Thursday, July 1, 2010

A court in England, UK has jailed a policeman for ten months after he was convicted of defrauding his car insurance company.

Police Constable Simon Hood, 43, arranged for a friend who dealt in scrap metal to dispose of his Audi TT, then claimed it had been stolen.

Hood had been disappointed with the car’s value when he tried to sell it two years after its purchase in 2008. He arranged for friend Peter Marsh, 41, to drive the vehicle to his scrapyard in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Marsh then dismantled the vehicle with the intent of disposing of it, but parts were later found wrapped in bubblewrap at Ace Tyre and Exhaust Centre.

Marsh picked up the TT from outside nearby Gorleston police station. Records show mobile phone conversations between the conspirators that day in March, both before and after the vehicle was reported stolen. The pair denied wrongdoing but were convicted of conspiring to commit insurance fraud after trial.

The fraud was uncovered after Hood told former girlfriend Suzanne Coates of the scheme. It was alleged before Norwich Crown Court that he had confessed to her in an effort to resume their relationship. Coates said that after the pseudotheft, Hood told her “he didn’t want to look for it. He said it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, which I thought was a bit strange.”

Shortly afterwards Hood suggested they should become a couple once more, she said; she challenged his version of events regarding the car: “He said he did it but I couldn’t tell anyone. He said he did it with Peter. Peter had a key and took the car away and it was going to be taken to bits and got rid of so it was never found.”

Hood was defended by Michael Clare and Marsh by Richard Potts. Both lawyers told the court that their clients had already suffered as a result of the action in mitigation before sentencing. Clare said Hood had resigned from the police after fifteen years of otherwise good service and risked losing his pension. “It is not a case where his position as a police officer was used in order to facilitate the fraud,” he pointed out. “His career is in ruins.” Hood is now pursuing a career in plumbing.

Potts defended Marsh by saying that he, too, had already suffered from his actions. His own insurers are refusing to renew their contract with him when it expires and his bank withdrew its overdraft facility. His business employs 21 people and Potts cited Marsh’s sponsorship of Great Yarmouth In Bloom as amongst evidence he supported his local community.

Judge Alasdair Darroch told Marsh that he did accept the man was attempting to help his friend. He sentenced Marsh to six months imprisonment, suspended for two years and ordered to carry out 250 hours of community service. He was more critical of Hood:

“As a police officer you know the highest possible standards are demanded by the public. You have let down the force. You knew throughout your career that policemen that get involved in serious dishonesty get sent to prison.”

Friday, January 23, 2009

Wikinews has learned that the internet group known only as “Anonymous” has hacked the website of the No Cussing Club (NCC), nocussing.com, for at least two days in a row. On day one, the group hacked into the website, replacing the content with links to images of alleged e-mail conversations. The e-mails appear to be from the founder’s e-mail account, accusing organization members of forgery and using the site for their own personal financial gains. The website was also replaced with Anonymous’s logo and a message. On January 22, they again attacked the website, by means of a Distributed Denial-of-service attack (DDoS), bringing it offline periodically throughout the day. Anonymous attacked the Scientology website in 2008 with a DDoS attack, taking it off-line for at least two days.

“It has come to our attention that the creators of the no cussing club, McKay and Brent Hatch have done so at great personal gain. Their material promotes the organization as the brainchild of their 14-year-old son, when actually the material is written by his parents, who also manage his profitable career while using his speaking events to plug their own material,” said Anonymous on the hacked website. On Encyclopedia Dramatica, a satire Wiki, they claim further responsibility for the hack and exposition saying they managed to break into McKay and Brent Hatch’s email accounts. “[the accounts got] haxx0rd and via this astonishing development passwords were got and a certain website got its shit ruined.”

According to the NCC’s website, it has 20,000 members worldwide, was founded in 2007 by McKay Hatch, a 14-year-old boy, and aims at discouraging swearing in public places such as schools. In 2008, McKay even succeeded in making cussing illegal in his hometown of South Pasadena, California and has appeared on various talk shows such as that of Doctor Phil. However, according to e-mails leaked to Wikinews, allegedly written by the boy’s father Brent, a motivational speaker also owning Dawson Publishing, the parents are allegedly using the site and their son’s material for their own personal financial gain. Anonymous also claims that the parents have forged some of their son’s writings and claim it to be his.

The e-mails allege that Brent along with his publishing company, the name which “nocussing.com” is also registered under, were trying to set up assemblies in the No Cussing Club’s name at schools across the United States for US$1,500.00 per show and would then pocket the money, doing the same for postcards they created for churches and schools.

“McKay spoke last night to a group of 40 people, and at the end of his presentation, there wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd. I know this is going to work because the message is so important. Thanks for all you do and I hope we can work together for a long time, and of course make money in the process,” said Brent in an alleged e-mail conversation on November 25, 2008. Earlier in August 2008, Brent spoke about hoping to reach a “goal” of “2.5 million dollars” by selling thousands of postcards to “schools and churches”.

On January 19, 2009, ABC News.com reported that McKay claimed Anonymous was sending him and his family hate e-mail and death threats, nearly 50,000 per day, “almost all of them filled with obscenities” and spam. On the NCC’s website, McKay calls himself the “most cyberbullied kid on the planet” because of Anonymous’s attacks.

“A lot of people were saying I was taking away their freedom of speech,” said McKay to ABC News on January 16. “All I was trying to do was raise awareness.” He says he formed the club because his schoolmates were sick of hearing people swear in public. Wikinews contacted the NCC to confirm or deny the reports, but would only say that “the FBI is [working] on it [the case]” including “our attorney and we will press charges” against those who are responsible for the crimes.

Anonymous is known to prank and hack websites and e-mail accounts. In September 2008, the group hacked into BillOreilly.com, the official website of Fox News Channel commentator Bill O’Reilly, exposing personal information of the site’s users in a document posted on the internet.

The NCC is located in South Pasadena. According to the California Penal Code §502 part C of the computer hacking laws, depending on the offense if caught, punishments could be a “fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars ($10,000), or by imprisonment in the state prison for 16 months, or two or three years, or by both that fine and imprisonment, or by a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars ($5,000), or by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment”.

On October 20, 2008, Dmitriy Guzner, aged 18 from New Jersey, admitted to the charges related to carrying out the DDoS attack on Scientology’s website. He was subsequently charged with computer hacking crimes and faces a maximum sentence of ten years imprisonment.

Monday, October 1, 2012

The Iranian Fars News Agency (FNA) yesterday apologised over an article it reproduced Friday, originally written by US satirical news website The Onion on Monday September 24. The parodic article reported “a Gallup poll” suggesting “the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans” would vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, instead of US President Barack Obama. The Onion article also said “77 percent of rural Caucasian voters” would prefer to drink beer with Ahmadinejad or attend a baseball game with him as opposed to Obama.

The FNA’s English service Editor-in-chief said the article had been “extracted” from The Onion and that FNA gives “our formal apologies for that mistake”, as well as pointing out the article was “taken down from our outlook in less two hours”.

However, the editor-in-chief also said “we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Barack Obama and American statesmen”. He stressed that this belief does not constitute justification for the error.

In The Onion’s article, fictional West Virginia resident Dale Swiderski says about Ahmadinejad: “I like him better”. ‘Swiderski’ is also quoted by the Chicago, Illinois website as saying the Iranian President “takes national defense seriously, and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does.”

In Iran, homosexuality is a criminal offence which can carry a penalty of incarceration or capital punishment. Just over five years ago, when he participated in a debate at Columbia University in New York, New York, Ahmadinejad said: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country”.

The FNA’s error made international headlines, including in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia. Will Tracy, editor of The Onion, said their website “freely shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran’s Finest News Source on their superb reportage”, a humourous reference to The Onion’s slogan, ‘America’s Finest News Source’.

On the original web page on The Onion’s website, the satirical news organisation added a reference to “our Iranian subsidiary organization”, providing a link to a screenshot of the FNA’s page.

On the article page, in which The Onion was not attributed as a source, the FNA copied The Onion’s article verbatim and in its entirety, save for part of a sentence saying Ahmadinejad was “a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed”.

This is not the first time The Onion has caused the mistaken belief of their material being factual. In a November 2007 interview with Wikinews, The Onion’s Editorial Manager Chet Clem recounted an incident in which the Beijing Evening News reproduced a story from The Onion created in 2002, copied entirely verbatim, headlined “Congress threatens to leave DC unless new capitol is built”. When the error was highlighted to the Chinese newspaper, Clem said “their response was not to print a correction, but just to say that some newspapers in America make money by printing lies.” In a separate incident, Christians forwarded a story on the Internet from The Onion saying children were converting to Satanism as a result of reading the Harry Potter book series.

The FNA statement released yesterday went on to say “[a]ctive and well-known media occasionally make mistakes, and no media is an exception to this rule”, before going to provide a list of errors made by such publications as The New York Times and Beijing Evening News, as well as television broadcasters like the BBC, ITV, and CNN.

The bottom of the FNA’s statement introduces a list of notable BBC errors reported by The Daily Telegraph on December 6, 2010. While the FNA referenced The Daily Telegraph and the order of the mistakes was changed from the original article, the wording was reproduced verbatim, excluding one omitted sentence under the subheading ‘Nicky Campbell and hunting mark II’ which reads: “Campbell, who is also the presenter of the BBC’s flagship programme for Holy Week, apologised profusely for the mistake.”

According to BBC News Online, the FNA is associated with the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, an Iranian military branch.