NY Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald — best known for his coverage of the Enron scandal for the paper and his book on the scandal, Conspiracy of Fools — pens this remarkable Times article, which tells the incredibly sad story of Justin Berry, a teen-ager who was seduced by online pedophiles.
At the ripe age of 13, Justin began attracting online pedophiles by performing on his webcam and he subsequently made hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next several years by performing online. In researching the story, Eichenwald met Justin and persuaded him to get off of drugs, to shut down the online business, and provide to the government names and credit card information on about 1,500 people who paid him to perform on his webcam.
This is one of those stories that stays with you for a long time.

It looks as if a number of wealthy Aggies have had an Aggie joke played on them.
This Southern District of Texas U.S. Attorney’s office press release (newspaper report here) reports that a Bryan woman has been indicted on mail and wire fraud charges after the woman allegedly portrayed herself to investors as a postgraduate A&M student studying cattle reproduction at the university. Based on her supposed position as an A&M grad student, the woman promoted a number of Aggie investors to purchase bogus cattle as a part of an alleged grant-funded genetics research program at the university. The woman would raise $600 per head of cattle from the investors on the promise that she would use the invested funds to buy cattle from one of four Texas ranches, including the venerable King Ranch. Then, after nine months of “research” at A&M, the cattle would be sold back to the ranches for $1,000 per head, with $400 of that sales price coming from a research “grant” funded by A&M and the four participating ranches. After she pocketed a $100 fee for “tax purposes,” the woman would tell the investors that they would make a $300 per-head profit on each resale of the cattle. Remarkably, the woman was able to promote the dubious deal for almost three years.
As with all investments that violate the tried and true “too good to be true rule,” the research program was nonexistent, the cattle were bogus, the woman was not an A&M student and she is currently a defendant in civil lawsuits by investors seeking over $5 million. She faces 26 criminal counts, each of which carries a possible punishment of up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Meanwhile, there is no truth to the rumor that the A&M administration — as an accomodation to the defrauded investors — is attempting to schedule a special screening of the new movie, The Producers. Hat tip to Peter Henning for the link to the U.S. Attorney’s press release.