Top 10 Scams and Rip-Offs of 2009

new Lifelock Shows Identity Theft Services Not Foolproof As a penalty for inflating guarantees that Lifelock could prevent identity theft from ever happening, the company has agreed to a $12 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead How Derek Freeman Fooled Us All on an Alleged Hoax ...the hoaxing argument is easily challenged using Freeman’s own unpublished interviews with the Samoan woman on whose testimony Freeman so heavily relied....Freeman stated his argument so boldly and presented it with such certainty that it seemed believable. In fact, it seemed foolish not to believe him. Almost no one thought that it might be a good idea to look at the actual interviews with Fa’apua’a and to ask if Freeman’s certitudes about the value of her testimony were warranted. These unpublished interviews with her demonstrate that there is no compelling evidence that Mead was hoaxed. It was a good story — a story that many people wanted to believe. Alas, it was a story that was too good to be true.

note: the comments on this article make for good reading.

Brian Brushwood lectures on YouTube 1. How the shortchange con works 2. Science vs. Pseudoscience 3. How Astrology & Divinations Work 4. UFOs: What are the odds? 5. False Memory & Eyewitness Testimony 6. Bigfoot and Cryptozoology 7. Crop Circles 8. Spiritualism, Table Tipping & Dowsing 9. ESP & Probability 10. Homeopathy, Magnets, & Quackery 11. The Placebo Effect & Psychic Surgery

Too Good to Be True

"Pranks, Frauds, and Hoaxes from Around the World." Robert Carroll (2004). Skeptical Inquirer. volume 28, No. 4. July/August, pp. 41-46.

Warning sounded on web's future

Michael Shermer and "the pigeon drop" con (YouTube)

"The Serpent’s" Tale by Kurt W. Burchfiel (Strange Magazine)

Alias Carlos Allende:The Mystery Man Behind the Philadelphia Experiment by Robert A. Goerman

Chuck Whitlock

Cliff Pickover's Internet Encyclopedia of Hoaxes

Computer Virus hoaxes

Consumer Reports

Encyclopedia of Scams

Eric's History of Perpetual Motion and Free Energy Machines

Fairy Tale An Untrue Story Fairy Photographs, Piltdown Man, and Faked Vermeer Paintings The Debunking of Three Hoaxes by James Opie

Federal Consumer Information Center

Federal Trade Commission Home Page

FTC: Miracle Health Claims - Add a Dose of Skepticism

Internet Crime Complaint Center

Internet Scambusters

It's a Fake! by Lee Moller

Museum of Hoaxes

Museum of Questionable Medical Devices

National Fraud Information Center

National Institute for Consumer Education

NESARA scam

New "Shroud" Claims Challenged as Spurious

Piltdown Man by Richard Harter

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

The IDChip spoof

TruthorFiction.com

Urban Legends & Folklore

Urban Legends Reference Pages snopes.com

What's Wrong with Multi-level Marketing?

news

new Bernard-Henri Lévy a laughing stock for quoting fictional philosopher When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.

There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke