When the FBI warns the public about a scam, you know it's serious. And that's the Phantom Hacker scam.  To make a long story short, the scam has 3 phases.  1) A random call from a major company (this is fake, BTW), such as Amazon, or a company you deal with) trying to convince you that you've been hacked, and they will convince you to download a remote control software so they can takeover your computer later. After convincing you, they hand off to part 2, a "fraud department of your financial institution".  2) A second fake contact calls you, claims to work for the fraud depart ..read more

A Type II "Vigilante Karen" was documented on Reddit harassing a father with his disabled child in San Francisco's Lands End, mistaking them as "old man dragging a drugged kid" over the July 4th weekend in 2023, and park police was summoned.  I am not going to repeat the whole story, you can click through the link yourself, but here's the TL;DR version:  Father, in his 40s, was with his disabled 7-year old son with severe intellectual disability at Lands End for some nature.  They were just walking on a trail when a wild Karen appeared...  This Karen in her 20s (no ot ..read more

Previously, we had discussed the four sub-types of Karens; (NOTE: for consistency, I'll be using the term Karen, and "Ken" if the subject is male. Apologies to actual people named Karen and Ken) Type I: "Serve me, peon!" Karen -- entitled Karen wanted people around her to serve her, no matter how inappropriate (i.e. "I don't work here, lady!" stories) Type II: Vigilante Karen -- narcissistic Karen believes she's doing the world right by enforcing some "law" or "standard" in her head, even though it was uncalled for, i.e. "Karen calls the cops on my wobbly disabled father for alleged public int ..read more

A reader of /r/scam posted this "job offer" and asked if it was a scam.  There are a couple red flags.  * While an employer can definitely run a credit report on a candidate, it is generally paid for by the employer. Asking a candidate to pass a credit report THEN come back to the employer is extremely fishy, esp. when there's not even a candidate number, employer profile, or such.  * The grammar is actually quite bad with several capitalization errors, typos, and just very awkward phrasing. Why would I not "think you are fit for the job" if I applied, and you wrote "we think y ..read more

NOTE: This post is also available at randomrantsbykc.blogspot.com as it explains how antivaxxers misuse statistics for propaganda purposes.  Recently, experts warned that pregnant women are being deliberately targeted with COVID vaccine misinformation. Some claimed that COVID vaccines can affect fertility, while another claimed vaccines cause stillbirths. One even cited a study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Preliminary Findings of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons" to claim the vaccine is unsafe for pregnant persons. But the study actuall ..read more

In January 2021, total deaths due to COVID in the US have passed 400000... that's LESS THAN A YEAR after the FIRST confirmed case (January 21st, 2020, in Seattle). Today, April 2021, it's already past 550000.  Keep in mind that the US death toll is the world's HIGHEST, even worse than China, where it was first discovered and turned the city of Wuhan into an almost ghost city.  Just to keep the numbers in perspective... 400000 about the same as the TOTAL US MILITARY CASUALTIES IN the entire World War II! (400103 COVID deaths as of Jan 19, 2021, vs 405000 total casualties as quoted fro ..read more

Previously, we had discussed the three sub-types of Karens; (NOTE: for consistency, I'll be using the term Karen, and "Ken" if the subject is male. Apologies to actual people named Karen and Ken) Type I: "Serve me, peon!" Karen -- entitled Karen wanted people around her to serve her, no matter how inappropriate (i.e. "I don't work here, lady!" stories) Type II: Vigilante Karen -- narcissistic Karen believes she's doing the world right by enforcing some "law" or "standard" in her head, even though it was uncalled for, i.e. "Karen calls the cops on my wobbly disabled father for alleged public in ..read more

 A recent Reddit thread on r/entitledpeople have pointed out yet another "subtype" of Karen, which I am dubbing "the punisher Karen", or type III. It shares traits from both type I and type II.  A type I Karen behaves out of entitlement and views everyone else beneath her, and thus she has no regard for rules, aka "rules are for losers". The "Central Park Karen" story I had used as my first example was one such... when a man (who happens to be black, but shared her surname) asked her to please leash her own dog in the leash-required area of the park, she called the police claiming he ..read more

The #pseudoCrisis started innocently enough... A woman "Julie Van Rosendaal" (cookbook author?) on Twitter asked... why is the butter no longer soft at room temperature?  Link to Tweet She also coined an article at The Globe and Mail, but it's behind a paywall, where she opined that farmers are adding supplements to the feed to boost production (according to a BBC article), the implication that inferior milk produced inferior butter is pretty clear.  Interesting question, but this is not a data point. It's is anecdotal, at best. However, what we *do* know is... unpasteurize ..read more

 I live in one of the densest cities in the US... San Francisco. 49 square miles with 80000+ residents, yet getting a good reliable Internet connection is far more difficult than it should be.  At this point, I am with AT&T DSL, because it's the standard phone provider, and DSL was counted as an add-on service. I sorta forgot to look at the overall picture, and turns out I was paying $170 a month for 2 phone lines and 1 18 Mbps down / 1.5 Mbps up ADSL line.  Which is ridiculous. That sort of connection won't even get me onto many "work from home" jobs which demands are much ..read more