Page 12 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • October 3, 2012 Another scam is the Craigslist fraud. One of the most bizarre cases I remember from this field is the mail order snake. A client’s son wanted to sell a snake, so he advertised and found a buyer who agreed $200 was a fair price. However, the snake purchaser sent a check for $2,000. The honest seller contacted the would-be buyer and told him he had sent too much money. The buyer told the seller to cash the check, keep $200, and send the balance to him in cash or by a personal check. The seller then sent the snake and a personal check – and the buyer’s $2,000 check bounced. This scam has permutations. Lonely men sometimes contact mail order brides who advertise online. Many already have boyfriends in their own countries and want to get their names on a U.S. marriage license. The bride shows up, the papers are signed, and the marriage sometimes ends before anything else happens. In the meantime, the boyfriend arrives in America and marries the new divorcee. Then there are the e-mail scams. Have you ever received an e-mail from some foreign country telling you a man who hated his own government wants to leave you his entire estate of $2,500,000, but the lawyer who is the executor of the dead total stranger’s will needs a mere $20,000 to process the will? I get these messages all the time, and so do my friends. Whoever sends this stuff must have researched Bergen County’s demographics and found out that most people could use $2,500,000 and are probably well enough off to have $20,000 available. What he or she failed to find out -- I hope -- is that you need a three-digit IQ to make that money or hold onto it. Sorry if any of my readers fell for this one. My son talked me out of it. Repair scams are still popular. They usually start with a worker saying, “Excuse me, ma’am/sir, but I just happened to be finishing a job around the neighborhood and I noticed that your (driveway, chimney – you name it) is in really bad shape. I just happen to have enough material to fix it and I can give you a really good discount on the price.” What the person usually gets is a coat of black paint that looks great through the winter and costs a lot more than if he or she hired a college kid to do it. The Ponzi scheme is kind of a blood libel, because the technique existed long before the Charles “Carlo” Ponzi got caught in 1920. John Law worked such a scheme in France in the early 1700s and fled when he got caught. Charles Dickens described two fictional instances. Around World War I, Ponzi noticed that he could make pocket money by buying and selling postal exchange coupons. He made a few cents on the dollar depending on whether the American or Italian prices were higher when the coupons were redeemed. J.P. Morgan used to do the same thing on a grander scale with arbitrage, swapping French francs for German marks or vice versa and sometimes making $10,000 a day before he got out of bed and went to work. No one ever questioned Morgan’s arbitrage legality. Ponzi and Law went wrong because they attracted investors through paying good money for stock using the proceeds from new investments, rather than any profits earned by the money invested. In Law’s care, there were no profits. French ownership of Louisiana did so badly that the French later traded it back to Spain. Ponzi’s postal coupon sales could not generate anything like the high-profit stock dividends he was sometimes asked for. He paid off the old stockholders with money he took from new stockholders, and when the public discovered this, there was no money to redeem most of the stock. This happens all the time when people expect 15 percent interest while the banks are paying three percent. Bernie Madoff was one spectacular Ponzi artist, but he was not the last one. The answer to this is not “cruel and unusual punishment.” The answer is simple: honest scorn of anyone who deliberately cheats others with fraudulent investments, worthless repairs, or non-existent bequests from total strangers. These are middle-class crimes, and they deserve middle-class punishment -- as in a complete loss of trust and respect, not the rope or 100 years in Rahway. Know what a humbug really is? We have all heard Ebenezer Scrooge use the expression, but the origin of the term is particularly interesting. Back before cell phones replaced watches as time-keeping devices, having a pocket watch was a status symbol. A pocket watch was generally the first thing paupers pawned when they needed a meal or a drink, so having a watch on your person meant you were still flush. People who were not flush would somehow acquire a watch that was hopelessly broken, scrape out the cogs and wheels, and insert a cricket that would scurry while trying to escape from the empty watch casing. The pauper who wanted to appear to be flush would whip out the watch to consult it, and if anyone questioned whether the watch was really working (since there was no second hand in those days) he would hold up the watch, and the noise made by the cricket would pass for the ticking of the watch. Thus the “hum bug” was born. An Oct. 17 Scam & Fraud Prevention Workshop that will start at 7 p.m. at Glen Rock Borough Hall will introduce citizens to some of the more insidious ways in which people will try to scam others. Some people may be so down and out that stealing from trusting people is the last resort. I urge everyone who can get there to go to this or to any similar lecture, but based on reports from various police departments, I can provide a brief introduction to some of what they may hear. Ever bought stock through a friend in need? Dubious stockbrokers sometimes hire desperate people whose friends still have money. When the stock quotations start to go drastically up and down, this means somebody is making money by dropping his or her own shares to make the price fall and then buying them back when they are assumed to be rock-bottom and creating the illusion of a rebound. That is the time to get out. If you jump fast and ignore appeals to friendship, loyalty, manhood, or whatever, you may be lucky enough to break even. One of the items on the Glen Rock agenda is the “Grandparents sam.” We’ve had a couple of these in this area. In one of the earlier cases, a couple of grandparents from Wyckoff received a gruff call from a “Canadian attorney” who said their college-age grandson was under arrest in Canada after a DWI with an injury to another motorist. The hapless grandson was facing immediate jail time if the grandparents did not send a substantial amount of money. The grandson was in custody and could not come to the telephone. The grandparents sent the money. The grandparents shortly learned that their grandson had not been in Canada and had not been involved in a DWI. There are three lessons here. Do you know where your grandsons are? Do they generally have enough common sense not to get involved in driving drunk? Do you know enough to put the caller on hold and find out from your adult children whether the grandchildren are vacationing in out-of-the-way places before you commit five-figure checks to Western Union? Is scamming the last ditch of the American middle class? Mall suits at crossroads (continued from page 5) make him more favorably disposed towards Crossroads and thereby impair his partiality.” Finally, Kates cited a recent Ridgefield, New Jersey legal case which, he said, makes it clear that donations made to an organization to which an official belongs can create a potentially disqualifying conflict of interest. “We believe for all of these reasons that the court should find that DaPuzzo had a conflict of interest and his vote to approve the rezoning should be nullified,” Kates said. Jaworski responded, saying the standard for a conflict of interest in common law and in the local government ethics law is that there be a direct or indirect financial interest. He claimed that while DaPuzzo’s wife, Dawn, is the township’s recreation director, she is a part-time employee and doesn’t report to the township council to which her husband was elected. In addition, he said she had no role in the adoption of the rezoning ordinance and did not know that it contained any recreation features when the ordinance was introduced. Jaworski asked the judge, “Can a reasonable person conclude that his (DaPuzzo’s) judgment and opinion (were) impaired?” Jaworski also argued that the township council put the inclusion of a recreation field in the plan at the discretion of the planning board as the approving authority. On the donations to the schools foundation, Jaworski argued that DaPuzzo only served on the foundation’s Corporate Committee for one year because he could not attend its meetings, and the donations were made because donors’ names are placed on banners and T-shirts for the Mahwah Run, and everyone on the foundation knew about the Crossroads donations. “Did that impair DaPuzzo’s objectivity?” Jaworski asked rhetorically. Jaworski also addressed the Ridgefield case Kates cited and pointed out that the Appellate Court found there was no disqualifying conflict in that case. He also noted that the local government ethics law defines the term “interest” as ownership of more than 10 percent and that there is no conflict of interest with a non-profit entity. Finally, Jaworski claimed that the township attorney at the time of the vote on the rezoning found there was no conflict, and he claimed if the court found that DaPuzzo had a conflict in this matter it would have a “chilling effect” on other people who might want to serve on charitable boards. Fede joined Jaworski in arguing that there was no conflict in this matter because the facts show that DaPuzzo was not involved in the donations made by Crossroads Developers LLC to the schools foundation, his wife is not an employee of Crossroads, and the foundation was not a proponent of the rezoning ordinance. “There is no conflict under case law,” Fede said, “and it would make it difficult if officials had to know if an applicant made a donation to something in which he or she is involved.” Jaworski and Fede argued the second case concerning the repeal of the rezoning ordinance from different sides. Jaworski argued that the township council did not adhere to the required timeline to adopt the repeal because it acted before it received the written report from the planning board concerning the ordinance’s compliance with the master plan and that effort to act before the report was received was arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable. Fede argued that the council was not required to adopt the rezoning ordinance and they simply changed their minds and came to a different conclusion when they adopted the repealing ordinance. He said there is no requirement to wait for the report from the planning board and he added there is no basis to set the repealing ordinance aside because all the statutory procedural requirements were followed. “These people are elected to make decisions and both decisions should be affirmed,” Fede said.