Shameful scam artists

Most people know me as a calm sort of chap, but there are a few topics that frost my donuts. Let's start with those check-cashing stores. Say an individual borrows $300 for 21 days. He pays back the principle plus $45 interest on time. That interest rate, taken over a year, is 260 percent! But most people don't pay it back on time, so "additional finance charges may apply," as the fine print kindly advises. How much more than 260 percent would you like to pay?

First cousin to the check-cashing vultures are the credit car lots, where according to the screaming radio commercials in incomprehensible Ebonics, one can get a car "no matter if you got no credit, bad credit, no job or even a bankruptcy." The bottom feeders who run these joints should be ashamed of their predatory shenanigans, but of course, they are not. A pox upon these bozos and their shiny suits. And that goes double for the rent-to-own stores that encourage the unsophisticated to buy a $200 TV for $600, if one considers all the payments. Or in the alternate, to continue to make payments as long as they can, only to default halfway through and thereby lose the TV and all the money. Unlike the car lots, these rackets are owned by big corporations.

Some of the worst scoundrels are in government, which should come as no surprise. The State of Ohio encourages people to act stupid by running commercials that make the lottery look like a great deal. "Odds are you'll have fun." Poppycock. Odds are you'll lose every penny. As my wife says, your odds of winning the Ohio Lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not: nil. It's pathetic that our state legislators have enacted this regressive tax (in which the poorest among us pay the most), and then our elected officials smear a smiley face of "helping the schools" all over the venture, as if it were patriotic. In order to play the lottery, one must sustain the belief that the state is going to take the money from everyone else, hundreds of thousands of other people, and redistribute it to you. You have a better chance of being hit by lightening twice in your lifetime than you have of winning this legalized shell game. No wonder the state maintains a monopoly on it. It's a great scam!

We've all heard about those bad guys in Nigeria who steal millions through their phony and highly improbable-sounding money transfer schemes on the Internet. We know all about the malicious worms and other malware that hackers dream up to steal our data. But there is a new computer scheme out there, according to Scambusters.org. It's called "data ransom," and it works like this. One day you boot up and you can't access any of your files. Dude! You get a pop-up box that tells you that in order to open them, you need to pay some jerk in another country $10 or $50 or more. That will get you the password to un-encrypt your own files. And since this is done with a credit card, there is no telling what happens to your bank account or your identity from there.

The above described rip-offs are not perpetrated by the fates, Mother Nature or some nameless deity. They are all examples of evil things who people willingly do to other people. Those who have productive and rewarding lives don't waste their time thinking about hurting others. They instinctively know that the bad karma they would engender by such acts would be brutal. Life is not fair, nor do I expect it to be. But I'm constantly appalled at the lengths to which some people go to harm fellow human beings.