Crime and Punishment

A new scam is running around. A bank account is cracked, real checks are printed, sent out in large numbers, the checks are deposited by people thinking they are for payment of “taxes” for a lottery and the “tax payment” is sent via Western Union / Moneygram to the “tax agent”, in other words, the scam artist. The name, bank information, routing number, security features on the check are all entirely legitimate. This way the group gets money sent to them without ever actually having to touch the bank.

I just got the 2nd one of these in a month and it’s ticking me off. My local police are too lazy to follow up on reporting this sort of scam (the route I took in the first case) so I’m throwing this out for a bit of international justice. Is there a coalition of the willing out there willing to bust scammers?

The “agent” gives a number of 011-491-60-91-92-39-92 which seems to be Germany. If anybody could trace this to a locality and get the police to act, I will press charges.

I was in Canada the first time someone pointed a gun at me.

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There are some fascinating posts that I’d like to bring to your attention. The first one is to be found at Glenn’s. He discusses a book where a woman successfully disguised herself as a man in order to gain insights into how the other side lives. One passage that made an impressions was where the author entered the dating world, only to find that many women were distrustful and downright hostile to any man because they had been through failed relationships where a man had treated them badly.

Glenn links to a post at Dr. Helen’s, his wife’s blog. The good doctor was surprised to find that many men are shunning marriage, fearing jail due to false accusations about being an abuser if the relationship goes sour and a divorce is necessary.

Dr. Helen links to this essay on a blog called DADvocate. The author discusses why he and many other men are no longer interested in marriage. The potential penalties are too severe, while most women don’t bring enough to the table to make it worthwhile.

The posts are all interesting. Click on the links and give them a read. But what I want to talk about are the claims that men are risking jail time every time they tie the knot.

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I recently posted some casual comments about crime rates. One thing I noticed was that NYC’s statistics looked pretty good compared to those of other large US cities.

Now I am reminded, via this post on David Hardy’s blog, that there is a reasonable case for suspecting NYC of cooking the books. I don’t know to what extent the NYC government really did that, but it certainly appears that the City’s crime-reporting system created strong incentives for police to falsify reporting.

It’s interesting to browse this page.

Based on a very casual and unsystematic perusal of the data, and even allowing for variabilities in reporting, I note some striking differences between cities. For example, in 2003:

-There were no murders in Fargo, ND;

-The murder rate in Gary, IN was almost 9 times the national average;

-NYC looks very good, though it’s not broken down into sub-regions — I suspect that there are big differences in crime rates between different parts of NYC;

-The murder rate in Buffalo, NY is almost 3 times the national average;

-Many cities with high murder rates, like Gary, do not have exceptionally high rates of other violent crimes or property crimes;

-In general, the South, and big cities with big ex-southern populations, have much higher rates of violent crime than do cities in the Midwest;

-I think they are cooking the books in some of these places, e.g., Gary, IN — I’ll bet that the murder rate is generally the most accurate statistic, since it’s probably the most difficult statistic to misreport;

-In general it appears that demography predicts crime rates, except that good or bad local government (e.g., NYC vs. Chicago) make a big difference.

There is nothing new in any of this but it’s nice to refresh one’s memory.

(Thanks to commenter Tex for the link to CityRating.com.)