Re: E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out of Billions

On Jan 25, 2011, at 4:26 PM, nicholas a. evans wrote:
> though I rarely have anything to add.  I was trying to think of other
> examples of "fraud as a successful business model" except on a smaller
> scale than the banksters, and two examples immediately sprung to mind:
> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-cancel-aol and

good one!

> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094155/.  Any more?  :)

Nice!  I had forgotten about that movie (filmed in Baltimore!)

I may have told this story here before, but when I lived in Ellicott  
City, MD all of my neighbors got their aluminum siding replaced with  
nice new vinyl siding for free.  A siding salesman made the rounds in  
our neighborhood telling about a hailstorm we had months before that  
damaged our siding and we could make a claim on our insurance.  I had  
him look at my siding and he said I had a certain number of dings per  
inch from the hail, but darned if I could see any, and that I should  
file a claim and that he would work with our adjuster to document it.   
I said no way, there was nothing wrong with my siding.  Meanwhile all  
my neighbors filed claims and sure enough this guy replaced siding on  
every house in the neighborhood.  I was the only one with 15 yo dingy  
aluminum siding, while the rest of the neighborhood looked brand new.   
Finally, my insurance company raised our property insurance rates  
(nearly doubled, if I remember correctly) in our neighborhood (hah,  
imagine that).  So we all paid for new siding that we didn't need, but  
we paid with higher insurance instead of paying the siding man.  I  
finally gave in and filed a claim and they replaced it, but there was  
nothing wrong with my siding.  But I was pretty mad that my insurance  
went up because of these shenanigans.

regards,
-Lance

-- 
dadl-ot mailing list
http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot