Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Criminals can steal your car’s key fob’s signal and use that to steal your car. This is causing insurance rates to go up. Some kids do this because Tik Tok teaches them how to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sTqw0Vfg-A
“”The FBI took Linda’s savings without clearly saying what she did wrong. That shouldn’t happen in America, but taking on the entrenched federal civil forfeiture system is challenging,” said Bob Belden, an attorney at I.J. (which represented Martin), in a statement via email. “Unfortunately, there is not a clear path to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. We know that several Justices are alarmed at how civil forfeiture works in America and hope that the right case will work its way to the Court.”
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“Owners must decide whether to fight against the federal government, default, or plead for mercy, all without knowing why the FBI is doing this to them,” he says. “It’s therefore little surprise that 93% of federal forfeitures never get to a court, meaning the FBI gets to keep the money without ever telling anyone why they should be allowed to”—which, at least for now, will remain the status quo.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/28/the-fbi-took-her-40000-without-explaining-why-she-fought-back-and-lost/
“Bots create AI-generated student profiles, apply for enrollment, and submit minimal online coursework—often AI-generated—to stay enrolled long enough to receive federal and state aid disbursements intended for low-income students. The scammers are known as “Pell runners,” who disappear after collecting the $7,400 federal grant.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/30/ai-bots-in-california-steal-over-10-million-in-federal-financial-aid/
“it’s not true that shoplifting less than $950 is no longer illegal—it can still be charged as a misdemeanor. “What Prop 47 did is increase the dollar amount by which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950 to adjust for inflation and cost of living,” Alex Bastian, who co-authored the proposition, told the Associated Press in 2021. “But most shoplifting cases are under $400 to begin with, so before Prop 47 and after Prop 47, there isn’t any difference.”
And even after being raised to $950, California’s felony threshold is lower than more than half of all other U.S. states: Deep red states like Montana and Kansas set theirs at $1,500, while Texas’s is set at $2,500.
“Under current law, prosecutors can already add together thefts that are demonstrably related, for example multiple thefts from the same store in the same week or skimming small amounts from your employer every day,” notes the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy advocacy organization that supports criminal justice reform (and opposes Proposition 36).
In fairness, evidence indicates that certain crimes did increase after Proposition 47. “Driven by larcenies, property crime jumped after Prop 47 compared to the nation and comparison states,” according to a September 2024 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. At the same time, it wasn’t the biggest contributor: “Evidence is clearer that retail theft increased due to pandemic responses by the criminal justice system, and the increases were of greater magnitude than increases due to Prop 47.”
Similarly, a 2018 study in Criminology & Public Policy found “that Prop 47 had no effect on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or burglary. Larceny and motor vehicle thefts, however, seem to have increased moderately,” but the rates of increase were both minor and had other potential causes.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/01/should-california-vote-to-roll-back-criminal-justice-reforms/
Who Really Owns the South China Sea?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YFnLhAYe9k
“A few years back, the organization accrued a $2,543 property tax debt on its community center. So in 2018, the city sold that lien for $5,115 to a California-based investor, who then foreclosed on and sold the ECO’s building for $139,500. In return, the ECO got a check for the difference between its debt and the lien purchase price: $2,572.
In other words, all told, the organization paid six figures to compensate for the $2,543 it owed the government, in what a new federal lawsuit alleges is a pervasive practice in Baltimore that illegally deprives people of their equity in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Taking Clause as the city attempts to satisfy modest tax debts.
Every spring, Baltimore bureaucrats conduct a mass auction online to sell off liens like the ECO’s. Sometimes the unlucky debtors have fallen just hundreds of dollars behind on their taxes.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/19/baltimores-tax-sales-are-robbing-people-of-their-equity/
“”Wage theft” is a catch-all term for not paying workers what they are owed under the law, such as violating minimum wage or overtime regulations. It is a crime under the Fair Labor Standards Act and is enforced by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. It can involve business owners sneakily ripping off employees. It can also result from honest confusion or mistakes regarding what is owed.”
“Cyberattacks on health systems are on a steady rise, and their costs are mushrooming. Experts said there are a variety of reasons for the increase, including that criminals are getting more advanced and more aspects of health care are online.
When a cyberattack struck Sky Lakes Medical Center, a community hospital in southern Oregon, in late October 2020, its computers were down for three weeks. The most mundane tasks became arduous. Nurses had to check on critical patients every 15 minutes in case their vital signs changed. Doctors scribbled down their orders and the swelling mounds of paper took over whole rooms. In three weeks, the hospital ran through 60,000 sheets of paper.
Sky Lakes had to rebuild or replace 2,500 computers and clean its network to get back online. Even after it hired extra staff, it took six months to input all the paper records into the system. In total, John Gaede, Sky Lakes director of information services, says his organization spent $10 million — a big expense for a nonprofit with roughly $4.4 million in annual operating income (the organization did not pay a ransom).
For hospitals with limited budgets, there are questions about how well they can protect themselves. The attack on Sky Lakes was part of a wave of attacks in 2020 and 2021 connected to a criminal group in Eastern Europe.
“Our budgets typically have a margin of maybe 3 percent a year,” Gaede said, “but we’re supposed to compete with nation-state actors?”
Health data is lucrative on the black market, making hospitals a popular target. Plus, if a health system has ransomware insurance, criminals may think they’re guaranteed a payout. Ransomware ties up hospital records in encrypted files until a fee is paid.
“Back when ransoms were $50,000, it was cheaper to pay them than to deal with a lawsuit that would have cost far more,” says Omid Rahmani, associate director at Fitch Ratings, a credit rating agency, adding that ransoms now cost millions. “The landscape’s changed and because of that the cyber insurance side has changed — and that’s really connected to the rise of ransomware.”
In its annual cost of a data breach report, IBM writes the global average cost of an attack on a health system rose from about $7 million to over $9 million in 2021. But remediating these violations in the U.S. can be far more expensive.”
“An organized group of Southern California bandits has brazenly hijacked armored cars and grabbed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. The heavily armed thieves reportedly have damaged trucks, hassled their victims, covered up video cameras—and even celebrated their haul. “Wowee!” and “way to go, buddy,” they allegedly cheered, after pulling a recent heist.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that this is the latest example of California’s ongoing crime wave, epitomized by “third world” scenes of pilfered freight trains and brazen smash-and-grab robberies. But it’s nothing of the sort. Actually, it’s more pernicious than the usual crime spree because a sheriff is the mastermind and his deputies are looting the armored cars.
For instance, San Bernardino County deputies stopped the same Empyreal Logistics armored-car driver twice and took a total of nearly $1.1 million in cash owned by legal marijuana dispensaries, per news reports. The government has not charged the armored-car company nor the cannabis firms with any crimes, but the sheriff keeps the cash, anyway. Critics are right to call it highway robbery.
Welcome to the dystopian world of civil-asset forfeiture, a drug-war relic that allows police—often at the behest of district attorneys—to take people’s cash, cars, and properties based on their suspicion that the property was involved in a crime. Officials never have to prove that the property’s owner was involved in a crime.
The agencies have every incentive to employ this strategy routinely given that they keep the proceeds and spend the money on vehicles, guns, and whatever. News reports found police so adept at abusing this process that they sometimes target people who own the kind of fancy SUVs and sports cars that they’d like to have available in their motor pool.
Not only does this process deprive Americans of their Fourth Amendment right to be safe against the government’s searches and seizures, but it undermines the credibility of law enforcement by turning cops into our adversaries. San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus claims that “80 percent of marijuana at dispensaries was grown illegally.” If that’s true, then the sheriff simply needs to, you know, go to court and prove it.”