TomW

The big divide in Britain today is between those who work and those who don’t. Reform are on the side of Brits who set their alarm clocks, get up early and go to work.

Benefit cheat Bethany Elwood, 31, pocketed £78,057 in Universal Credit by lying she was single for over four years. The mum-of-two from Parson Cross, Sheffield, kept claiming as a lone parent even after her full-time employed boyfriend moved in with her in the mid-2020s. She failed to update the DWP and continued raking in the cash until a member of the public tipped off the fraud hotline in 2024. When interviewed she initially denied it but then made a full admission. At Sheffield Magistrates’ Court she was given a 12-month prison sentence suspended for two years and ordered to repay the full £78k at just £20 a month. The judge called it a “long term, wilful fraud for a great deal of money” that defrauds every taxpayer. £20 a month......

How the Opta supercomputer sees the title race after Manchester City's win over Arsenal on Sunday🫣

I genuinely belive we will beat Manchester City at the Etihad and secure the Premier League today. I can't wait to see all your tears later on.

A 22 year old in Spain scammed Amazon out of $370,000 by returning boxes full of dirt Amazon refunds returns based on one thing which is the weight of the box when it comes back If the weight matches the original item, the refund goes through automatically and nobody opens the box James Gilbert Kwarteng figured this out in 2018 The way it worked was almost stupidly easy He would order an expensive item on Amazon, a phone, a laptop, a piece of electronics, anything over a few hundred dollars When it arrived he would weigh it to the gram, fill the original box with the exact same weight in dirt and ship it back as a return Amazon's warehouse would log the box at the correct weight, process the return and refund him in full He would then sell the real item online and pocket both the refund and the resale price He did it so many times that he eventually registered a limited company for the operation and called it "Kwartech." A portmanteau of his surname and the word technology, run out of his apartment in Palma de Mallorca The scheme ran for over a year and pulled in roughly €300,000, about $370,000 at the time Returned boxes full of dirt were piling up in Amazon warehouses across Europe because nobody was opening them He only got caught because Amazon changed their return policy and started spot checking packages An employee in Barcelona opened one of his boxes at random, found it full of soil and flagged it to the Technological Crimes Unit of the Balearic Islands Police traced the returns back to Kwartech and arrested him in August 2019 The case was called the biggest Amazon scam ever recorded in Europe at the time He showed up to court, posted €3,000 bail and walked out the same day Others took the same playbook and got more sophisticated with it A guy in North Carolina named Hudson Hamrick pulled $290,000 out of Amazon over four years by ordering expensive electronics, guitars and tools and returning cheaper broken versions of the same items in the original boxes An international ring called REKK openly advertised their services on Reddit and Discord, charging a fee to get fake refunds approved on anything you ordered They pulled in millions by bribing Amazon employees to push the refunds through manually before anyone could inspect the package Amazon spent $1.2 billion in 2022 alone trying to fight return fraud and hired 15,000 people to work on it full time The craziest part is that the original scam still works today Weigh the item, match the weight, ship back something worthless, collect the refund Amazon processes millions of returns a week and the machine checking the box at the warehouse only knows one thing about what's inside it