German Man Cheats Recycling Machine Out of Over $47,000 Using a Single Bottle

A drinks vendor in Cologne, Germany was recently tried and convicted to ten months in prison for modifying a bottle recycling machine and cheating the swindling several tens of thousands of euros from the national recycling system.

Bottle-recycling machines in Germany are fairly straightforward – a person inserts one or more bottles into the machine and they receive a receipt for a few euro-cents, or euros, depending on the number of bottles recycled. But in a case presented in front of a Cologne court last week, one recycling machine ended up paying a whopping €44,362.75 ($47,000) without recycling a single bottle. It turns out that an unnamed local drinks vendor managed to modify one such recycling machine located in the basement of his shop so that he could earn a lot more than the usual spare change. Evidence presented during the trial showed that the 37-year-old defendant had installed a magnet sensor and a kind of wooden tunnel into the machine, which allowed him to insert the bottle into the mechanism, receive his receipt and then retrieve the bottle without it actually getting shredded inside.

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Pay to Pray – Guy Makes Over $7 Million Charging People for Prayers Online

Between 2011 and 2015, Seattle “businessman” Benjamin Rogovy made millions of dollars by taking advantage of people’s religious beliefs. Through his website, ChristianPrayerCenter.com, he led people to believe that ministers and religious leaders would pray for them if they paid between $9 and $35 for the service. He managed to convince hundreds of thousands of people to participate in the scam, becoming the sole recipient of all their donations.

To make the internet scam seem genuine, Rogovy posed as Pastor John Carlson, a fictitious character with a professional-looking LinkedIn profile. He created other fake profiles for ministers who could provide private consultations and perform religious ceremonies through ChristianPrayerCenter.com and its Spanish version, OracionCristiana.org. Both websites contained fake testimonials of people who, with the help of his prayers, had been able to avoid home foreclosures, win the lottery, have healthy babies, and even be cured of HIV.  The scheme worked perfectly for four very profitable years, and at the height of its popularity, Rogovy’s pay-to-pray service had a whopping 1,289,120 likes on Facebook. People posted all their prayers online and sent money in hopes that it would lead to small miracles.

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