Get 3.3 Million Dollars for encashing 100 $!

Wish they do it me.!

“

When Rodolfo Valladares walked into an Aventura Bank of America, he simply wanted to cash his $100 check. A jumpy bank teller, thinking he looked like a robber, hit a silent alarm.

Police from Aventura and Miami-Dade rushed to the bank, ordered everyone to the floor as they physically detained Valladares, handcuffing him and kicking him in the head, his lawyer said. He was let go when bank employees and police realize they made a mistake.

For his troubles, Valladares soon will be getting a much bigger check.

A Miami-Dade jury has awarded Valladares $3.3 million in damages after ruling that the bank was negligent in triggering the silent alarm, then failing to cancel it when employees realized he was not a robber.

Valladares, 50, a former mortgage company loan officer, still suffers from headaches, blurred vision and post-traumatic stress disorder, said his attorney Russell S. Adler.

Bank of America plans to appeal the verdict, believing their employees acted reasonably.

“We are disappointed,’’ said bank spokesperson Shirley Norton.

The July 3, 2008 incident happened at a time when bank tellers were on high alert because of a warning about a male Hispanic wearing a Miami Heat hat had been robbing banks in the area.

Bank of America’s corporate security had emailed a surveillance photo and a description of the robber.

When Valladares – wearing a Miami Heat cap – walked in, teller Meylin Garcia activated the alarm, though she did not have the photo on hand.

If she had, it would have shown the differences between Valladares and the bank robber, his lawyers said.

The robber in the bulletin was in his 60s and weighed about 145 pounds. Valladares was 46 at the time and weighed more than 200 pounds.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/15/2643501/jury-awards-33-million-to-man.html#storylink=cpy

Six Month Banking Blockade of WikiLeaks.

Those who talk of Freedom must respect it.

No doubt some of the information leaked by WikiLeaks embarrassed every one , like the one on what US thinks of other countries in private.

You have prosecuted Assange on a charge which every one thinks is funny.

This banking Blockade is going to the extreme.

Has the blockade helped?

WikiLeaks releases advertisement coinciding with the six month unlawful banking blockage against it

Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.

For six months now, five major US financial institutions, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and the Bank of America have tried to economically strangle WikiLeaks as a result of political pressure from Washington. The attack has blocked over 90% of the non-profit organization’s donations, costing some $15M in lost revenue. The attack is entirely outside of any due process or rule of law. In fact, in the only formal review to occur, the US Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy C. Geithner found, on January 12, that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a financial blockade.

http://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html

Sample of Wikileak .

Google makes Online payment Easy-Android.

Image via CrunchBase

Big changes could be afoot in the way Americans pay for stuff. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo are introducing a new service that will let customers easily transfer money from their checking account to someone else’s, the Wall Street Journal reports. The banks are hoping the service competes with eBay’s popular PayPal service, which now handles a lot of the transactions people used to use checks for. The payments could even be made on the go from a smart phone.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576343613260587314.html

Banks and Home Loans Frauds.

Banks in India too have their bits of Frauds.

Top PSU’s ,including LIC Housing were involved in Home loans scams and many senior executives were arrested.

Of course nothing has been heard ever since their arrest quite some time ago.

Banks use many tactics to defraud he home loan customers.( see related)

After the Loan is fully paid,consumers are asked to pay extra amount(it varies from Bank to Bank), before they issue ‘Release Letters’.

Documentation charges–why?(again varies from Bank to Bank)

Story:

WASHINGTON — A set of confidential federal audits accuse the nation’s five largest mortgage companies of defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans, four officials briefed on the findings told The Huffington Post.

The five separate investigations were conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general and examined Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial, the sources said.

The audits accuse the five major lenders of violating the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law crafted as a weapon against firms that swindle the government. The audits were completed between February and March, the sources said. The internal watchdog office at HUD referred its findings to the Department of Justice, which must now decide whether to file charges.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/16/foreclosure-fraud-audit-false-claims-act_n_862686.html?utm_campaign=051611&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alert-business&utm_content=FullStory

The State Bank of India, the country’s largest commercial bank, has been forced to withdraw “teaser” mortgage loans amid fears of repeating the lending follies of the US subprime crisis.

Under pressure from the Reserve Bank of India to curb what the regulator considered potentially reckless lending, the SBI said last week that it would scrap the home loans from May.

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/522286-silentplanet/169284-indian-banks-scraps-teaser-home-loans

Related:

(CONFIDENTIAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE) Attn : Existing HDFC Home Loan Customers – Join Yahoo Group The existing customers of HDFC home loan have formed a group at Yahoo Groups by the name of ‘hdfchomeloancustomers’ to address the concerns of existing customers who are paying high interest rates. The group unites Hdfc customers and intends to take the issues like high interest rates, conversion fee, increase in loan transfer fee and treatment of old customer’s with HDFC. The group is very active, vibrant with people from diverse vocations and regions. Please join the group. Please forward to all you know are HDFC customers”

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/hdfc-home-loan-c57295.html#comments

http://www.complaintsboard.com/bycompany/hdfc-home-loan-a16674.html

http://www.icrpc.org/

The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters.

Image via Wikipedia

 

There’s been a very strange episode being written about the past couple of days involving numerous parties, including me, that I now want to comment on.  The story, first reported by The Tech Herald, has been been written about in numerous places (seeMarcy Wheeler, Forbes,The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, Matt Yglesias, Reason, Tech Dirt, andothers), so I’ll provide just the summary.

Last week, Aaron Barr, a top executive at computer security firm HB Gary, boasted to the Financial Times that his firm had infiltrated and begun to expose Anonymous, the group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers that had launched cyber attacks on companies terminating services to the whistleblowing site (such as Paypal, MasterCard, Visa, Amazon and others).  In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the email accounts of HB Gary, published 50,000 of their emails online, and also hacked Barr’s Twitter and other online accounts.

Among the emails that were published was a report prepared by HB Gary– in conjunction with several other top online security firms, includingPalantir Technologies — on how to destroy WikiLeaks.  The emails indicated the report was part of a proposal to be submitted to Bank of America through its outside law firm, Hunton & Williams.  News reports have indicated that WikiLeaks is planning to publish highly incriminating documents showing possible corruption and fraud at that bank, and The New York Times detailed last month how seriously top bank officials are taking that threat.  The NYT article described that the bank’s ”counterespionage work” against WikiLeaks entailed constant briefings for top executives on the whistle-blower site, along with the hiring of “several top law firms” and Booz Allen (the long-time firm of former Bush DNI Adm. Michael McConnell and numerous other top intelligence and defense officials).  The report prepared by these firms was designed to be part of the Bank of America’s highly funded anti-WikiLeaks campaign.

The leaked report suggested numerous ways to destroy WikiLeaks, some of them likely illegal — including planting fake documents with the group and then attacking them when published; “creat[ing] concern over the security” of the site; “cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters”; and a “media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities.”  Many of those proposals were also featured prongs of a secret 2008 Pentagon plan to destroy WikiLeaks.

One section of the leaked report focused on attacking WikiLeaks’ supporters and it featured a discussion of me.  A graph purporting to be an “organizational chart” identified several other targets, including former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee,Guardian reporter James Ball, and Manning supporter David House.  The report claimed I was ”critical” to WikiLeaks’ public support after its website was removed by Amazon and that “it is this level of support that needs to be disrupted”; absurdly speculated that “without the support of people like Glenn, WikiLeaks would fold”; and darkly suggested that “these are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause.”  As The Tech Herald noted, “earlier drafts of the proposal and an email from Aaron Barr used the word ‘attacked’ over ‘disrupted’ when discussing the level of support.”

In the wake of the ensuing controversy caused by publication of these documents, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir Tech, Alex Karp, has nowissued a statement stating that he ”directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary.”  The full statement – which can be read here — also includes this sentence:  ”personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.”  Palantir has also contacted me by email to arrange for Dr. Karp to call me to personally convey the apology.  My primary interest is in knowing whether Bank of America retained these firms to execute this proposal and if any steps were taken to do so; if Karp’s apology is genuine, that information ought to be forthcoming (as I was finishing writing this, Karp called me, seemed sincere enough in his apology, vowed that any Palantir employees involved in this would dealt with the way they dealt with HB Gary, and commendably committed to telling me by the end of the week whether Bank of America or Hunton & Williams actually retained these firms to carry out this proposal).

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/02/11/campaigns/index.html

Related:

It’s been a long week for security firm HBGary.

First the loose hacker group Anonymous retaliated against one of the firm’s employees investigating Anonymous byhacking into the corporation’s servers and spilling 50,000 emails onto the Web. Then a string of those stolen emails revealed a proposal by the firm and two others to launch a campaign of illegal cyberattacks and calculated misinformation against WikiLeaks and its supporters.

Now, just a few days later, one of those firms, Palo Alto-based Palantir, has publicly cut ties with HBGary and apologized for its role in the WikiLeaks response plan, essentially verifying the reality of that plan and isolating HBGary further.

In a statement to the press, Palantir chief executive Alex Carp writes, “I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HBGary.” Karp adds that “Palantir Technologies does not build software that is designed to allow private sector entities to obtain non-public information, engage in so-called ‘cyber attacks’ or take other offensive measures. I have made clear in no uncertain terms that Palantir Technologies will not be involved in such activities.”

On Thursday, the Tech Herald reported that hacked emails from HBGary revealed a PDF document outlining a proposal to Bank of America to sabotage WikiLeaks on multiple fronts, a response plan to what some believe may be a release of Bank of America’s internal documents by WikiLeaks in coming months. The PDF suggested launching cyberattacks on WikiLeaks servers, spreading misinformation about its insecurity, and even pressuring journalists who support the site, specifically focusing on Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com.

http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palantir-apologizes-for-wikileaks-attack-proposal-cuts-ties-with-hbgary/