Its Time To Update Our Laws

Did you ever wonder how many times people have tried to fool us? This is a question which would have been much easier to answer years ago, before the Internet connected us to every country in the world. Before computers got popular most of us were never exposed to a hoax. Sure we might have known someone who had been a victim of a scam, but it just was not prevalent. Today there are scams and hoaxes all around us. It reminds me of the Wild West before law and order got to there. Crime was rampant and people were more dependent on themselves to avoid being victims. We are being forced into that situation again, only this time it is almost impossible for us to defend ourselves. You may wonder why I said this, but the correctness of the answer is easy to see. With all our personal data being in the hands of hundreds and maybe thousands of companies and government agencies, it is impossible for us to control who gets to see it and even to protect it.

Technology has surpassed the ability of current laws to protect us. Our laws were never designed for the technological revolution. When they were enacted there was no thought we would be in contact with people who lived in other countries and that these people would be able to commit crimes against us without entering the country where they could be prosecuted. The laws were never set up to protect us from entities who had our data, but never protected it from prying eyes. What should have happened was treaties should have been enacted to punish computer crime by foreign nationals and our laws updated to protect us from those domestic criminals who used computers against us. One has to wonder what the United Nations is really doing. Shouldn’t they have been involved with developing these treaties? It seems to me this is one of the most useless organizations on the face of the planet.

Sometimes the scams are more or less harmless, but annoying never the less. Take all those faked videos which appear on video sites such as YouTube. While we might laugh at some of those purported UFO videos, some of them are giving UFO investigators fits, because technology is advancing so quickly it is getting much harder to detect fakes. This has hurt the UFO community, but it is great for the disinformation people. The videos can then be cited by others as proof of facts which really don’t exist and weaken the case for real UFOs as the videos are exposed as frauds. There are many other videos out there showing many different amazing things, but remember most of them are frauds. I saw one the other day and a lot of people were impressed by it. It had to do with objects hanging on strings of varying lengths that moved in wave patterns to music. Conveniently you could not see the top of the strings so anyone could have been manipulating them.

It is very import when viewing one of these videos to take notice of everything in the picture or video. If an important part is hidden or missing chances are the video is a fake. I see this quite often in videos, but sometimes videos look perfect and you have to check out the story and then preform a very close examination, going frame by frame. One video I remember was of a UFO over a building in Mexico. It was said thousands of people saw it and at first glance the video looked real. When the story was checked out, NO ONE SAW THE UFO above the building, because it was never there. Close examination of the video by an expert showed some objects on the roof of the building were clearly facing the wrong way and had been added to the frame when the UFO was inserted. Sometimes you have to look for the smallest deviations.

While these types of videos don’t hurt us financially, videos showing some process doing amazing things are more harmful to our wallets, because many times these things are for sale and when bought they don’t work as advertised. Other times we find out the price was not what we thought. Let me give you an example. There is a certain item being sold which is being advertised not by a video, but by still photos. The photos are full of praise by supposedly people who bought the item. It is said to cost only about ten dollars, but when you go to buy it you find out that ten dollars is only for a month of use. The cost can be anywhere from 50 dollars a year to 200 dollars a year depending on what version you buy. This is certainly unethical advertising, but it seems to be catching on. I remember when I could look at videos without first sitting through commercials, do you remember those days?

While I am on the subject of hoaxes and false advertising, why should people in foreign countries be allowed to send you an email telling you that you have inherited money and if you send them a fee they will forward it to you? It is amazing to me nothing is being done about this. How about those emails claiming to be from the FBI saying you inherited money or the ones from the supposed IRS saying you own money and to send it to a certain agent. One would think the government of this country would want to put an end to things like this. We have a lot of sway in this world and I am sure we could stop countries like Nigeria many of whose nationals have made these emails a national pastime, but from what I have seen nothing is being done.

We can’t even stop the annoying phone calls from make believe charities with official sounding names from calling us for money. Sure we can put our phones under the Federal no call runes but that expires and we have to renew it for each number. Many of these charities collect money where noting goes to the needy, but is kept by the company. The names usually have the words police, starving children, sick children, firemen and such in them and are calculated to gain our sympathy. It seems we have become targets for this sort of thing. How hard would it be to put these people behind bars or at least out of business?

We need better protection from scams. It is time the government thought about the people and enacted real laws and signed treaties with other countries to at least try and put an end to this criminality.