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The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

texasmonthly.com

31–40 of 116 posts

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#31
post #28

5 years seems like such a small penalty. He was an international arms dealer and from the sounds of it selling weapons to countries that it was illegal to sell weapons to. Who knows what those weapons were used for.

But I think he wasn’t convicted for that? (Not sure why.)

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#32

I don't want to read a novel before being able to understand what this is about. At least the article could provide a quick glimpse at what the fraud scheme is. I kept reading for 5-6 minutes and then lost interest.

A 6 hundred word article is blown up to 6 thousand words to fill more pages and sell more ads. It's not for the benefit of the reader.

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#34

I don't want to read a novel before being able to understand what this is about. At least the article could provide a quick glimpse at what the fraud scheme is. I kept reading for 5-6 minutes and then lost interest.

How sad to have such a short attention span in a world full of intrigue.

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#35

I don't want to read a novel before being able to understand what this is about. At least the article could provide a quick glimpse at what the fraud scheme is. I kept reading for 5-6 minutes and then lost interest.

A 6 hundred word article is blown up to 6 thousand words to fill more pages and sell more ads. It's not for the benefit of the reader.

Texas Monthly has a long, storied history as a well-regarded print magazine. A content farm it is not.

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#36

I don't want to read a novel before being able to understand what this is about. At least the article could provide a quick glimpse at what the fraud scheme is. I kept reading for 5-6 minutes and then lost interest.

I grew up reading a lot of long novels as a kid and rather enjoy long-form articles as well since there’s an opportunity to gain a richer perspective of the story. Texas Monthly has been around for half a century and their long-form articles are a welcome respite from short blips of journalistic writing that barely do justice to an interesting story to cater to short attention spans. I’m not saying this is the best article ever, but as an example of one I appreciated a lot, they once covered the twists and turns a Collin Street Bakery accountant took to steal vast sums from the company over many years so he and his wife could enjoy being part of the high society of the prominent small town. You might not care about that topic but my relatives have ordered this famous bakery’s fruitcakes for generations so it was a particularly intriguing story to me, and I know Texas Monthly was not trying to win someone like you over with clickbait. I’ve seen their hefty magazines on coffee tables for decades and I associate them with thoughtful writing. The story I mentioned is “Just Desserts”.

https://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/just-desserts/

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#37

I don't want to read a novel before being able to understand what this is about. At least the article could provide a quick glimpse at what the fraud scheme is. I kept reading for 5-6 minutes and then lost interest.

I don't understand this comment at all. First of all, the first paragraph is about a suspicious plane fire - the plane literally burned in half sitting in a hangar. That should provide you some hint about what the fraud scheme is going to be. There's even an animated image of a plane on fire! Did you need the author to print "this is a story about insurance fraud" in big bold print at the top of the story? Secondly,…

>I don't understand this comment at all. [...] Why even both writing a waste of a comment?

I understand where the op's reading frustration is coming from. For some urls that point to pdf files or racy content, we might put informal warning tags such as "[pdf]" or "[NSFW]". But there really isn't a meta tag such as "[human_interest_story]" to warn readers of this type of article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-interest_story

There's nothing wrong with human interest stories (and even long form texts of it) but it's tedious for many who aren't expecting it. (I.e. some global readers aren't familiar with TexasMonthly and its editorial focus on long-form human interest articles.)

One type of reader just wants the mechanics of the insurance fraud explained. Thus, the human names -- whoever they are -- are not important -- because they will be forgotten 5 seconds after finishing the article. If it's the "wildest" insurance fraud, what makes it more wild than other insurance scams? Unfortunately, many articles "trick" readers with a compelling title about some but the actual article is mostly about . Some readers care more about details of the insurance deception than the escapades of Mr. TR Wright.

Another example of this mis-alignment between some readers and the author is the "Why it's so hard to find dumbbells in the US (vox.com)" article that was on HN front page today. The actual article starts off with human-interest stuff by mentioning people like like Andrew, Logan, Fread, etc and goes on like that for many paragraphs. But the HN top-voted comment extracts the relevant explanation that actually answers the question put forth in the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270770

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#38
> The venture escalated on a kiosk-buying trip to the Shenzhen International Toy and Education Fair, in China, where, T. R. claimed, he came up with an idea for a console for pirated video games called Power Player that would plug into a TV and allow users to play classics like Space Invaders and Galaga. He decided to focus on selling Power Player wholesale. It was a huge hit, T. R. said, until the FBI began arresting the biggest Power Player retail operators. Panicking, he abandoned his business and left the United States with $8,000 to travel in Europe.

I'm pretty sure I actually own one of these. For a while I collected some of these silly pirate consoles. If I recall this one correctly it had a N64 controller body for some reason.

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#39

I don't want to read a novel before being able to understand what this is about. At least the article could provide a quick glimpse at what the fraud scheme is. I kept reading for 5-6 minutes and then lost interest.

No joke. 4 out of 5 times I open a news article on HN it is some kind of novella I have no interest in.

In our age of short time spans and competition for attention you would think news magazines would be concise and to the point, I would even say, lapidary. But for some reason they became an outlet for graphomania?

Re: The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

#40

Given how long it took to catch him, after years of outrageous purchases and shady business dealings, it makes me wonder if frauds are much more common than conventional wisdom would lead one to believe.

What is the conventional wisdom? Because frauds are extremely common.
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