Kenyan wife of N9gerian fraudster, jailed in Britain

THE Kenyan wife of a 9gerian fugitive fraudster was jailed for four years in Britain, on Wednesday, for the role she played in mortgage fraud

Ruth Ayinde-Azeez, 26, a care home assistant, who led a life of luxury thanks to an £8 million mortgage fraud, sobbed as she was sentenced, on Wednesday.

Isaac Matthews, 42, of Chatham, Kent, was sentenced to six years in jail.

Ruth Ayinde-Azeez lived in a six-bedroom mansion containing 12 plasma TVs and drove around in a top-of-the range Bentley and Land Rover.

She took lavish holidays in Dubai and the south of France, kept £1.6 million in her bank accounts and blew huge sums at upmarket bars and restaurants.

But her lifestyle was funded by crime, Southwark Crown Court heard.

Her husband, Victor, a fraudster who is on the run overseas, led a mortgage con gang which plundered nearly £6 million from high street banks in just six weeks using a network of front companies and crooked solicitors.

The court heard that Ruth Ayinde-Azeez was sucked into the criminal world of her husband and came to enjoy the trappings of excessive wealth.

The Kenyan national laundered £1.25 million and was jailed, on Wednesday, for four years for her part in the fraud.

A curious order emanating from a Sharia judge in Kaduna State is seeking to gag users in a forum launched recently on an amputation case on Facebook and Twitter.

Justice Lawal Muhammed of Magajin Gari Sharia Court in Kaduna has ordered social networking sites - Facebook and Twitter - to stop discussions on the amputation of Buba Bello Jangebe until the determination of the suit instituted by the Association of Muslim Brotherhood of Nigeria.

The restraining order is the first of its kind in Nigeria where a court seeks to interfere in the freedom of interaction and activities of people online.

It is not clear how the restraining order would be enforced.

But it has been delivered to the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) that opened the discussion on Sharia law and Jangebe on Facebook and Twitter recently.

Court documents obtained in Kaduna confirmed the ruling of Justice Muhammed.

“An order is hereby given restraining the respondents (CRC) either by themselves or their agents from opening a chat forum on Facebook, Twitter, or any blog for the purpose of the debate on the amputation of Malam Buba Bello Jangebe,” the document read.

Jangebe was the first person to have his right wrist amputated on the orders of a Sharia court in Zamfara State, a year after 12 Northern states adopted the strict Islamic penal code during the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration.

In an interview , President of the CRC Shehu Sani said the group would challenge the order at a higher court. He said the order tramples on his right to free speech and freedom of association.

Sani added that the chat forum was opened about 10 days ago to provide an avenue for Nigerians to discuss Sharia law as a whole and the amputation of Jangebe in particular.

“We opened the blog on Facebook and Twitter chats 10 days ago to serve as a platform for which Nigerians could air their opinions on Sharia law as a whole and the justification or otherwise of the amputation of the hand of Malam Buba Bello Jangebe,” Sani said.

This is not the first time Sani is having an encounter with Sharia courts in the North.

In 2008, one of the courts banned his satirical play “Phantom Crescent” after it ruled that the content violates Sharia law. The ban was later lifted on appeal.

Kaduna is one of 12 states to introduce the stricter version of Sharia law in the North after Zamfara signed it into law in 1999.

Lilli Day | Photodisc | Getty Images

On Tuesday, US President Barack Obama signed into law health care legislation that expands health coverage for the poor, imposes new taxes on the rich and forbids
insurance practices such as refusing coverage to those with pre-existing
conditions.

In their expansionary phase, empires force people to go out, seek risks and fend for themselves, Murrin said, reminding of the dismantling of the
British empire after the war, when the National Health Service, which
ensures universal health coverage in Britain, was created.

"This (empire decline) is actually a dead-set course that societies get into and it will happen very quickly I'm afraid," he told "Squawk Box Europe."

"As you start to build a system it becomes cohesive because of its success… the fractures in the American system I think are more apparent than ever," Murrin added.

China's rise will be much faster than most people anticipate as the country's military prowess increases, he said.

"We all know there's going to be a change, the surprise will be the pace of that change," Murrin said, noting that "all empires when they decline they
underestimate their challengers."

The peak for commodities will be reached somewhere between 2020 and 2025 and it's the period before that that must be watched, as China seems much more willing to take risks than Western
countries, he predicted.

- Watch the full interview with David Murrin above.

"You have a lot more males in China then you do in the west," he said, noting that 56 percent of the Chinese society was male, because of the country's policies to
control population and because of traditions which value males more than
females.

"What that means is that they're far more risk-oriented than a society in the West…if you look at conflict and your ability to risk your males in
conflict," Murrin explained.

There is a Cyber War going on that a lot of us are not aware of .Yesterday we did a story on Yahoo Yahoo and Western Union .today Russian Geeks or efficos as we call them in naija have taken it to a diferent level .

Hundreds of computer geeks, most of them students putting themselves through college, crammed into three floors of an office building in an industrial section of Ukraine's capital Kiev, churning out code at a frenzied pace. They were creating some of the world's most pernicious, and profitable, computer viruses..Federal Trade Commission investigators Sheryl Novick (R) and Martha Vera look at images as part of their investigation of the scareware company Innovative Marketing Ukraine (IMU) in the FTC internet lab in Washington March 22, 2010. Photo: REUTERS

According to court documents, former employees and investigators, a receptionist greeted visitors at the door of the company, known as Innovative Marketing Ukraine. Communications cables lay jumbled on the floor and a small coffee maker sat on the desk of one worker.

As business boomed, the firm added a human resources department, hired an internal IT staff and built a call center to dissuade its victims from seeking credit card refunds. Employees were treated to catered holiday parties and picnics with paintball competitions.

Top performers got bonuses as young workers turned a blind eye to the harm the software was doing. "When you are just 20, you don't think a lot about ethics," said Maxim, a former Innovative Marketing programer who now works for a Kiev bank and asked that only his first name be used for this story. "I had a good salary and I know that most employees also had pretty good salaries."

In a rare victory in the battle against cybercrime, the company closed down last year after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit seeking its disbandment in U.S. federal court.

An examination of the FTC's complaint and documents from a legal dispute among Innovative executives offer a rare glimpse into a dark, expanding -- and highly profitable -- corner of the internet.

Innovative Marketing Ukraine, or IMU, was at the center of a complex underground corporate empire with operations stretching from Eastern Europe to Bahrain; from India and Singapore to the United States. A researcher with anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc who spent months studying the company's operations estimates that the business generated revenue of about $180 million in 2008, selling programs in at least two dozen countries. "They turned compromised machines into cash," said the researcher, Dirk Kollberg.

The company built its wealth pioneering scareware -- programs that pretend to scan a computer for viruses, and then tell the user that their machine is infected. The goal is to persuade the victim to voluntarily hand over their credit card information, paying $50 to $80 to "clean" their PC.

Scareware, also known as rogueware or fake antivirus software, has become one of the fastest-growing, and most prevalent, types of internet fraud. Software maker Panda Security estimates that each month some 35 million PCs worldwide, or 3.5 percent of all computers, are infected with these malicious programs, putting more than $400 million a year in the hands of cybercriminals. "When you include cost incurred by consumers replacing computers or repairing, the total damages figure is much, much larger than the out of pocket figure," said Ethan Arenson, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission who helps direct the agency's efforts to fight cybercrime.

Groups like Innovative Marketing build the viruses and collect the money but leave the work of distributing their merchandise to outside hackers. Once infected, the machines become virtually impossible to operate. The scareware also removes legitimate anti-virus software from vendors including Symantec Corp, McAfee and Trend Micro Inc, leaving PCs vulnerable to other attacks.

When victims pay the fee, the virus appears to vanish, but in some cases the machine is then infiltrated by other malicious programs. Hackers often sell the victim's credit card credentials to the highest bidder.

Removing scareware is a top revenue generator for Geek Choice, a PC repair company with about two dozen outlets in the United States. The outfit charges $100 to $150 to clean infected machines, a service that accounts for about 30 percent of all calls. Geek Choice CEO Lucas Brunelle said that scareware attacks have picked up over the past few months as the software has become increasingly sophisticated. "There are more advanced strains that are resistant to a lot of anti-virus software," Brunelle said.

Anti-virus software makers have also gotten into the lucrative business of cleaning PCs, charging for those services even when their products fall down on the job.

Charlotte Vlastelica, a homemaker in State College, Pennsylvania, was running a version of Symantec's Norton anti-virus software when her PC was attacked by Antispyware 2010. "These pop-ups were constant," she said. "They were layered one on top of the other. You couldn't do anything."

So she called Norton for help and was referred to the company's technical support division. The fee for removing Antispyware 2010 was $100. A frustrated Vlastelica vented: "You totally missed the virus and now you're going to charge us $100 to fix it?"

AN INDUSTRY PIONEER

"It's sort of a plague," said Kent Woerner, a network administrator for a public school district in Beloit, Kansas, some 5,500 miles away from Innovative Marketing's offices in Kiev. He ran into one of its products, Advanced Cleaner, when a teacher called to report that pornographic photos were popping up on a student's screen. A message falsely claimed the images were stored on the school's computer.

"When I have a sixth-grader seeing that kind of garbage, that's offensive," said Woerner. He fixed the machine by deleting all data from the hard drive and installing a fresh copy of Windows. All stored data was lost.

Stephen Layton, who knows his way around technology, ended up junking his PC, losing a week's worth of data that he had yet to back up from his hard drive, after an attack from an Innovative Marketing program dubbed Windows XP Antivirus. The president of a home-based software company in Stevensville, Maryland, Layton says he is unsure how he contracted the malware.

But he was certain of its deleterious effect. "I work eight-to-12 hours a day," he said. "You lose a week of that and you're ready to jump off the roof."

Layton and Woerner are among more than 1,000 people who complained to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about Innovative Marketing's software, prompting an investigation that lasted more than a year and the federal lawsuit that sought to shut them down. To date the government has only succeeded in retrieving $117,000 by settling its charges against one of the defendants in the suit, James Reno, of Amelia, Ohio, who ran a customer support center in Cincinnati. He could not be reached for comment.

"These guys were the innovators and the biggest players (in scareware) for a long time," said Arenson, who headed up the FTC's investigation of Innovative Marketing.

Innovative's roots date back to 2002, according to an account by one of its top executives, Marc D'Souza, a Canadian, who described the company's operations in-depth in a 2008 legal dispute in Toronto with its founders over claims that he embezzled millions of dollars from the firm. The other key executives were a British man and a naturalized U.S. citizen of Indian origin.

According to D'Souza's account, Innovative Marketing was set up as an internet company whose early products included pirated music and pornography downloads and illicit sales of the impotence drug Viagra. It also sold gray market versions of anti-virus software from Symantec and McAfee, but got out of the business in 2003 under pressure from those companies.

It tried building its own anti-virus software, dubbed Computershield, but the product didn't work. That didn't dissuade the firm from peddling the software amid the hysteria over MyDoom, a parasitic "worm" that attacked millions of PCs in what was then the biggest email virus attack to date. Innovative Marketing aggressively promoted the product over the internet, bringing in monthly profits of more than $1 million, according to D'Souza.

The company next started developing a type of malicious software known as adware that hackers install on PCs, where they served up pop-up ads for travel services, pornography, discounted drugs and other products, including its flawed antivirus software. They spread that adware by recruiting hackers whom they called "affiliates" to install it on PCs.

"Most affiliates installed the adware product on end-users' computers illegally through the use of browser hijacking and other nefarious methods," according to D'Souza. He said that Innovative Marketing paid its affiliates 10 cents per hijacked PC, but generated average returns of $2 to $5 for each of those machines through the sale of software and products promoted through the adware.

ANY MEANS BUT SPAM

The affiliate system has since blossomed. Hackers looking for a piece of the action can link up with scareware companies through anonymous internet chat rooms. They are paid through electronic wire services such as Western Union, Pay Pal and Webmoney which can protect the identity of both the sender and the recipient.

To get started, a hacker needs to register as an affiliate on an underground website and download a virus file that is coded with his or her affiliate ID. Then it's off to races.

"You can install it by any means, except spam," says one affiliate recruiting site, earning4u.com, which pays $6 to $180 for every 1,000 PCs infected with its software. PCs in the United States earn a higher rate than ones in Asia.

Affiliates load the software onto the machines by a variety of methods, including hijacking legitimate websites, setting up corrupt sites for the purposes of spreading viruses and attacks over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

"Anybody can get infected by going to a legitimate website," said Uri Rivner, an executive with RSA, one of the world's top computer security companies.

A scareware vendor distributed its goods one September weekend via The New York Times' website by inserting a single rogue advertisement. The hacker paid NYTimes.com to run the ad, which was disguised as one for the internet phone company Vonage. It contaminated PCs of an unknown number of readers, according to an account of the incident published in The New York Times.

Patrik Runald, a senior researcher at internet security firm Websense Inc, expects rogueware vendors to get more aggressive with marketing. "We're going to see them invest more money in that -- buying legitimate ad space," he said.

To draw victims to infected websites, hackers will also manipulate Google's search engine to get their sites to come up on the top of anyone's search in a particular subject. For instance, they might capitalize on news events of wide interest -- from the winners of the Oscars to the Tiger Woods scandal -- quickly setting up sites to attract relevant search times. Anti-virus maker Panda Security last year observed one scareware peddler set up some 1 million web pages that infected people searching for Ford auto parts with a program dubbed MSAntispyware2009. They also snare victims by sending their links through Facebook and Twitter.

Some rogue vendors manage their partnerships with hackers through software that tracks who installed the virus that generated a sale. Hackers are paid well for their efforts, garnering commissions ranging from 50 to 90 percent, according to Panda Security. SecureWorks, another security firm, estimates that a hacker who gets 1 to 2 percent of users of infected machines to purchase the software can pull in over $5 million a year in commissions.

Hackers in some Eastern European countries barely attempt to conceal their activities.

Panda Security found photos of a party in March 2008 that it said affiliate ring KlikVIP held in Montenegro to reward scareware installers. One showed a briefcase full of euros that would go to the top performer. "They weren't afraid of the legal implications, " said Panda Security researcher Sean-Paul Correll. "They were fearless."

BANKING

One of Innovative Marketing's biggest problems was the high proportion of victims who complained to their credit card companies and obtained refunds on their purchases. That hurt the relationships with its merchant banks that processed those transactions, forcing it to switch from banks in Canada to Bahrain. It created subsidiaries designed to hide its identity.

In 2005, Bank of Bahrain & Kuwait severed its ties with an Innovative Marketing subsidiary that had the highest volume of credit card processing of any entity in Bahrain because of its high chargeback rates, according to D'Souza.

Innovative Marketing then went five months without a credit card processor before finding a bank in Singapore -- DBS Bank -- willing to handle its account. The Singapore bank processed tens of millions of dollars in backlogged credit card payments for the company, D'Souza said.

To keep the chargeback rate from climbing even higher, Innovative Marketing invested heavily in call centers. It opened facilities in Ukraine, India and the United States. The rogueware was designed to tell the users that their PCs were working properly once the victim had paid for the software, so when people called up to complain it wasn't working, agents would walk them through whatever steps it took to make those messages come up.

Often that required disabling legitimate anti-virus software programs, according to McAfee researcher Dirk Kollberg, who spent hours listening to digitized audio recordings of customer service calls that Innovative Marketing kept on its servers at its Ukraine offices. He gathered the data by tapping into a computer server at its branch in Kiev that he said was inadvertently hooked up to Innovative's website. "At the end of the call," he said, "most customers were happy."

Police have had limited success in cracking down on the scareware industry. Like Innovative Marketing, most rogue internet companies tend to be based in countries where laws permit such activities or officials look the other way.

Law enforcement agencies in the United States, Western Europe, Japan and Singapore are the most aggressive in prosecuting internet crimes and helping officials in other countries pursue such cases, said Mark Rasch, former head of the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice. "In the rest of the world, it's hit or miss," he said. "The cooperation is getting better, but the level of crime continues to increase and continues to outpace the level of cooperation."

The FTC succeeded in persuading a U.S. federal judge to order Innovative Marketing and two individuals associated with it to pay $163 million it had scammed from Americans. Neither individual has surfaced since the government filed its original suit more than a year ago. But Ethan Arenson, the FTC attorney who handled the case, warned: "Collection efforts are just getting underway."

Barkindo said that the resumption of gas supply to the countries was because domestic gas supply had improved, hinting also that supply to Ghana was initially stopped to satisfy local demand.

The NNPC GMD, who was speaking to journalists on the sidelines of a meeting organised by the corporation titled, "Stakeholders' forum on gas to power: Achieving alignment for delivering gas to power in Nigeria," said, "Today, we have started supplying the West African Gas Pipeline, which we had to shut down in order to divert the gas for domestic utilisation."

He added that the reason for the resumption of supply was "Because power generation has started to go up."

The West African Gas Pipeline Company, the firm delivering Nigeria's gas to Ghana, had in a statement issued in November 2009, said, "WAPco, last April delivered its first natural gas supply to VRA's Takoradi Thermal Plant at Aboadze near Takoradi, under an interim gas supply arrangement.

"This initial supply enabled VRA to commission one of its 100 megawatts' turbines and generate power in Ghana from natural gas.

"Since May 2009, however, WAPCo has not received gas from N-Gas Limited for further delivery to VRA due to vandalism of gas supply pipelines in the Niger Delta region, several kilometres upstream of the WAGP connection to the Nigerian Gas Company's Escravos-Lagos Pipeline system."

Corroborating Barkindo's statement on increased power generation , the Executive Director, Operations, Power Holding Company of Nigeria, Mr. John Ayodele, who was also speaking on the sidelines of the conference in Lagos, said power generation was 3,558 megawatts on Monday morning and could climb to 3,700MW by Tuesday morning.

Also, Barkindo, had, in a presentation at the opening ceremony of the event, explained reasons why the oil industry could not achieve the 1.2 billion standard cubic feet of gas- domestic -gas- target agreed between it and government in 2008 and which government provided adequate funds for.in 2008 and 2009 budgets.

According to him, although the industry achieved 885 million standard cubic feet, it fell short of the target beacuse of the security situation in the Niger Delta, which was poor between 2008 and 2009 and operational challenges in the various oil producing companies.

Barkindo said, " The 1.2 billion scfd, domestic gas supply obligation was distributed among Joint Venture companies, including the NNPC and some of the Production Sharing Contracts' operators like Pan Ocean. In each of the companies, they had internal challenges. Now, this meeting that we convened will give us the opportunity to jointly review and address these challenges in order to come out with a joint programme of action, that is realistic, flexible and will enable us, not only to achieve the missed target but also to bring forward the projects which are being funded in the 2010 budget."

He stated that the outcome of the conference would be presented to Acting President Goodluck Jonathan

BEIJING – A former medical worker allegedly stabbed to death eight young children and wounded five others Tuesday in a bloody rampage outside an elementary school in eastern China.

The attacker struck in the morning as students arrived for classes, mingling with parents at the school gates before suddenly pulling out his knife and slashing children, according to witnesses interviewed on local television.

In the aftermath, doctors treated small children and bodies lay covered in bloody sheets after the attack at Nanping City Experimental Elementary School in Fujian province. Police officers manned a cordon around the school. Some comforted distraught parents..

China has witnessed a series of school attacks in recent years, most blamed on people with personal grudges or suffering from mental illness, leading to calls for improved security.

The rampage in Nanping was finally stopped by passers-by and school security guards and the attacker was arrested, the reports said. The suspect was identified as Zheng Minsheng, 41.

Zheng worked as a senior nurse in a community clinic before resigning last June, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing Huang Zhongping, spokesman for the Nanping city public security bureau.

Zheng was known to have a history of mental illness, said a man surnamed Wu in the Nanping city government office, who would not give his full name as is common among Chinese officials.

An unidentified former co-worker interviewed on Fujian television said Zheng was "difficult to get along with."

Eight children were killed, and five were being treated at a hospital, Wu said. Six died at the scene, which was smeared with blood from the sidewalk to the floor of an inner reception room.

The victims' ages were not immediately known, but Chinese elementary schools typically have students ages 6 to 12.

The school was closed and students were sent home for the day. Counseling will be provided for students when classes resume Wednesday, Xinhua said.

Recent school attacks include a July 2007 assault in which a mentally ill man wielding a wrench wounded 18 children and a teacher in a kindergarten in southern China before fleeing on a motorcycle and trying to stab himself to death.

In June the same year, a man slashed four students, wounding one seriously, in a high school in the southeastern city of Fuzhou, while elsewhere, police shot dead a suspected mentally ill man who threatened to blow up a school in southern China with dynamite.

China's worst such incident in March 2001 destroyed a schoolhouse and killed at least 42 people, most of them children. Officials blamed a mentally ill man who charged into the school in Jiangxi province with a bag full of dynamite. Parents disputed that, claiming their children had been forced to make fireworks at the school.

Albert Gubay amassed his riches after founding the Kwik Save supermarket chain in 1965Photo: LIVERPOOL POST & ECHO

The devout Roman Catholic vowed to hand over half his fortune to the Church if he ever became rich when he was working as a penniless sweets-seller in Wales after the Second World War.

Instead, at the age of 82, he has fulfilled the deal by giving almost his entire £480 million estate to a new charitable foundation, keeping less than £10 million to see out his old age.

Mr Gubay, who amassed his riches after founding the Kwik Save supermarket chain in 1965, will continue running his companies until he dies and hopes to push to value of his empire to more than £1 billion.

After his death, the newly-founded Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation will receive an estimated income of £20 million a year from the businesses.

The Welsh tycoon has stipulated that half the income must be invested in the Roman Catholic Church, in line with his “pact”, while the rest can be distributed at the discretion of the trustees.

Mr Gubay, who now lives in Santon on the Isle of Man with his second wife Carmel, described his “50/50” deal with God in a 1997 television documentary made by RTE, the Irish broadcaster. He said he had told God in his prayers: “Make me a millionaire and you can have half of my money”.

He has now joined a line of businessmen who have handed over much of their wealth to charity in recent years.

Lord Sainsbury, the supermarket tycoon and one of Britain’s richest men, last year handed over £1bn to the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and instructed the trustees to spend all the money on scientific research, the arts and projects in east Africa before he dies.

Lord Ashcroft, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party currently embroiled in a row over his tax status, has established a foundation to receive 80 per cent of his estimated £1.1 billion fortune after his death.

Karl Rabeder, an Austrian millionaire, announced last month that he was giving away every penny of his £3 million fortune after realising that being rich was making him unhappy.

Mr Gubay ranked 107th on The Sunday Times Rich List in 2009, but will disappear from this year’s list following his donation.

John Nugent, chairman of the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation, said: “Albert is a very frugal man and has dedicated his life to good causes.

“He wants this work to continue after his death and he has given a lot of thought to this arrangement. His priority now is to maximise the asset base of the company. He is confident he can push the worth to £1 billion before he dies.

“With these arrangements he is keeping to the pact and going well beyond it.”

Mr Gubay, who began his business career selling non-sugar sweets in Wales during post Second World War sugar rationing, founded the first Kwik Save store in 1965 and went on to sell the supermarket chain for £14 million in 1973. The chain went into administration in 2007.

He went on to found the Total Fitness network of gyms, which he sold in 2004 for £70 million, and has since built a vast property empire.

The property group Derwent Holdings is among several dozen companies being transferred to the new charitable trust.