US Financial Quagmire Bringing Out the Scammers 272
coondoggie contributes this snippet from NetworkWorld: "You could probably see this one coming. With all of the confusion and money involved you knew there would be cyber-vultures out there looking to cash in. Well the Federal Trade Commission today issued a warning that indeed such increased phishing activities are taking place. Specifically the FTC said it was urging user caution regarding e-mails that look as if they come from a financial institution that recently acquired a consumer's bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. In many case such emails are only looking to obtain personal information — account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers — to run up bills or commit other crimes in a consumer's name, the FTC stated."
Re:But what about the real scam? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly your idea of printing money to devalue it to the point where you can easily pay off your debts would work, but only if the US was self-sustaining, which it isn't. And I doubt you'd get the Chinese to agree to devaluing the US Dollar much more, they seem to have a very large amount of US dollars in their hands... some sort of insane trade deficit? They'd probably invade the US to over-throw the government and attempt to stop the devaluation of the currency (and their investment). Somehow I see world war 3 coming out of this royal fuck up by the US.
It's times like these I'm so happy to live in Canada, and look forward to enjoying the nuclear winter that's inevitibly coming sooner rather than later.
Re:*illegal* scammers (Score:2, Interesting)
To solve this mystery, we need to look at who ended up losing money out of the fiasco, and who ended up making money. For example, a lot of people who bought houses have now lost everything. Many people's retirement savings are way down. And a lot of those banking and finance types are still getting millions of dollars in bonuses. So somebody must be making a lot of money out of this. If the ones making lots of money are the same people who are in charge, then it's going to get pretty ugly.
Reserve banks all over the world have slashed interest rates, billions of dollars have been spent on bailout packages, and yet, stock markets keep crashing. Capitalism might be a fine system when it's working well, but when it fails, as it does periodically, large numbers of people suddenly lose a lot of money. You've got to wonder if somebody was able to know when the crash was coming, if they could manipulate events so that they came out of it better off.
Re:well ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Dude, I ain't even from Iceland...
Re:But what about the real scam? (Score:2, Interesting)
The other thing is while Canada is loaded with natural resources, so is the USA. In the nightmare world where the USA runs out of better ways to make money, it will turn to natural resource extraction too, and that is not going to have a good effect on Canada's extraction industry.
Again, not knocking Canada - great country, great people. But our fates are tied. Usually that's pretty cool, and sometimes, like now, it the pits.