It takes a special kind of crook to take advantage of people when they are down and out. We saw this when the mortgage crisis hit and con artists offered to help people save their homes from foreclosure. The victims paid the crooks thousands of dollars and still lost their homes.
Credit repair con artists are cut from the same cloth. District Attorney Richard Brown recently charged the owner of a Richmond Hill company with bilking desperate customers out of thousands of dollars.
According to Brown, B.J. Cardova, of Valley Stream, L.I., promised at least four customers he would repair their credit scores, but instead scammed them out of a total of $7,700 between 2008 and 2010.
If Cardova was scamming the four known victims, it is likely there were others. We trust the DA will keep digging until all of the victims are found and made whole.
“Instead of throwing them a lifeline, in reality he is alleged to have exposed businesses to bad debtors who were financially drowning and assisted his customers in burying themselves deeper in debt,” said Brown.
The police found evidence of broader criminal activity, including Georgia name-change and divorce decrees, rubber stamps with the names of a judge and clerk from the Peach State and a raised seal of Fulton County Superior Court.
If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. When good people find their backs to the wall, their judgment gets clouded.
We applaud the DA’s office for its work on this case and hope the courts will bring the hammer down on everyone involved.
Melanoma Machines
New Jersey’s “tanning mom” is proof of just how dangerous tanning machines can be. Whether or not she ever allowed her daughter to use tanning beds, she did damage to her own skin.
It happens that May is Melanoma Awareness Month. The biggest danger for contracting melanoma is too much exposure to sunlight, but the tanning beds can also cause skin cancer. The city should make it clear to the owners of tanning salons that they cannot allow customers to misuse their machines.
The tanning mom should have been stopped long before she became front-page news.
