Posts Tagged → email
Avoiding payment scams is easy
Last year, some local person took a picture of a check I had written to a local business, and they used that picture to create several fake checks written against my bank account. Because I bank locally with a relatively small bank owned by local people I know and trust, and because I have personal relationships with the bank staff, the forged/fake scam checks were caught right away.
“I looked at that check, and then the next one, and the next one, and just I knew that there was no way that Josh First was writing them. They are ridiculous on their face. I mean…flowers and gourmet cat food? No! No way. I knew that is not Josh. Chainsaws, yes, could be, I could be fooled by that if someone tried it, but gourmet cat food, no, flowers hell no“, said the local bank branch manager with a big smile.
Because the bank manager knows me and my business personally, he was easily able to discern the fake checks from real ones. He saved me a lot of heartache. And so I recommend to you that you use your local banks, that are owned and run by local people. Unlike the big banks like Chase, these local people get to know you, know your face, and are accountable and connected to the community around them.
A month later I got a call from a sweet and very distressed woman in Arizona, who had shipped off five thousand dollars worth of product from her small business based on a check written in my name. No, I assured her, I had nothing to do with it. I had no need for marketing products, and certainly not her particular products. This nice lady and I had a long conversation about how much America has changed in our adulthood, and not for the better. She said the scam had really hurt her financially.
Fast forward almost a year and I recently got a call from a nice young man in Alaska. A check bearing my business name had been used to purchase thirty-five hundred dollars of beauty salon hair and nail products from his friend in Florida, and the proceeds had been sent to Alaska to help him purchase a home there. Only days after he had deposited the check in his account was he informed that the check was bad, and that in fact he did not have the money. His friend in Florida was cheated out of her salon products.
I would say the common thread I have seen across all of these check scams is that the person getting scammed does not really look into the check they have received. For example, why would a buyer of beauty salon products in Florida pay with a check from a business in Pennsylvania that does land and timber work? This obviously makes no sense, and the young man admitted it.
And when I spoke with the nice lady in Arizona last summer, she too admitted that this same issue had given her pause. To which I asked her “Why didn’t you call us with your question before taking the check? We could have easily protected you from committing this mistake.”
Scams are everywhere: Email scams asking for money, phone calls asking for money, malware and phishing scams by email and text (DO NOT CLICK ON THEIR CONTENTS and links), phone calls about getting a low cost mortgage on your penis enlargement, updating your nonexistent home warranty/ extended car warranty/ computer warranty etc etc etc. We are inundated in this garbage.
You have to care about yourself enough to stay on guard and defend your interests. One little mistake can cause you a lot of grief and cost you a lot of money.
The best ways to protect yourself from being victimized are: 1) Ask yourself if this is a service or product I really have? 2) Is this phone call or email a normal way for a real bona fide service provider to communicate? 3) Why is there a company name from far away on this check? And you can always call that company whose name is on the check and ask them if they wrote the check.
Had that happened in the most recent scam, I would have said “I have nothing against dudes who use girl makeup, but I will also say that I am the last man on Planet Earth who would do so, and so there, you have your answer: The check is bad.”
You just gotta ask a question or two if you want to stay out of scam trouble.
Why Ken Matthews’ show was terminated at WHP580 AM
In 2013 or 2014, radio personality Ken Matthews followed the late and great gravelly voiced, cowboy hat wearing, hard charging, chiseled face long time prime time radio host Bob Durgin here on Harrisburg, PA’s WHP580. While Bob frequently talked about the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s most recent ridiculous and pointless regulation that had squashed Mabel’s farm stand, or that had SWAT raided some little girl’s lemonade stand, which, believe me, all resonated here in Central PA, Ken Matthews brought a broader and more general American government policy discussion.
Like most conservative talk show hosts today, Matthews hit the daily or weekly zeitgeist of subjects and issues, from the global warming/ global cooling/ global whatever hoax to regional politics to the 2020 stolen election. But when he first arrived, it was clear that Matthews was working hard to impress the radio station engineers. And it was clear that they were making him work at it, because his first few months on air were a little tense. Listeners could feel that tension, and it seemed that Matthews might just be a fly-by.
Eventually, Matthews and WHP580 engineer Art Selby hit their rhythm, and the show took off. When he first arrived in town, I did some amateur on-the-ground citizen reporting “live from the Perry County court house!” for Ken. I frequently called in to the show or sent an email, either of which Ken would almost always take on air. After all, I have been involved in politics and culture battles for a long time, and I try to offer substance. And for a long time it felt like I, too, had a quiet, good rhythm with Ken Matthews.
But then somewhere around 2019 Ken changed. He became more popular, more self-aware, more self-important. He did some radio shows for Rush Limbaugh, and suddenly Ken’s on- air voice changed. His personality changed. His patience with callers changed. His voice was clipped. He sounded snooty. It was obvious that Ken Matthews was awfully proud of Ken Matthews, and that he looked down on just about everyone. Because he was important, ya know.
My last interaction with Ken was mid-January, 2021, I think when his radio show became nationally syndicated and Ken was feeling especially very important. While I was on a long drive returning a car trailer to a garage in rural Centre County from Harrisburg, a very low, unimportant-person kind of thing to do…I suppose. Below are the screen shots from our emails that immediately followed my being on hold for half of Ken’s entire three hour show. What was so important at my end? Well, I wanted to share with Ken and his listeners my own law-abiding experience in Washington, DC, on January 6th. It was exactly the kind of call-in Ken used to take, about a subject he was covering.
I actually ended up staying on hold just because I was fascinated at the technology at play. My truck’s own AM radio had long since lost contact with WHP580, but here I was clearly connected via a tenuous but unbroken cell phone call. Driving across the lightless, deep darkness that is rural Central PA in winter time, hearing WHP580’s on-hold show through my bluetooth connection made me feel a bit like an astronaut floating way out in space, far from Earth, yet with a very slight connection to the Houston control room back home. It was both fascinating and a little assuring.
As you can see from the emails below, Ken’s snarky, disrespectful responses showed he relished keeping me on hold. He was enjoying being mean. I don’t know why he didn’t just get on the phone with me during a radio break and say that he didn’t want to talk about January 6th, or why he didn’t simply ask call screener Art Selby to come back on and tell me they were not going to take it (Art had told me they would take the call) (And why not just send a normal email response that says “I am sorry you think that”). Instead, Ken enjoyed being a jerk, even and especially when someone he knew was a loyal follower told him he was. Ken’s sense of personal power and self importance took over his brain. Making people feel badly made Ken feel good.
And that is exactly what got Ken’s nationwide radio show canned two weeks ago. Ken Matthews’ ever increasing on-air arrogance eventually overrode his professionalism so egregiously that he was terminated on the spot. His behavior has been called a “slip-up,” a hot mic moment etc. But the actual truth is Ken Matthews had long since cared little about what other people thought or think, because he had become way too important.
While I felt stung that January night on my way up north, my desire for revenge against Ken for treating me like a jerk was gone a few hours later, by the time I got back to Harrisburg late that night. Afterwards, I never called or wrote in to the radio show, and only quite infrequently listened to it. Because let’s face it, Mark Steyn, Mark Levin, and a bunch of other radio hosts all do pretty much the same format and content. And listeners can hear pretty much the same thing, without having to listen to Ken Matthews’ self-important, arrogant voice grating on your ears.
It had been my long time loyalty to local station WHP580, and the occasional local story flavor, that had kept me listening to Ken Matthews for several years, during his transition to “stardom” and then after he had become an all-out on-air jerk. All that shred of loyalty ended with the email exchange below in January 2021.
So I am not happy that Ken Matthews got his come-uppance. But boy, did he need it. And he earned it. Hopefully he learns from this experience, but it is doubtful he will.
Hillary Clinton: Public Threat #1
Had any Republican of note engaged in the same email account shenanigans as Hillary Clinton while she was employed by the American taxpayer to represent us abroad in the US State Department, his or her career would be over in seconds.
World-wide condemnation of her ham-handed use of unsecured, hackable email accounts to conduct secret official diplomatic business in a very competitive worldwide environment would have destroyed any Republican.
Never mind that Clinton’s secret, private email accounts were designed to avoid public scrutiny of transparent public email accounts. Public scrutiny of her emails might reveal the deep, dark corruption behind Clinton’s private sales of public influence through her role at the the US State Department to the Clinton Foundation.
The liberal mainstream media has given liberal Hillary Clinton multiple public opportunities to explain away her dangerous games that have cost Americans their personal security. But now even the mainstream press corps might have limits. Yesterday was apparently the end of the media coddling the Clintons have grown up with, because even liberal outposts like the Washington Post are now criticizing Hillary Clinton’s poor performance at her press event.
Would it not be rewarding to see Democrats subject more often to the same rules the media establishment apply to conservatives and Republicans? We might actually get some good government as a result. Or at least we won’t have an obvious, avowed public threat being considered for the most important, most influential public office on the planet.
409+
Last week, under pressure to perform at an adult, professional level, the senior staff at the NCAA folded right before appearing in court.
The discovery phase of a lawsuit brought against the NCAA for its disproportionate over-correction of Penn State University was about to begin, and with a handful of damning NCAA emails already in hand, the meaty part of discovery would have exposed the heavy handed NCAA overlords for what they are: Incompetent, vacuous bullies.
The fictional Louis Freeh “report” aka Hit Piece and Flaming Bomb Meant to Humble Penn State has gradually yielded to the collective bits of disbelief and basic deductive logic surrounding the Joe Paterno Assassination aka The Oxbow Incident.
Knowing now what we already knew two years ago, the NCAA storm trooper and tactical nuke assault on one of the very few pristine colleges in the nation has blown up in the NCAA’s own face.
Yes, we got our 409 wins back, but we deserve so much more.
And to have undergone so much knee-jerk reaction injustice…..Penn State deserves compensation, to be made whole, to get back what we lost, if it’s remotely possible.
I want blood.
I want guts.
I want a shred of public justice for Joe Paterno and Penn State, and for the student athletes immorally saddled with faux guilt from the sick, distant actions of a man they’d never met, let alone heard of (Jerry Sandusky).
To begin with, the Joe Paterno statue immediately goes back to its original prominent place on campus.
Then, every member of the PSU board involved in the debacle issues a personal, hand written apology. And then each resigns. I’ve got a few names to go with that demand.
Then each NCAA staff member associated with the debacle issues a hand written apology, and then resigns.
That’s what real leaders do when they fail badly.
And for those folks who really want to demonstrate their earnest attitude, I’ve got some old Japanese swords you can fall on. I’m tempted to serve as your second….to ensure a clean ending, of course.
A clean ending to a tragedy, a failure to protect little boys, a failure to act like grown men and women and apply justice carefully, a failure to protect the grown boys on the team and the many professional educators and students unfairly tarnished by the NCAA’s hasty, shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude.
And then there’s the scholarships, the bowl money PSU lost. The opportunities unfairly crushed. How do we get all that back?
And Mr Louis Freeh, you may be ex-FBI, but I’m ex-Penn State Nittany Lion. Don’t meet me in a dark alley.
Say what?
“Never put in writing something you aren’t ready to see and defend in a newspaper,” is an old adage governing good government.
In other words, be prepared to be held to what you write, especially if it’s in government emails.
If there’s one thing I am proud of, it is my willingness and ability to stake out earnest policy positions. Nothing wishy washy on this blog. But don’t ever expect to find racism or personally belittling comments here. Or in my emails.
It’s often painful to see people held accountable for their mistakes. Then again, it’s often a necessary result of having caused unwarranted pain to other people.
With great power goes great obligation and responsibility. When these basic rules of conduct are forgotten, inevitable chains of events are uncorked.
Now that we’ve seen it here in Pennsylvania, wouldn’t it be pleasing to see it in Washington, DC, too?
Thank you!
Attending a lovely social event recently, several people came up and told me that they enjoy what I write and asked me to keep on writing. That means a lot, because I usually don’t hear back unless someone strongly disagrees.
Writing opinion pieces and independent reports, and emailing them out, is a bit risky in the world of politics, because it reveals often closely held values. These can alienate anyone for any reason. On the other hand, what I have been told is that readers find that independent perspective refreshing.
Dear readers, you inspire me. Thank you!
-Josh
“Climate Change” Takes a Stake Through its Heart
Once again, recently unearthed emails from publicly funded climate researchers in Britain provide bomb-grade damage to the claims of global climate change.
Not only do these newly revealed, previously secret emails show collusion among researchers to overcome problems with their data, suppression of evidence that defies their claims, and their private doubts about global climate change, they also explicitly show what critics have claimed for years: The BBC news service has secretly colluded with the researchers to exclude their critics from getting air time, to match BBC reports with unfounded, essentially political claims by the researchers, and to cast aspersions on their critics.
In other words, the BBC is a willing tool to deceive the taxpayers who underwrite the BBC.
This is exactly the situation that America has with National Public Radio, a news service captured by politically partisan activists.
Like BBC, NPR also advocates for unfounded claims of global climate change, like today’s (6:30 PM on 11/29/11) interview with the US envoy to the United Nations climate change group, which ignored the recent bombshell reports (see below) and instead gave an unchallenged platform for a global climate change evangelist.
And what bothers me is that there are genuine, real, measurable environmental problems that need attention and funding, but which are undermined by the false issue of the sky-is-falling crisis of global climate change.
Read more at
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066706/BBC-sought-advice-global-warming-scientists-economy-drama-music–game-shows.html
…and more at
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2066240/Second-leak-climate-emails-Political-giants-weigh-bias-scientists-bowing-financial-pressure-sponsors.html