Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/15/hoosier-hotshot.html
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Christ, what an asshole
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I’m sure there are some very fine people on Fox & Friends. Hopefully they will find a way to reunite in Portugal.
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As I recall he was a pretty regular guest on the This Week In Tech podcast and pushed his involvement in this garbage during those appearances.
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If things continue like this, outright criminals with no concern for politics will start putting Trump stickers on their cars and claim “political bias” when they get caught.
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Man, the everlasting shitshow just never ends with these people, does it.
Fox and Friends is like a big tent for grifters of all shapes.
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Here’s a possibly useful tool:
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Yugoslavia and Slovenia listed, missing are Serbia and Croatia.
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fyi, all the suits are civil at this point. Extradition isn’t an option there.
If criminal charges are brought, this would of course be available.
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Would you buy a used car from this man?
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How sad. He used to be on The Daily Buzz morning show (over on the CW?) in the early to mid 2000’s. He was such a goof ball along with Mitch English, Ron Corning, and Andrea Jackson. I fuckin’ loved that show.
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A trebuchet would be too kind for this guy.
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Faux Newz has always been a criminal racket, like all Murdoch properties. Do you expect the place infested with other than scuzzballs? We know they’re crooks; only the charges vary.
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And for countries without extradition treaties USA always have their drones.
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Diseases don’t ‘move’. They ‘disseminate’, or, in this case, ‘metastasize’.
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He looks exactly like the kind of person who would sell oceanfront property in Indianapolis
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I’ve been curious for years about how those ‘we buy ugly houses’ billboards worked, and convinced it was a scam, but could never figure it out until I saw this. I even asked realtors about it, but even if they knew, they played dumb.
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I listened to Clayton’s podcast for a while about 2 years ago and thought…naaaaah.
Sometimes…usually.
Flippers buy houses at bank auctions or distressed houses that can’t sell on the open market and whose owners can’t afford the necessary renovations to make them ready to do so. These are often older properties, properties with uninsured damage, or properties where the builders cut corners. The flippers then hire low-ball contractors to do the bear minimum and turn around and sell them to realty companies at a profit.
Some flippers actually do some of the work themselves to save money and may be retired contractors with the connections to hire reputable contractors to do the rest of the work. These flippers will be handling relatively small numbers of houses and aren’t actually running a scam. You could argue they prey on the less fortunate, but the reality is that there may be no way for the original owners to get rid of the house and, if the flipper does the job properly, they actually do provide valuable work to improve properties.
But the majority of flipped properties are flipped by small companies whose operators do nothing more than solicit investment capital and hire contractors based on who works cheapest without regard to reputations or licenses, which leads to abysmal renovations. Worse still, the temptation to get in over their heads is enormous in this largely unregulated industry. So they’ll promise unrealistic or flat-out impossible returns on investment to lure investors to them and away from their competitors. When the returns from selling the flipped houses don’t suffice to meet their obligations to their investors, some will pay those returns out of new investors which they lure in by showing they paid those unrealistic or impossible returns in the past.
Of course this is a Ponzi scheme, with less and less capital to flip the necessary properties, so it eventually comes crashing down when enough investors’ suspicions overcome their greed. But this can take a while because unrealistic ROIs attract irresponsible investors who don’t want to believe the uncomfortable mathematical truth. In the meantime, the flipper turned Ponzi scheme operator can siphon off a lot of money if they con enough investors, and then take their money and their ass to a tax shelter and a country without an extradition treaty. Maybe they take their spouse if they’re married, maybe they find a new spouse in their new home.
The subprime mortgage crises, subsequent raft of illegal robo-signed foreclosures and the growing frequency and severity of natural disasters in the US flooded the market with such properties, causing their industry to balloon and attract hordes of get-rich-quick grifters with little in the way of regulation to stop scammers.
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