Fraud, Big and Little

The human world is so thick with fraud that we have to be suspicious of everything we see. There are countless ways in which evil people can get money or, even more valuable, identity and reputation from us.

But there are little kinds of fraud that do not cost us anything but which can be used to deceive third parties.

One example is free magazines. I received a phone call from the publisher of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, asking me if I wanted a free subscription. My own work does not overlap this field in any way, so I said no. The person then said they would send it to me anyway.

And they did. It is a very slick publication, nearly as nice as Science, one of the world’s major scientific journals. Nearly every third page is a full page, very slick advertisements that are as high quality as those in Science. And there is no question that the articles and news items are very well done, also.

It is also apparent that this publisher (Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Publishers) gets a lot of income from the advertisements. I am sure that their very large list of subscribers is part of the attraction for the advertisers. But if the advertisers think that the subscription list reflects possible customers, they are wrong. I believe that this is a deliberate strategy by the publisher to entice corporations to pay for more expensive ads than they otherwise might choose. To this extent, it is fraudulent. I am a partner to this process, and cannot do anything about it. I have no time to pursue this matter, and since I am losing no money, I have no legal interest in a case against them. It is not victimless, but I am not the victim.

If you visit the Mary Ann Liebert home page, you will find a link to Journal Collections. But this publisher does not publish these journals. The link to Biomedical Research, for example, leads to the journal home page; the journal is published by Elsevier. If you click on their publications A-Z, you find such journals as Advances in Wound Care, published by the Wound Healing Society of Beverly, Massachusetts, not by Mary Ann Liebert.

It is apparent that this “publisher’ is parasitic upon many other publishers. Maybe it matters and maybe it doesn’t, but I am a partner to this parasitism and there is nothing I can do about it. I will probably continue to be a “subscriber” even after I retire or even after I die.

Another example of “victimless” fraud is IHG (International Hotel Group). I stayed at a Candlewood Suites hotel last summer. They enrolled me in their email feed, and would not let me unsubscribe; the unsubscribe button apparently does nothing, nor did a personal phone request. Because my stay at this hotel was deeply unsatisfying (a feeling shared by other reviewers on TripAdvisor.com), I told them I would not stay at an IHG hotel again. (Before staying, I called them with a question, and instead of answering the question they insisted that I rent a car from them. I hung up.) The point is that IHG has a very long list of email recipients, and they can tell advertisers that this is the case. But the advertisers may not realize that the list may consist mostly of dissatisfied customers. IHG appears to me to be a parasitic corporation that uses former customers like me to lure others. I dislike this even though I am not losing any money to them.

Parasites can live anywhere. In 1990, nobody imagined that parasites could live in what we then called cyberspace. On a Star Trek episode, a parasite lived inside of transporter beams. And you are part of the resource space that these parasites use, even if you are not a direct victim.

Consumer Cultures, Right and Left

America consists of a mixture of different cultures. More than ever before, these cultures mix but do not blend. Part of this is because many members of the dominant white culture do not want to dilute their firearm-barbecue-bacon-yellow beer-pickup truck culture. Major store chains cater to their strange and often dangerous wishes.

Much of what these “conservatives” consume is for its cultural value only. Take, for example, pickups. They like to say they use their pickups for work. But this is largely untrue. I am collecting data about pickup trucks. I have not analyzed it yet, but it appears that less than twenty percent of the trucks are used for work. Eighty percent of the pickup trucks in Oklahoma have empty truck beds and are not towing anything. They are just for show. It is an expensive practice that depletes our resources and puts lots of extra carbon in our atmosphere.

But conservatives are not the only people who have a subculture. There is also a largely white subculture of liberals who are proud to eat portabella instead of beef, who do not own guns, who drink wine and dark beer, and drive fuel efficient vehicles. There are major store chains that cater to their strange though usually harmless wishes, too.

To see this, all you have to do is to take a stroll through a Whole Foods. Being a member of the liberal subculture, I could easily spend hundreds of dollars on the things that are available there. But if you look at those things critically, you find that very little of it is actually important, and consuming those things is not necessarily making the world better. How is using Mad Hippie Facial Cream ($26 for 2.1 ounces) or Dead Sea bath salts making the world better? My wife and I buy some of their unpackaged bulk items, and a few other things, but we find most of the products at Whole Foods humorous.

One of these packages shows a homeopathic remedy that contains poison ivy extract (Rhus toxicodendron, now Toxicodendron radicans), and a “soup cleanse” book that undoubtedly contains healthy recipes but they will not “cleanse” you of “toxins” any more than any other healthy diet.

Finally, this package is just salt. But the Indian company that sells it makes it sound that salt is part of the freedom movement of Mahatma Gandhi.

One way to make the world better is to consume less, and make more efficient use of what you consume. Don’t drive big pickups around, and don’t waste your money on Mad Hippie Facial Cream. Consume less stuff, and the corporations that cater to conservatives and to liberals will not be very happy with you.