Filed under: Ripoffs and Scams, Technology

BioArts International, a California-based biotech start-up, is hoping to kick-start commercial dog-cloning with five successive daily auctions for the service starting July 5.

The opening bid is $100,000 for the first auction, with a 10% buyer’s premium. In each of the successive auctions, the opening bid goes up by $20,000. So by the last auction on July 9, you’d need $180,000, plus 10%. Talk about inflation:

Plus you have to either pick up your puppy in Korea, or pay to have him shipped home.

The same guy ran another genetics company (Genetic Savings & Clone) a few years ago and offered cat cloning for $32,000. (That company went under in 2006 after cloning two cats.)

Before we speak about the fascinating peculiarities of this process, I do feel like I’ve to point out that we’re not exactly running out of dogs here. We euthanize nearly 10 million dogs and cats a year. On the other hand, I understand the desire. My dog Jolly is a grumpy 14 years old. As I always tell him, he’s the best dog in the world: loving, loyal, clever, funny, brave, silly and handsome. I would do practically anything to extend my time with him. I’d love to be able to see Jolly as a puppy since I adopted him when he was past two. But this isn’t that magic opportunity. For starters I don’t have $110,000 to spare. But more importantly what makes Jolly Jolly is his life and experience, as lousy as that might have been to begin (he was found in a drug dealer’s backyard.) A clone would only get me a handsome dog, not Jolly.

Ok, enough about the serious implications. Let’s get to the grotesque details. First the financials. You have to have cash or credit of $250,000 just to sign up to bid. If you win, you’ve three days to put the money in a Wells Fargo trust. They only take the money out if you accept a healthy puppy — except for some deposit fees.Then you’ve to get a genetic sample from your dog — if you don’t already have one stashed away in a cryo-lab. Hair, nails or even blood aren’t good enough. They want tissue. For live dogs, you might need anesthesia to take a “6mm biopsy tool,” turn it on their shaved skin and pull to just below the skin. For dead dogs, you can just cut out a 1cm by 3 cm strip. Oh, and you need four samples.

After all that you ship your dog’s DNA off to Korea and wait — up to a year. If all goes well, you get an eight-week old puppy that they guarantee will look like your dog. You can either pick the dog up at the Soamm Biotech Foundation near Seoul or have BioArts ship the dog to you. They won’t send the dog in cargo, so they might even hire a private jet.

Soamm is the facility that first cloned Snuppy, an afghan, in 2005. The lab’s leader, Hwang Woo-Suk, fabricated some of his data on human embryo clones and is almost inevitably described as “disgraced.” But his dog cloning work still stands.

I don’t anticipate many people to sign up for this auction. Not because they don’t want their dog cloned. Even though the deal is structured so you don’t lose (much) money if you don’t get a good clone, I suspect people savvy enough to have a quarter million lying around will be wary if they’re really ready. Snuppy was the only survivor of 1,095 embryos. You may have to punch a lot of 6mm holes in your dog for that.

More tempting will be their essay contest for a free dog cloning.

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Filed under: Ripoffs and Scams, Technology

BioArts International, a California-based biotech start-up, is hoping to kick-start commercial dog-cloning with five successive daily auctions for the service starting July 5.

The opening bid is $100,000 for the first auction, with a 10% buyer’s premium. In each of the successive auctions, the opening bid goes up by $20,000. So by the last auction on July 9, you’d need $180,000, plus 10%. Talk about inflation:

Plus you have to either pick up your puppy in Korea, or pay to have him shipped home.

The same guy ran another genetics company (Genetic Savings & Clone) a few years ago and offered cat cloning for $32,000. (That company went under in 2006 after cloning two cats.)

Before we talk about the fascinating peculiarities of this process, I do feel like I’ve to point out that we’re not exactly running out of dogs here. We euthanize almost 10 million dogs and cats a year. On the other hand, I understand the desire. My dog Jolly is a grumpy 14 years old. As I always tell him, he’s the ideal dog in the world: loving, loyal, clever, funny, brave, silly and handsome. I would do practically anything to extend my time with him. I’d love to be able to see Jolly as a puppy since I adopted him when he was past two. But this isn’t that magic opportunity. For starters I don’t have $110,000 to spare. But more importantly what makes Jolly Jolly is his life and experience, as lousy as that might have been to start (he was found in a drug dealer’s backyard.) A clone would only get me a handsome dog, not Jolly.

Ok, enough about the serious implications. Let’s get to the grotesque details. First the financials. You have to have cash or credit of $250,000 just to sign up to bid. If you win, you have three days to put the money in a Wells Fargo trust. They only take the money out if you accept a healthy puppy — except for some deposit fees.Then you’ve to get a genetic sample from your dog — if you don’t already have one stashed away in a cryo-lab. Hair, nails or even blood aren’t good enough. They want tissue. For live dogs, you might need anesthesia to take a “6mm biopsy tool,” turn it on their shaved skin and pull to just below the skin. For dead dogs, you can just cut out a 1cm by 3 cm strip. Oh, and you need four samples.

After all that you ship your dog’s DNA off to Korea and wait — up to a year. If all goes well, you get an eight-week old puppy that they guarantee will look like your dog. You can either pick the dog up at the Soamm Biotech Foundation near Seoul or have BioArts ship the dog to you. They won’t send the dog in cargo, so they might even hire a private jet.

Soamm is the facility that first cloned Snuppy, an afghan, in 2005. The lab’s leader, Hwang Woo-Suk, fabricated some of his data on human embryo clones and is almost inevitably described as “disgraced.” But his dog cloning work still stands.

I don’t expect many people to sign up for this auction. Not because they don’t want their dog cloned. Even though the deal is structured so you don’t lose (much) money if you don’t get a good clone, I suspect people savvy enough to have a quarter million lying around will be wary if they’re really ready. Snuppy was the only survivor of 1,095 embryos. You might have to punch a lot of 6mm holes in your dog for that.

More tempting will be their essay contest for a free dog cloning.

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Filed under: Cards, Ripoffs and Scams

Many consumers are aware that their credit history can have a huge impact on their lives, and the effects reach beyond the home mortgage, the auto loan, and the credit card. Credit scores have long been used by insurance companies in determining the premiums you pay. Hospitals are starting to look at credit histories before providing some types of care.

And now the credit scoring mystery gets a little stranger. The FTC is suing CompuCredit, company that provides credit cards to people with poor credit. The FTC is alleging that the company uses unfair practices in its proprietary system of credit scoring for its customers.

For CompuCredit, it doesn’t just matter how long you’ve had an account, whether you’ve made your payments on time, or whether you’ve exceeded your credit limit. They also include factors in their scoring system based on what you’re buying with your credit card. And they’re slicing off customers who use their credit cards at massage parlors, bars, billiard halls, and marriage counselors.

This is getting ridiculous, and it’s yet another reason why consumers should participate in the whole credit card game as little as possible. Quite simply, credit card companies own you. And they have the ability to do with your credit what they wish, with seemingly few exceptions. The fact that the FTC is potentially going to crack down on ridiculous standards like this is a good sign, though.

Of course if we use our credit cards, we have to play by the rules of the credit card companies. But I don’t think they should be able to tell us where we have the ability to and cannot use the cards, so long as we’re not engaging in illegal activity with their credit cards. Where will credit card companies go next? Slicing off people who use their cards for certain political or religious donations? Prohibiting the use of credit cards with certain merchants who are on a special list created by a credit card company? The line has to be drawn somewhere.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Record-keeping, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

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Filed under: Borrowing, Ripoffs and Scams, Shopping

Late on rent? Loan shark breathing down your neck? Can’t fill your vehicle with gas to get to work on Monday? Assuming all available funds and traditional sources of credit are tapped out, here are 25 (legal) ways to raise cash in a few days. We list them in order from least to most desperate.

When I was growing up, I watched a lot of Twilight Zone reruns. I developed what has become a lifelong fascination with pawn shops. In The Twilight Zone, pawn shops were places of magic and mystery, the kind of joint where you might find heaven, hell, hope, or redemption. It’s where Jack Klugman dropped off his trumpet before he met the angel Gabriel, where Luther Adler found a genie who taught him to love his modest life, and where Larry Blyden died before going to hell. Pawn shops were the kind of places where anything could happen.

Later on, I saw more and more of the dark side of pawn shops. Watching Brandon Lee sort through stolen engagement rings in The Crow and seeing Rod Steiger abuse his patrons in The Pawnbroker, I came to realize that pawnshops can be places of misery, where people give up pieces of themselves in order to continue financing their lives. I began to understand that pawnshops occupy an interesting place in American culture. Like the three medieval gold balls that hang in front of many pawnshops, these places have a tradition and history. They hang somewhere between hope and despair, offering the one and causing the other.

Of course, most pawnshops aren’t almost as cool as the ones on the TV and in the movies. They tend to be clean, shiny, low-rent affairs, with fluorescent lighting, high ceilings, and industrial carpet. There are usually a couple of glass cases with pieces of jewelry and the occasional firearm. They’re good spots for picking up used tools and DVDs, the kinds of places where you can sometimes find a great deal on some mildly threadbare merchandise.

For a brief period in the late 1980’s, my dad used some DC-area pawnshops to raise a little swift dough, and I got a quick lesson in the economics of the pawn industry. Basically, pawnshops work like this: you bring in your items, which you offer up as collateral on a loan; in most cases, the loan will be about ten percent of the actual value of your item. If you concur to the loan, the pawnshop gives you a loan ticket.

At this point, you have three choices. One option is to purchase your item back. To do this, you go to the pawnshop sometime in the course of the next month and pay back the loan with interest, which is usually somewhere around 20%. Your second option is to come back a month later and pay the interest on the loan, in which case you continue the loan for another month. Your final option is to let the loan expire, in which you keep the money and the pawnshop keeps the goods.

The positive aspect of the pawnshop lies in the loan. Unlike a payday loan or other short-term loan, you’ve already given up possession of the collateral, which means that, should you default on the loan, you will have nothing more to pay. You’ll not have to worry about interest on the loan compounding, driving you deeper into debt.

Another positive aspect of pawnshops is the impermanence of the transaction. Unlike a clear sale, a pawnshop loan grants you to regain possession of your item. Therefore, if your fortunes turn around, you’ll be able to get your stuff back. With Craigslist and eBay, once your stuff’s gone, it’s gone.

Finally, pawnshops are very convenient. While Craigslist and eBay will net you far more money for your possessions, getting the cash can take days, weeks, or even months. With a pawnshop, getting paid takes about as long as it takes you to cart your stuff down to the store. You don’t have to worry about keywords, photos, listing your item properly, fraudulent bidders, or any of the other headaches that accompany internet sales. You simply drop off your property, whine a little bit about how the pawnbroker is screwing you, grab your dough, and leave.

The downside is pretty obvious. If your precious possessions stay with the pawnbroker for over a month, he puts them on sale to recoup the cost of your loan. Chances are that he will be able to sell your stuff for a lot more than he gave you, which means that, once your month is up, you probably won’t be able to buy your stuff back.

So should you use a pawnshop? Absolutely–if you’re a buyer. As I mentioned earlier, they are great places to find deals, and can be a lot of fun to wander around. On the other hand, you should view them as an completely last resort for selling your stuff. While they will enable you to get your hands on a tiny bit of money very quickly, they will end up giving you a bare minimum for your goods. If it comes to a choice between selling blood, going to a pawnshop, or ending up on the street, sell your blood, then go to the pawnshop!

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. When it comes right down to it, pawnshops make him a tiny sad.

All 25 ways to raise quick cash.

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