DONATION POST: The Ponzi/Fraud Scourge Continues

Dear Readers,

We’re midway through December and are facing the challenge of carving out a tolerable existence and the costs of keeping the PP Blog going into the new year. The cupboard is bare, and today we’re once again asking for your help.

Today began as do so many days: A quick look in our queue to see how relentless the spammers were overnight, followed by a quick look at our email for the purposes of pruning spam and finding the notes readers submit. The spammers have been particularly relentless lately. The Blog received 13,167 spams in November alone. It has received 8,787 so far this month, a pace that promises to top the November standard.

Sifting through the mess creates an additional maintenance chore during these lean times. The situation places a demand on labor and time. There are very few short days at the PP Blog.

It has struck me recently how bizarre certain fraud cases continue to be; it’s as though there is no ceiling to the absurdity and that no human being is off-limits. In Illinois, for example, a man scammed a woman — now 85 — who survived a Nazi labor camp.

At the moment, this question cannot be answered: How low will they go.

Longtime readers probably have noticed we’ve also been covering more and more stories involving purported “sovereign citizens.” Navigating that thicket is important because it shows Ponzi and fraud madness sometimes are symptoms of a larger madness. In any event, the universe that emerges is one in which the adjectives contradict the nouns. It is worrisome because the crimes are borderless, which is to say the madness can spread electronically from state to state and even country to country.

We are doing our best to keep you informed.