60 Minutes on Tax Fraud

October 2, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

Recently, 60 Minutes ran a story about prevalent IRS identity scam.

Here is a how the story began:

There have been lots of stories over the past few months on identity theft and how the information can be used against you. You may have heard something about stolen identity tax fraud. You may even have been a victim of it. It’s the biggest tax scam around now.

This is how it works. Someone steals your identity, files a bogus tax return in your name before you do and collects a refund check from the IRS. It’s so simple, you would think it would never work, but it does. It’s been around since 2008, and you’d think the IRS would have come up with a way to stop it, it hasn’t. Instead the scam has gone viral, tripling in the past three years.

The IRS estimates that it sent out nearly three million fraudulent refunds to con artists last year. And according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office out tomorrow, it cost tax payers $5.2 billion. The Treasury Department believes the numbers are much higher than that. Proving once again, what every con man already knows: there is no underestimating the general dysfunction and incompetence of government bureaucracy.

Pedophile Support Group

April 15, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

Pedophile Support Group

This weekend, the popular This American Life podcast aired an episode entitled “Tarred and Feathered.” It featured stories of public shame. Particularly interesting was a story titled “Help Wanted,” which discusses a young man’s struggle with pedophilia and child pornography.

Here is a description of the story:

There’s one group of people that is universally tarred and feathered in the United States and most of the world. We never hear from them, because they can’t identify themselves without putting their livelihoods and reputations at risk. That group is pedophiles. It turns out lots of them desperately want help, but because it’s so hard to talk about their situation it’s almost impossible for them to find it. Reporter Luke Malone spent a year and a half talking to people in this situation, and he has this story about one of them. More of Luke Malone’s reporting on this topic will appear next month on Medium.com. (27 minutes)

Pedophile Support Group

April 15, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / 1 Comment

Pedophile Support Group

Here is a description of the story:

There’s one group of people that is universally tarred and feathered in the United States and most of the world. We never hear from them, because they can’t identify themselves without putting their livelihoods and reputations at risk. That group is pedophiles. It turns out lots of them desperately want help, but because it’s so hard to talk about their situation it’s almost impossible for them to find it. Reporter Luke Malone spent a year and a half talking to people in this situation, and he has this story about one of them. More of Luke Malone’s reporting on this topic will appear next month on Medium.com. (27 minutes)

Do Violent Video Games Lead to Less Violent Crime?

November 26, 2013 / Matthew Clemente / 2 Comments

Do Violent Video Games Lead to Less Violent Crime?

That was one of the questions asked on the Freakonomics Radio podcast.

Here is a description of the episode:

Our latest podcast is called “Who Runs the Internet?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript; it includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

It begins with Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt talking about whether virtual mayhem — from online ranting to videogame violence — may help reduce mayhem in the real world. There is no solid data on this, Levitt says, but he hypothesizes:

LEVITT: Maybe the biggest effect of all of having these violent video games is that they’re super fun for people to play, especially adolescent boys, maybe even adolescent boys who are prone to real violence. And so if you can make video games fun enough, then kids will stop doing everything else. They’ll stop watching TV, they’ll stop doing homework, and they’ll stop going out and creating mayhem on the street.

This episode then moves on to a bigger question about the Internet itself: who runs it? As Dubner asks: “Who’s in charge of the gazillions of conversations and transactions and character assassinations that happen online every day?”

Internet scholar Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, tells us that 60 percent of adults around the world are now connected to the same communications grid. (South Korea, he says, is the “most wired” country.) And this global connectivity is interesting, he says, because it’s not like there is an international body governing what’s online:

SHIRKY: Well, I mean, famously, the regulatory overhead on the Internet is permissive and minimal. In fact, the thing that freaked everyone out about it in the 90s when it was spreading on the wings of the web was that no one was in charge. … There are famous stories of bosses fretting that because all of their employees were suddenly sending international emails that they were suddenly going to be hit by the bill by the people who ran the Internet.