THAT IS GOING ON ONLINE. I WILL BE ENDING HERE NOW, IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING BOTHERING YOUR MIND AND YOU NEED PERMANENT SOLUTION TO IT WITHOUT ANY SIDE EFFECT OR HARM, KINDLY SEND AN EMAIL TO THE FOLLOWING EMAIL ADDRESS: great.spellcaster@yahoo.com Thanks and may the spirits guide you to read and understand what i said and also we will be awaiting response from you all that have problems that want it solve at once.Thanks for your patronage as you come. To enhance fast communication, Kindly send down your Name : Country: State: Address: More about the kind of help you want here: Phone number: Age: Gender : Job: and any other information's you know it will be so helpful on the kind of work and help you wish for here. Because we solve any kind of problem in this life. NOTE : MY GMAIL ACCOUNT IS NOW BAD AS YOU CAN ONLY GET ME ON THIS EMAIL : great.spellcaster@yahoo.com. So don't contact me via me gmail account. And also our spell casting here has no side effect, As it is just to grant you your heart desires without any problem.
Kuqya
Phishing to Get Money The classic Nigerian scam (also called a 419 scam) is alive and well. You receive an email from someone claiming a relative or someone else has millions of dollars. Unfortunately, the sender can’t get the money without your help. The email says that if you help retrieve the money, you’ll get a substantial portion of the money for your troubles. This scam often requires the victim to pay a small sum of money with the promise of a large sum of money. However, the large sum never appears. Instead, the attackers come up with reasons why they need just a little more money. In many cases, the scammers request access to your bank account to deposit your share, but instead they use it to empty your bank account.
Darril Gibson (CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-401 Study Guide)
These funds had been built up over many years, mainly from North American sources sympathetic to the cause of a united Ireland, and it seemed that the money never entered the Republic of Ireland or the Province, but would be invested mainly in Europe. There was also income from protection rackets, bank robberies, post office raids, black taxis, DSS scams, video and CD pirating, fruit machines, republican clubs and pubs and local collections among sympathisers. 
Martin McGartland (Fifty Dead Men Walking: A true story of a secret agent who infiltrated the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA))
Before wrapping up this chapter, let us look at one of the deadly scams in the Indian primary market history. There was company named ‘MS shoes east’. Shares of this company traded in Rs 150-200 range throughout the year 1994. But towards December 1994 it spurted to Rs 500 without any justifiable rationale behind the raise. Its promoter Pavan Sachedeva and his broker artificially manipulated the stock price to this level.   By February 1995, the company devised an expansion plan for an estimated expense Rs 700 crores. It proposed to raise around Rs 428 crores by means of Fully convertible bonds. These bonds were to be sold at Rs 199 each through public issue. The idea was to provoke people to subscribe the issue with a hope of converting this bond of Rs 199 to a share of Rs 500.   Well, his brokers was constantly buying the stocks from the open market to maintain the price at that high level. But the situation had already worsened. He had bought too much and had too little money at hand that he could not pay the stock exchange for all the purchases he made. BSE could not give money to the sellers of that security. Things turned out to be serious. You may find it hard to believe  - the BSE was shut down for three consecutive days without any business.   Before this drama came to light, FCD ('Fully Convertible Debenture) public issue was a big success and it almost stole the show. Delighted by the overwhelming response from the investing community, MS Shoes had announced to close the public issues few days before the stipulated time. The world came to know that the cruel plan of manipulating the stock price was only to push the bond issue successfully. Even the authorities woke up to the problem. The company was issued a notice. And also it allowed the investors to take back their FCD application. Almost all the investors took back. Even the underwriter refused to buy the unsold portion of the issue because the company had voluntarily announced to close the issue before the end date. The ruling was in favor the underwriter. Sachedeva declared himself to be innocent. MS shoes office resembled a mourning house with  deserted look.   There was one Sachedeva who came to light. There were and probably still are more of them out there.
Chellamuthu Kuppusamy (The Science of Stock Market Investment - Practical Guide to Intelligent Investors)
The value of money is a scam             perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
Westerners live in a complex society, and opportunities for scamming relatively small amounts of money off the bottom are almost endless—and very hard to catch. But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American defense contractors is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the financial industry. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases—insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting—implicated the company’s chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion—or about $45,000 per citizen. Most
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
Revival: A Novel (Stephen King) - Your Highlight on page 75 | location 1013-1015 | Added on Sunday, 7 December 2014 23:00:46 Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.
Anonymous
She fell for the scam that easy federal money could make law school possible for everyone, and took the first bold steps that would lead to Foggy Bottom.
John Grisham (The Rooster Bar)
You don't have to work to earn money to feed and clothe a body when it's dead. No one can take your dignity away when you're gone. I wish I could say what shuts down that thought is love for myself as a person deserving of life, or the fear of breaking the hearts of those who love me. Those feelings are present, but they aren't enough to shut it up. What makes me turn it off if another sensation that's always with me - a burning rage, sometimes morphing into total hatred. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Fuck you for making me even consider that for a second. You may not want me to live how I need to live in order to be happy, but I won't give you the satisfaction of no longer having me as a problem. I will never stop being a burden on the state when the state decided to make me one in the first place. If I have to scam, commit crimes, and become a nuisance to the taxpayer, so be it. And I'll never once feel guilty. I can't say I didn't try doing things 'the right way'. If you don't allow me to exist as a person, I have no choice but to exist as a problem.
C.R. Houghton
You don't have to work to earn money to feed and clothe a body when it's dead. No one can take your dignity away when you're gone. I wish I could say what shuts down that thought is love for myself as a person deserving of life, or the fear of breaking the hearts of those who love me. Those feelings are present, but they aren't enough to shut it up. What makes me turn it off is another sensation that's always with me - a burning rage, sometimes morphing into total hatred. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Fuck you for making me even consider that for a second. You may not want me to live how I need to live in order to be happy, but I won't give you the satisfaction of no longer having me as a problem. I will never stop being a burden on the state when the state decided to make me one in the first place. If I have to scam, commit crimes, and become a nuisance to the taxpayer, so be it. And I'll never once feel guilty. I can't say I didn't try doing things 'the right way'. If you don't allow me to exist as a person, I have no choice but to exist as a problem.
C.R. Houghton
The main test for residence is that if you’re physically in the UK for more than half the year, then you count as a UK resident. If you’re not a resident of the UK you only pay tax on money earned in the UK, not anything earned elsewhere. And if you’re rich enough and your accountant is talented enough, everything you earn should be from elsewhere.
The Rebel Accountant (TAXTOPIA: How I Discovered the Injustices, Scams and Guilty Secrets of the Tax Evasion Game)
A corporation offers woke people money and influence, and in return they lend it the protective cloak of wokeness’s moral superiority to hide its wrongdoing.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
HERE’S ANOTHER ANGLE to the quid pro quo between woke nonprofits and corporations. Remember those massive settlements that companies like Goldman pay for violating laws, like the $5 billion in fines it paid for that Malaysian scandal I talked about in the Chapter 1? Well, here’s a second part of the scam—the settlement money that’s supposed to go to taxpayers ends up in the pockets of left-wing nonprofits
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
If they’re fines, they naturally go to the US Treasury, and the Constitution says, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”7 That means that Congress decides what happens to that bank money. But if it turns into donations instead of fines, the money never goes to the Treasury, and the executive branch gets to decide where it goes.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
In a different Google case, federal district judge James Ware rewrote the settlement to direct $500,000 to his own alma mater, Santa Clara University School of Law, where he taught classes. The money—I’m not joking about this—went to fund a center on ethics.8
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
The scam is fundamentally the same: when corporations reach settlements over their wrongdoing, judges and lawyers find ways to direct the money to their pet causes instead of to the people who were wronged.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
In 2020, the mantra of “keeping money out of politics” was no longer a liberal slogan.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
He runs a crew that’s been doing real-estate scams in Florida. They’d buy and sell the same house four or five times among themselves to jack up the price, take out a giant mortgage, and then walk away. That worked in boom times when houses were going up. Now they’re taking money to prevent foreclosures. The victim signs his house over to them.
Thomas Perry (The Informant (Butcher's Boy, #3))
We have a morality and ethics problem or crisis. Everyone in their profession is doing something wrong, illegal, or criminating to those they offer service or product. Clients or consumers are always being scammed. Professions, Institutions, or corporates are scamming their clients, especially the poor ones. Most business or institutes are cheating their clients. You never get the service or product you pay for. You never get what you were promised. Bank steals people’s money, ISPs steal people’s data bundles, and Hospitals steal people’s health, organs, and lives. Security companies are the ones stealing, killing and kidnapping people. The media is always feeding people lies. Police officers are committing crimes. Politicians are traitors and support terrorists. NGO and foundations are fronts for money laundering, drug dealers and criminals. It is like everyone is doing the opposite of what they need to do . It is because we lost integrity and now, we are losing morals, principles, values and ethics more and more. We have no shame in doing wrong or harm to other people.
De philosopher DJ Kyos
Put together two stock market forecasts - one predicting that prices will rise next month and one warning of a drop. Send the first mail to fifty thousand people and the second mail to a different set of fifty thousand. Suppose that after one month, the indices have fallen. Now you can send another mail, but this time only to the fifty thousand who received the correct prediction. This fifty thousand you divide into two groups: the first half learns prices will increase next month, and the second half discovers they will fall. Continue doing this. After ten months, around a hundred people will remain, all of whom you have advised impeccably. From their perspective, you are a genius. You have proven that you are truly in possession of prophetic powers. Some of these people will trust you with their money. Take it and start a new life in Brazil.
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly)
The scam boggles the mind when we consider that three of the top officers of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York publicly supported Bolshevism – Sanders, Peabody and William Boyce Thompson.
Paul T. Hellyer (The Money Mafia: A World in Crisis)
At one time, I worked for a 401k retirement Plan company that handled retirement plans for Transamerica, Vanguard, and all others 401k and IRA corporations operating in America. I can tell you, first hand, that retirement plans are a scam designed to make investors money without spending a dime of their own money.
James Thomas Kesterson Jr
banker: (n.) scam of the earth.
Sol Luckman (The Angel's Dictionary)
He said the other day that someone had taken father’s his money in a scam not long before he died.
Sarah Pearse (The Retreat (Detective Elin Warner, #2))
They’re keeping this shocking secret away from you… And it’s a 12-second eye trick that will fix your eyesight and give you 20/20 vision within a matter of DAYS. That’s right. And it works on just about anyone, no matter the age. That means your doctor is WRONG and there IS a way to reverse your bad eye sight even if you’re almost 70. Don’t believe me? This U.S. doctor is actually challenging the ENTIRE billion dollar industry with this discovery so they can keep making money… Money from expensive glasses, eye exams, lasik surgeries, and more… Things that we all know are just band-aid temporary solutions to our failing eyesight… And he’s been fighting to get the truth known. So if you wanna know what secret your eye doctor is probably hiding… Click here to find
The eye industry is SCAMMING you and you don’t even know
Households that use credit cards pay hundreds of dollars annually for the privilege of having a worse lifestyle in the future. What an amazing scam!
Erik Wecks (How to Manage Your Money When You Don't Have Any)
ED issues notice to NDTV, Prannoy Roy, wife Radhika and Vikram Chandra for Rs.4369 cr. Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) violations with help of Chidambaram. This also includes the 40 million dollars routed to NDTV by Malaysian firm Maxis’s subsidiary Astro, the accused in the Aircel- Maxis scam. According to Income Tax Commissioner S K Srivastava’s complaint to CBI, this 40 million dollar was the bribe received by Chidambaram from Maxis for the illegal Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance of
Sree Iyer (NDTV Frauds V2.0 - The Real Culprit: A completely revamped version that shows the extent to which NDTV and a Cabal will stoop to hide a saga of Money Laundering, Tax Evasion and Stock Manipulation.)
If we take it much further, then paying tithing in church can also be considered a scam. Simply, the priest is idle in prayer; patiently waiting for your 10% of your income. You work to feed him. Free money.
Mwanandeke Kindembo