Oz bottle shop falls for 'double your money' scam Three Oz businesses have been taken for a total of AU$160,000 after handing over cash to scammers in the belief a wonder chemical could double their money. According to the Stonnington Leader, the twin owners of a bottle shop in Malvern, Victoria, were approached by two men who expressed an interest in buying the business. The …
I can turn a title I award myself into a veritable gold mine, and he can be part of it!
Here's how it works, he scans and distributes all the books in Australia, except any that the publisher objects to.
I will call myself, the 'Australian Publishers and Authors Association" to give me a bit of credibility, and I will bring a class action lawsuit against him.
He will make a lot of noise, but ultimately agree a settlement, we get some naive judge to rubber stamp the class action settlements and bingo, we get all the Australian rights to all the orphaned copyright in the world! From which we can milk expenses and interest and charges and and yachts, and company jet planes, and lots of business junkets.
Ka- chink!
And best of all, it's all totally legal!
Sounds like a variation of the "blacked banknotes" that was demonstrated on the bbc show "the real hustle" - getting people to buy wads of black paper that when washed in a certain solution would revert to full banknotes!
It's amazing how much greed can blind people.
Have to point out the lack of IT angle though.
Why would the scammers have needed a lot of money just to double the amount? If the duplicated notes were perfect then they would have 2, then 4, then 8, then 16 (etc) fully formed notes to continue their copying from. The scamees initial outlay could therefore be quite low.
hahahahaha
Secondly, what really astounds me about these stories is when there are two or more people scammed at the same time i.e. the partners who owned the "bottle shop", I mean seriously, how could BOTH of you be that stupid? It reminds me of an earlier El Reg story about the Canadian teen who was 419'd out of all of his money, so then he got his parents to give him some more (to give to the scammers), when they stopped giving him money he went to his uncle for some instead. I still laugh at his apparent shock at not having any friends anymore.
Aaaanyway, I have on a rare occasion had a friend tell me about some super cool, to-good-to-be-true deal they found in the very, very small print of some local rag. Midway through their explanation of said "miracle" (after offering to save them the hassle of sending their life savings and taking it myself) I politely ask them to stop and excuse me, at which point I hot-foot it the nearest fish monger, buy the largest whole fish they have, return to soon-to-be-erstwhile-friend and slap them around the face with it.
"The victims, meanwhile, will escape a legal knuckle-rap since they "had not committed an offence""
Just like in the UK (see adjacent North Wales police story), the cops aren't always well-informed when it comes to the law. The ODPP will be facepalming right now (although tbf it probably wouldn't have been judged in the public interest anyway).
Forgery (especially of bank notes) is a Federal crime here in Oz. Attempted forgery or, in fact, conspiracy to commit forgery is also a Federal crime.
Either way, these bozos should have been referred to the Federal Police, as it is obvious from their own admissions that they were quite happy to produce their own version of our currency.
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