U.S. Attorney Halsey Frank’s office is investigating the fraud with a group of other state and federal agencies. Of the approximately 2,500 scams reported to the U.S. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the bipartisan committee, released the list on Wednesday, along with a free, 40-page resource booklet aimed at educating and protecting seniors and their families. It also gives tips for identifying likely scams, encourages seniors to consult with family members before responding to any demand for money and provides instructions for taking action if people suspect they have been targeted. Senate Special Committee on Aging’s fraud hotline in 2015, the most prevalent involved harassing telephone calls from fraudsters identifying themselves as agents of the Internal Revenue Service and falsely accusing seniors of owing back taxes and penalties. Scammers are disguising themselves as all types of entities, including customer service personnel, department stores, big-name enterprises like Apple or Amazon or major phone carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T. For example, you might receive one confirming a purchase that you didn’t make and tries to trick you into clicking on various links that look like contact information to Amazon’s customer service. Some fraudsters create fake accounts that they manipulate with software to make it seem as though an investor is making a return, encouraging them to invest more. This is a more specific example of a fake website and is a big problem. Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards. Health research is based on trust. Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise? Post was created with GSA C onte nt Generator DEMO.
Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Workers’ claims that were flagged as suspected fraud showed that payments would be made on the date “09/09/9999.” Some workers were paid last week or earlier this week, but the department said Thursday that people still seeing that date in their portals should email scans or photos of two forms of identification to the department’s secure email address. Security researchers, however, found that the attackers had fully taken over the victims’ accounts, and also changed the email address associated with the account to make it harder for the real user to regain access. Instead, it asks for an email address or phone number as the username, which triggers a request for a one-time use “login code,” also known as a one-time password (OTP). Unsolicited and nuisance phone calls: Typically in the form of recorded “robo-calls,” this scam uses computer technology to telemarket fraudulent products and services and gain access to victims’ personal information. Owner consent: The owner of the phone provides explicit consent for their device to be cloned. In her book Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach she argues that research misconduct is a systems problem-the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes. The resource booklet provides detailed information on each of these scams as well as eye-opening, real-life stories of con schemes, several reported by Mainers. In reality, the mark would be fleeing from his own money, which the con man still has (or has handed off to an accomplice). Whether through legitimate-looking emails with fake, but convincing website landing pages, or social media approaches, perhaps using a shortened URL, the end goal is the same for these con artists: stealing personal information.
Identity theft: Scammers gain access to victims’ Medicare, Social Security or financial information. While walking near the Eiffel Tower on a Saturday, we were accosted by three separate “Gold Ring” scammers within an hour. Scammers pretending to be government officials, aim to steal sensitive personal information and money. Hart, Matthew. How to Steal a Diamond. C141 Starlifter cargo planes carry the motorcade — including armored limos — to wherever the president is headed. You can put all kinds of assets into a trust, including savings accounts, stocks, bonds, real estate and personal property. Anyone who believes that their information has been used to fraudulently file an unemployment claim can submit a report on the state’s website. The reports of fraud are yet another barrier to the state’s efforts to provide economic relief to workers who have been laid off during the pandemic. Very few of these papers are retracted. It was perhaps coincidence, but a few weeks before the webinar the Cochrane Collaboration produced guidelines on reviewing studies where there has been a retraction, an expression of concern, or the reviewers are worried about the trustworthiness of the data. An editorial in the Cochrane Library accompanying the new guidelines recognises that there is no agreement on what constitutes an untrustworthy study, screening tools are not reliable, and “Misclassification could also lead to reputational damage to authors, legal consequences, and ethical issues associated with participants having taken part in research, only for it to be discounted.” The Collaboration is being cautious but does stand to lose credibility-and income-if the world ceases to trust Cochrane Reviews because they are thought to be based on untrustworthy trials. Roberts and others wrote about the problem of the many untrustworthy and zombie trials in The BMJ six years ago with the provocative title: “The knowledge system underpinning healthcare is not fit for purpose and must change.” They wanted the Cochrane Collaboration and anybody conducting systematic reviews to take very seriously the problem of fraud.
Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? IRS impersonation scams: Callers harass victims for unpaid taxes and penalties. Although they come in different flavors, in most cases the criminals committing romance scams study the profiles of their victims and collect personal information, such as their work activity, their level of income, and their lifestyle, because the mismanagement of our personal information in the digital age allows a criminal to build a fairly detailed profile of a future victim. It temporarily suspended payments last week due to a surge in fraudulent claims in which criminals used stolen social security numbers and other personal information to file a claim pretending to be a Maine worker. The Acting Inspector General of Social Security, Gale Stallworth Stone, is urging citizens to remain vigilant of telephone impersonation schemes that exploit the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) reputation and authority. These “IRS impersonation scams” top a list of the 10 most common scams reported to the committee last year. As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan.