Fake Facebook shares not to be taken at face value

Wherever there is money, there is crime. If Darwin were a modern day economist, he could have written amazing book that correlates the development of humans and society with the length, depth and sophistication of its crimes. Over in Wisconsin, a woman seems to have perpetrated a high profile crime on her own door step. If this villain were a creature – it would be the Dodo.

As Mark Zuckerberg prepares to join the ranks of the amazingly rich and take his well deserved annual salary of $1, while his personal accountant worries about which bank is least likely to fail once its coffers have been injected with $75 Billion… a woman called Marianne Oleson is preparing for the possibility that her pay cheques will be measure in cents and coming from the local prison kitchen – for a long, long time.

While internet scams to make a few dollars here and there are common place – and most likely ignored, defrauding people for tens of thousands of dollars is always going to cause an issue.

If they are nameless/faceless people on the web – across the world – then that is one scale of problem. But if you do it to the burly housing contractor who has just upgraded your home – then you are asking for trouble.

From what police can gather, Marianne Oleson is accused of telling people her daughter had an inside track to stock at Facebook – and that the Olesons had acquired around $1m worth. The woman also seems to have conned a partially blind 46 year old chap for around $43,000, telling him “The share certificates are in the post”.

As far as we are concerned, anyone buying stock outside the IPO should get their head examined.

KitGuru says: While fraud is a bad thing, bad fraud is incredibly sad. Without knowing this woman personally, it's hard to know how she thought stiffing her builder (and not in a nice way) would ever pay off. It would be nice if, for once, the allegations were all unfounded and the woman was pronounced innocent – but the evidence presented so far seems damning.

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