Wire Fraud

Categories: Ethics/Morals, Tech

If you’re about to wire someone money, stop. It could be wire fraud. Maybe. Ask Chicken Little.

Wire fraud happens when some sneaky SOB has tricked another person into wiring them money based on lies and/or false promises. Not a trusted party. Like the Prince of Nigeria.

You’ve heard them before: someone pretending to be a grandchild to the grandma (which is also identity fraud, assuming the grandchild actually exists out there in real life), or an internet relationship turns damsel-in-distress who needs money (but won’t ever visit you, for various reasons, of course). That email you got that said you have a super-rich great uncle who was actually a prince in a faraway land that left you millions of dollars? Uh...no.

So even if you think you know who you’re wiring money to, double check with them through another form of communication to make sure it’s really them. Or, you know, make sure they’re a real person you’ve spent a lot of time with, and not some hairy fat dude pretending to be a blonde princess in a high castle.

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Finance: What is a Bucket Shop?15 Views

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Finance, a la shmoop. What is a bucket shop? Anyone see wolf of Wallstreet?

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Remember Leo's firm yeah that was a bucket shop, it was set up to fraud, [Bucket shop stamp]

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deceive, steal, and basically take advantage of trusting naive rubes

00:18

who gave Leo and his partners their money and well they basically did vile [Toilets]

00:22

things with it. Bucket shop is a derogatory term coined [Leo holding money toilet paper]

00:26

by the Supreme Court actually in a 1905 ruling, in practice bucket shops were

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often unregistered financial pool halls where quote investors unquote would bet [Pool tables]

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on short term stock moves and well never actually take delivery of a

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security. They would just like make the bed and then whatever happened they'd [Men in suits]

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settle in cash outside of the security system, think of the bucket shop as a

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first derivative of a real brokerage, such that cash comes in and goes out

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without a whole lot of logic behind it, it's like betting on what tickers gonna [Stock tickers]

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come up next on CNBC at the bottom of the screen you know that thing. Yeah so [Stock ticker appears under the CNBC logo]

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that's what that weird logic is or lack of it other than as a reflection of

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whether or not Ford ticker F went up a dime or not that day, like that's what [Ford stock price chart]

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bucket shops do you're just making bets on random things and yeah Ford the wolf [Chips being placed on a roulette table]

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of Wall Street's second favorite F word, fine film though should see it... [The wolf of wall street being played in a theatre]

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)