STATEMENT: PP Blog Experiencing Unusual Circumstance
The PP Blog is experiencing an unusual circumstance that has affected operations throughout the day. Data suggest the circumstance presented itself in the early morning hours.
An engineer is addressing the problem, which has persisted into the evening and appears to involve rogue traffic that is affecting the site in multiple ways.
Quick notes: For security reasons, I cannot provide precise details about this circumstance. What I can say is that a rogue element with a specific signature more or less “sat” on the Blog for the entire day and pulled a specific type of URL in mass quantities and displayed a remarkable capacity to cloak its origin.
The engineer observed this “performance,” which included an element of what I’ll describe as geographic shifting, live. The event eventually brought down the server after affecting performance negatively throughout the day.
So — to summarize and briefly walk this one back — the United States and other parts of the world are experiencing an unprecedented era of white-collar crime.
PP Blog readers have been denied information about these crimes/allegations. The Blog itself has been forced to spend more money and devote more time and energy just to keep itself online, even as its ability to publish at a profit or even at a break-even point has been eroded.
And what do readers see here (occasionally) and at other sites that bring them information and research about crime and scams?
Well, they see the apologists for the scammers and, at least sometimes, the scammers themselves running interference for the scams. It is simply remarkable how often the apologists and their scammer friends wrap themselves in religion and/or the flag while defending the indefensible.
The incongruities are virtually endless, and the scammers retreat into an infinite set of bizarre contingencies. The “explanations” are absurd, if not tortured — and some of the players lead groups of people into scam after scam after scam. Upon recognizing they’ve been scammed, some of the people join the insidious, wink-nod subculture and become scammers themselves.
Wealth gets eviscerated as the scammers tap into bank accounts and credit resources at the LOCAL level, and before long the damage spreads regionally, statewide, nationally and internationally.
A week or so ago I had an off-the-record chat with a person in the position of being able to make a difference. This person informed me that scammers in a specific case under investigation were working behind the scenes in such a way that it even affected this person’s PERSONAL life. This person did not identify the case, and I did not ask for the name. I know from my own research that this situation is repeating itself in venue after venue across the United States and that it very often involves and element of what I’ll describe as God talk.
Some readers likely have observed that I’m publishing fewer court documents these days and providing fewer links to documents. One of the reasons why is that the scammers involved in certain types of cases effectively have weaponized the documents, mining them for the names of public officials and then starting harassment campaigns against the officials.
This, of course, is not how it should be. The documents are public information and courts in general have been trying to maximize the amount of information available to the public.
But that very openness has been exploited to cause harm to public officials.
Coincident to all of this are various threats directed at the media, some of them explicit — but perhaps most often implicit.
In an earlier off-the-record chat with the person referenced above, I referenced a specific form of multilevel-marketing that involves what I’ll describe as a confluence of payment schemes, coupled with what I’ll describe as the Stepfordian marketing of such schemes on the Internet.
The sentence was barely out of my mouth when the person’s voice began to project disgust. And then the person, without a prompt, simply said that “they” go from scam to scam to scam, really not even pausing for a breath.
Patrick