Bilking the Elderly

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1920213/posts

Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist

By CHARLES DUHIGG
May 20, 2007
nytimes.com

The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.

Then, the criminals emptied their victims' bank accounts.
Richard Guthrie, a 92-year-old Army veteran, was one of those victims. He ended up on scam artists' lists because his name, like millions of others, was sold by large companies to telemarketing criminals, who then turned to major banks to steal his life's savings.

Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information.

InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/u.../People/C/Clinton, Hillary Rodham&oref=slogin

Suit Sheds Light on Clintons’ Ties to a Benefactor

Charlie Neilbergall/Associated Press
Published: May 26, 2007

When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there.

A lawsuit accuses Vinod Gupta of infoUSA of wasting the company’s money on high-profile guests.

The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.

Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of infoUSA, who assert that Mr. Gupta wasted the company’s money trying “to ingratiate himself” with his high-profile guests.

SNIP

The Clintons’ role in the shareholder suit has been largely overlooked even as the presidential race has heated up. The Deal, a business publication, said in a February article about infoUSA that the lawsuit’s references to an unnamed “former high-ranking government official and his wife” appeared to describe Mr. and Mrs. Clinton.

Neither aides to the Clintons nor infoUSA disputed that the complaint referred to the Clintons.

SNIP

Mrs. Clinton’s use of infoUSA planes appears to be mostly campaign related. In one instance cited in the lawsuit, Mrs. Clinton “traveled at the company’s expense aboard a private jet from White Plains, N.Y., to Detroit, Mich., and then to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and home to White Plains, N.Y., after calling the company the previous day in desperate need of a plane.”

InfoUSA paid $18,480 in January 2004 to fly Mrs. Clinton “and her four-person entourage” to New York from New Mexico, where she had made a campaign appearance and attended a book signing. Campaign finance records show that her committee, Friends of Hillary, made a reimbursement of $2,127 for that flight. It was not clear if any other candidate committees in New Mexico also helped defray some of the cost.