As California voters went to the polls Tuesday to cast their ballot on a measure that could block President Trump’s national agenda, state officials ridiculed his unsubstantiated claims that voting in the largely Democratic state is “rigged.”
“The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump said on Truth Social just minutes after polling stations opened Tuesday across California.
The president provided no evidence for his allegations.
“All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review,” the GOP president wrote. “STAY TUNED!”
Gov. Gavin Newsom dismissed the president’s claims on X as “the ramblings of an old man that knows he’s about to LOSE.”
His press office chimed in, too, calling Trump “a totally unserious person spreading false information in a desperate attempt to cope with his failures.”
At a White House briefing Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, without providing examples, that California was receiving ballots in the name of undocumented immigrants who could not legally vote.
“They have a universal mail-in voting system, which we know is ripe for fraud,” Leavitt told reporters. “Fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in in the names of other people, in the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections. There’s countless examples and we’d be happy to provide them.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for more details.
Political tension across the nation is high as California voters cast ballots on Proposition 50, a plan championed by Newsom to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 election to favor the Democratic Party. The measure is intended to offset GOP gerrymandering in red states after Trump pressed Texas to rejigger maps to shore up the GOP’s narrow House majority.
California’s top elections official, Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, called Trump’s allegation “another baseless claim.”
“The bottom line is California elections have been validated by the courts,” Weber said in a statement. “California voters will not be deceived by someone who consistently makes desperate, unsubstantiated attempts to dissuade Americans from participating in our democracy.”
Weber noted that more than 7 million Californians have already voted and encouraged those who had yet to cast ballots to go to the polls.
“California voters will not be sidelined from exercising their constitutional right to vote and should not let anyone deter them from exercising that right,” Weber said.
Of the 7 million Californians who have voted, more than 4.6 million have done so by mail, according to the secretary of state’s office. Los Angeles residents alone have cast more than 788,000 mail-in ballots.
Leavitt told D.C. reporters Tuesday that the White House is working on an executive order to combat so-called “blatant” election fraud.
“The White House is working on an executive order to strengthen our election in this country,” Leavitt said, “and to ensure that there cannot be blatant fraud, as we’ve seen in California with their universal mail-in voting system.”
Trump has long criticized mail-in voting. As more Democrats opted to vote by mail in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the president repeatedly made unproven claims linking mail in voting with voter fraud. When Trump ultimately lost that election, he blamed expanded mail-in voting.
In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring that Attorney General Pam Bondi “take all necessary action” against states that count absentee or mail-in ballots received after Election Day. Most states count mail-in or absentee ballots as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
Over the last month, the stakes in the California special election have ratcheted up as polls indicate Proposition 50 could pass. More than half of likely California voters said they planned to support the measure, which could allow Democrats to gain up to five House seats.
Last month, the Justice Department appeared to single out California for particular national scrutiny: It announced it would send federal monitors to polling locations in counties in California as well as New Jersey, another traditionally Democratic state that is conducting nationally significant off-year elections.
The monitors, it said, would be sent to five California counties: Los Angeles, Kern, Riverside, Fresno and Orange.
While Trump is often a flame-thrower on social media, he has largely been silent on Proposition 50, aside from a few Truth Social posts.
In late October, the president voiced skepticism with California’s mail-in ballots and early voting — directly contradicting efforts by the state’s GOP leaders to get people to vote.
“No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID! Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is! Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!”
Over the weekend, Trump posted a video purporting to show a member of the San Joaquin County’s Sheriff Dept. questioning election integrity in California.
Times Staff Writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report
This week voters across California received a suspicious text message saying they’d failed to turn in their ballots for the Nov. 4 statewide special election on redistricting.
The message may appear official. It includes the voter’s name and address and links to an official website providing information on early voting and vote-by-mall ballot drop-off locations.
But it’s not from the state, and officials urge caution.
The office of the California secretary of state received numerous reports from voters of “inaccurate text messages from Ballot Now,” according to a news release.
“This has caused voters to believe their returned ballots have not been received or processed by county elections officials,” Shirley Weber, secretary of state, stated in the release. “Let me be clear: Ballot Now is not in any way affiliated with the California Office of the Secretary of State.”
Weber’s office told The Times it doesn’t know the intent behind the Ballot Now text messages, and “we are trying to get to the bottom of it.”
Ballot Now did not respond to The Times’ request for comment.
Where voters can get trustworthy answers to their elections questions
Voters can find accurate information on elections and voting at the state secretary’s website or at their county election office. The secretary’s website includes the complete list of county election offices.
Questions that the secretary of state’s website can assist with include:
How do I check my voter status? By entering some personal information, you can see if you are registered to vote, where you’re registered, and check that your political party and language preference are correct at the website’s voter status page.
How do I track my ballot? You can sign up to track your ballot through the state’s online site Ballottrax.
By signing up on Ballottrax, voters receive automatic updates when their county elections office: mails their ballot to them, receives their ballot, counts their ballot, or when the office has any issues with the ballot.
Updates are available in 10 languages — including Spanish, Japanese and Tagalog — and you can choose to be texted, emailed or called with voice alert updates.
If you believe you’re the victim of election fraud or have witnessed a violation of the California Elections Code, you can submit a complaint form or call the secretary of state’s office.
Fill out an online form, download a PDF version of the form and mail it, or call the office — English speakers can call (916) 657-2166 or (800) 345-8683; Spanish speakers can call (800) 232-8682.
The physical form can be mailed to the California Secretary of State Elections Division at 1500 11th St., 5th Floor, Sacramento, CA 95814 or faxed to (916) 653-3214.
Los Angeles County residents are encouraged to call the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s call center with any questions or concerns they have, said Mike Sanchez, spokesperson for the office.
The registrar of voters can be reached at (800) 815-2666, and the number for voter center information is (800) 815-2666; choose option No. 1.
The military also confiscated 30 Starlink satellites from the sprawling KK Park scam centre on the border with Thailand.
Published On 21 Oct 202521 Oct 2025
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Myanmar’s military says it has arrested more than 2,000 people in a raid on KK Park, an infamous scam centre on the border with Thailand, according to state media.
The sprawling compound was used by international criminal syndicates to carry out illegal gambling, money laundering, and online romance and investment scams, the Myanmar Alin daily reported on Monday.
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Operations were spread across more than 250 low-rise buildings, according to the media report. They included warehouses, shophouses, and dozens of one and two-storey buildings.
During the raid, the military also seized 30 Starlink satellites, Myanmar Alin said.
The satellites are built and run by Starlink, a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and can keep compounds connected to the internet, even during power cuts.
Authorities also arrested 2,198 people, among them 445 women, 1,645 men and 98 male security guards, although the newspaper did not list their nationalities.
KK Park is located in Kayin State’s Myawaddy Township, which lies just across the river from the Thai border town of Mae Sot.
Soldiers stand next to Starlink machines as they seize the KK Park online scam centre in Myawaddy, Kayin State, Myanmar [Myanmar Military True News Information Team via AP]
The area has seen recent fighting between Myanmar’s military, the People’s Defence Force – the armed wing of Myanmar’s National Unity Government, formed by elected lawmakers, which operates from exile after it was ousted in the 2021 military coup – and armed Karen ethnic groups, according to Myanmar Alin.
Myanmar has been embroiled in a civil war since the coup in 2021, with fighting between the military, armed opposition groups and ethnic armies.
Military spokesperson Major-General Zaw Min Tun said on Monday in a statement that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, one of the groups fighting the military, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Myanmar has been under pressure from Thailand and China to curb scam centre activity, which has drawn in criminal groups, particularly Chinese crime syndicates.
The issue became a cause célèbre in China in January when Chinese actor Wang Xing was trafficked to a scam centre and later rescued by Thai police.
Employees of the scam centres are often themselves victims of human trafficking, lured by the promise of employment but then forced to carry out online scams in slave-like conditions, according to rights groups.
Thai police estimate that as many as 100,000 people are working in scam operations on the Thai-Myanmar border alone, according to Reuters.
Scam centres have spread across Southeast Asia over the past five years, but their epicentre has been in Myanmar and Cambodia. They net international criminal groups billions of dollars each year.
The Department of the Treasury in the United States in September sanctioned more than 20 companies and individuals in Cambodia and Myanmar who were allegedly involved in scam operations.
South Korea has banned citizens from going to parts of Cambodia amid growing concerns over the country’s scam industry.
Dozens of South Korean nationals who had been detained in Cambodia for alleged involvement in cyberscam operations have been returned home and placed under arrest, according to South Korean authorities.
Officers arrested the individuals on board a chartered flight sent to collect them from Cambodia, a South Korean police official told the AFP news agency.
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“A total of 64 nationals just arrived at the Incheon international airport on a chartered flight,” the official said on Saturday, adding that all of the individuals have been taken into custody as criminal suspects.
South Korea sent a team to Cambodia earlier this week to investigate dozens of its nationals who were kidnapped into the Southeast Asian nation’s online scam industry.
South Korean National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac previously said the detained individuals included both “voluntary and involuntary participants” in scam operations.
On Friday, Cambodian Ministry of Interior spokesman Touch Sokhak said the repatriation agreement with South Korea was the “result of good cooperation in suppression of scams between the two countries”.
Online scam operations have proliferated in Cambodia since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the global shutdown saw many Chinese-owned casinos and hotels in the country pivot to illicit operations.
Operating from industrial-scale scam centres, tens of thousands of workers perpetrate online romance scams known as “pig-butchering”, often targeting people in the West in a vastly lucrative industry responsible for the theft of tens of billions of dollars each year.
Pig-butchering – a euphemism for fattening up a victim before they are slaughtered – often involves fraudulent cryptocurrency investment schemes that build trust over time before funds are stolen.
Parallel industries have blossomed in Laos, the Philippines and war-ravaged Myanmar, where accounts of imprisonment and abuse in scam centres are the most severe.
An estimated 200,000 people are working in dozens of large-scale scam operations across Cambodia, with many scam compounds owned by or linked to the country’s wealthy and politically connected. About 1,000 South Korean nationals are believed to be among that figure.
On Tuesday, the United States and United Kingdom announced sweeping sanctions against a Cambodia-based multinational crime network, identified as the Prince Group, for running a chain of “scam centres” across the region.
UK authorities seized 19 London properties worth more than 100 million pounds ($134m) linked to the Prince Group, which markets itself as a legitimate real estate, financial services and consumer businesses firm.
Prosecutors said that at one point, Prince Group’s chair, Chinese-Cambodian tycoon Chen Zhi, bragged that scam operations were pulling in $30m a day.
Chen – who has served as an adviser to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and his father, long-ruling former Prime Minister Hun Sen – is also wanted on charges of wire fraud and money laundering, according to the UK and US.
Still at large, he faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.
The move by the UK and US against the Prince Group came as South Korea announced a ban on travel to parts of Cambodia on Wednesday amid growing concerns over its citizens entering the scam industry.
South Korean police have said they will also conduct a joint investigation into the recent death of a college student in Cambodia who was reportedly kidnapped and tortured by a crime ring.
The South Korean student was found dead in a pick-up truck on August 8 in Cambodia’s southern Kampot province, with an autopsy revealing he “died as a result of severe torture, with multiple bruises and injuries across his body”.
The United States and the United Kingdom announced they have sanctioned a global scam operator based in Cambodia. File Photo by Sascha Steinbach/EPA
Oct. 14 (UPI) — Britain and the United States announced Tuesday that they have together sanctioned a transnational scam organization operating out of Cambodia.
The U.S. Department of Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced it has imposed sweeping sanctions on 146 targets within the Prince Group transnational criminal organization, a Cambodia-based network led by Cambodian national Chen Zhi that operates a global criminal empire through online investment scams.
It also announced that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has finalized a rule under the USA Patriot Act to sever the Cambodia-based financial services conglomerate Huione Group from the U.S. financial system. “For years, Huione Group has laundered proceeds of virtual currency scams and heists on behalf of malicious cyber actors,” the press release said.
Covered financial institutions are now banned from opening or maintaining accounts for Huione Group, the Treasury Department said.
“The rapid rise of transnational fraud has cost American citizens billions of dollars, with life savings wiped out in minutes,” said Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent in a statement. “Treasury is taking action to protect Americans by cracking down on foreign scammers. Working in close coordination with federal law enforcement and international partners like the United Kingdom, Treasury will continue to lead efforts to safeguard Americans from predatory criminals.”
In the U.K., a $16 million mansion owned by the Prince Group has been frozen by the government. Chen Zhi and his network have invested in the London property market, including the mansion, a $133 million office building and 17 apartments in the city. The freeze blocks them from profiting from these buildings.
The organization’s scam centers in Cambodia, Myanmar and other parts of Southeast Asia use fake job ads to lure foreign nationals to compounds or abandoned casinos where they are forced to carry out online fraud or face torture, the British press release said.
The scams often involve building online relationships to convince targets to invest increasingly large sums of money into fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes.
“These sanctions prove our determination to stop those who profit from this activity, hold offenders accountable, and keep dirty money out of the U.K.,” said Fraud Minister David Hanson in a statement. “Through our new, expanded fraud strategy and the upcoming Global Fraud Summit, we will go even further to disrupt corrupt networks and protect the public from shameless criminals.”
South Korea has faced a surge of kidnappings of its citizens in Cambodia. As of August, at least 330 cases were reported, according to data submitted to the National Assembly.
In June, Amnesty International said the Cambodian government has been “deliberately ignoring” human rights abuses including slavery, human trafficking, child labor and torture by gangs. It estimated that there were at least 53 scamming compounds in Cambodia.
In September, the Treasury Department sanctioned scam centers across Southeast Asia that the agency said stole $10 billion in 2024 from Americans via forced labor and violence.
FORMER One Direction star Louis Tomlinson was duped by fraudsters in a £4million footie plot.
The Bigger Than Me singer became the face of Doncaster Rovers in the hope he could boost the profile of his childhood team and take them to the Premier League.
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The singer with former Doncaster chairman John RyanCredit: Rex
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Louis Tomlinson was duped by fraudsters in a £4million footie plot
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The pop star making his Doncaster Rovers football debut in 2014Credit: Alamy
But the 33-year-old had the wool pulled over his eyes by a gang who stole millions from people’s retirement nest eggs.
Over two years £3.7million had been funnelled from hard-earned pension pots belonging more than 200 victims.
Prosecutors said the proposed Doncaster deal was used by the thugs to cover upthe missing cash to cops.
As reported by the Mirror, criminal gang Kevin Phelan, Daniel Giles and Adrian Bashforth were all convicted last month and face jail time.
The trial at Leeds Crown Court heard Louis unwittingly became involved with the scammers in 2014.
At the gang’s trial, prosecutor Timothy Hannam KC said: “These defendants nicked money from people’s life savings.”
Former club chairman John Ryan enlisted Louis’ help to bolster support for Doncaster at the time.
The club was insolvent and staying afloat by Ryan’s loans and other investors.
Seqentia Captial SA tried to buy it twice, but deals fell through on both occasions.
Ryan also asked crook Phelan, 62, if he wanted to buy the club in 2013.
Louis Tomlinson admits feeling nervous ahead of Soccer Aid as Zara’s ex Sam Thompson awkwardly hovers behind him
Louis later met with the gang at his Cheshire pad at the height of 1D’s fame in 2014.
Ryan transferred his 30 per cent shareholding to Sequentia and resigned as Doncaster chairman.
The proposed deal stated 70 per cent of Doncaster would be given to Belize-based Sequentia Capital SA if the takeover was successful.
Louis and Ryan would become the club’s public face while Sequentia would be a “silent participant”.
The One Direction singer started a fundraiser and aimed to rake in an eyewatering £6million from his fans and followers.
But the crowdfunder only raised £600,000 in the end, and £500,000 of that was from one of the fraudulent gang members.
The source of the offshore firm’s funds was “stolen pension money”, the court heard.
Phelan met Louis at his home in January 2014 and Daniel Giles texted the same day: “I’ve been interrogated for the last few hours over 1D boy. Kids want to come to the next meeting mate.
“I’m thinking 16 million brainwashed followers. Very very interesting.
“Let’s crack on now together and build a nice fighting fund.”
The deal would also see Louis take a 10 per cent stake in the club with the hopes they would reach the Premier League.
The singer would show his support at games and behind the scenes.
He met with Phelan and Giles, 51, at a One Direction concert in Dublin’ to sign the deal, however it didn’t go through due to the lack of funds raised.
Louis said at the time: “I’m gutted the Doncaster deal is not going ahead. I am desperate for the club to be given the recognition it deserves.
“I was told the deal to buy the club was not dependent on the money raised by Crowdfunding. Unfortunately I was misled.”
There is no suggestion Louis or Ryan knew about the pension fraud.
The defendants will be sentenced in January.
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Louis supported at matches and behind the scenesCredit: PA
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The former 1D star became the face of the clubCredit: PA:Press Association
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Neither Louis nor John Ryan knew about the dodgy dealingsCredit: Nigel Bennett
A British expat living in the holiday hotspot has issued a warning to tourists visiting the popular destination, after he said his ‘eyes were opened’ to how sophisticated the scams can be
Tourists should be wary of different scams in Ibiza(Image: Getty Images)
An expat living in Ibiza has issued a warning to Brits about common scams that target tourists and the key phrases holidaymakers should be wary of.
The Spanish island is a favourite holiday destination, renowned not only for its vibrant nightlife and party scene, but also for its stunning beaches. Each season, it draws a massive influx of tourists, and James Smith, a Spanish teacher and founder of Learn Spanish with James, warns that visitors are easy pickings for local fraudsters.
These con artists employ everything from sham boat parties to counterfeit holiday rental adverts in an attempt to swindle money from tourists.
“Living in Ibiza opened my eyes to how sophisticated these scams have become,” reveals James.
“The scammers know exactly what buttons to push with British tourists, promising VIP treatment, exclusive access, or once-in-a-lifetime experiences. But there are always telltale signs if you know what to look for.” According to James, these are the six most prevalent scams in Ibiza, reports the Manchester Evening News.
Fake club tickets
One of the oldest tricks in the book involves fraudsters approaching tourists with “discounted” tickets to top clubs like Amnesia or Pacha. These tricksters often lurk around popular hotels or loiter at beach bars during sunset.
“They’ll show you what looks like a genuine ticket and claim they can’t use it,” warns James. “The story is always the same: they’re leaving the island early, their mate cancelled, or they double-booked. But these tickets are either completely fake or already used.”
Warning signs include sellers who won’t let you examine the ticket closely, refuse to provide contact details, or pressure you to buy immediately with phrases like “last chance” or “someone else is interested”.
Ibiza is renowned for its party scene (Image: Getty Images)
Bogus boat parties
Boat party scams have surged in recent years, with fraudsters setting up fake social media pages and websites advertising non-existent events. They’ll post professional-looking photos and promise celebrity DJs, unlimited drinks, and VIP treatment.
“These scammers are getting smarter with their online presence,” cautions James. “They’ll steal photos from legitimate boat parties and create convincing websites. But when you turn up at the supposed departure point, there’s no boat – and no refund.”
Watch for vague meeting locations, requests for full payment upfront via bank transfer, and reluctance to provide official booking confirmations or company registration details.
Overpriced drinks packages
Street sellers often approach tourists with laminated cards advertising drinks packages for popular venues. They’ll claim you can skip queues and get unlimited drinks for a fraction of the normal cost.
“The legitimate venues don’t work this way,” James points out. “Real clubs sell their own packages through official channels. These street sellers are either selling fake vouchers or massively overcharging for basic entry.”
Timeshare presentation traps
Ruthless sales teams prey on holidaymakers with promises of complimentary dinners, boat excursions or club access in return for attending a “brief” presentation. What begins as a half-hour discussion can escalate into hours of relentless sales pressure.
“I’ve seen tourists lose thousands on timeshare deals they signed under duress,” says James. “The salespeople are trained to create urgency and make you feel like you’re missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Accommodation bait and switch
Fraudulent holiday rental adverts have become increasingly clever, utilising pilfered photographs and fabricated reviews to trick tourists into handing over deposits for properties that are non-existent or bear no resemblance to the description.
“Always verify the property through multiple sources,” advises James. “If someone is pushing for immediate payment or won’t video call to show you the property, walk away.”
Transport overcharging
Rogue taxi drivers and bogus airport transfer operators routinely fleece tourists, particularly those arriving during the early hours or whilst intoxicated.
James has also cautioned holidaymakers about specific phrases employed by fraudsters to manipulate tourists. This includes: James advised: “Living in Ibiza taught me that scammers specifically target British tourists because they know they’re often unfamiliar with local customs, and language barriers can make visitors more vulnerable.
“The key is preparation: know the Spanish phrases for ‘no thank you’ and ‘I’m not interested’, and don’t be afraid to use them firmly.
“Before you hand over any money, always ask for official documentation, a receipt, and contact details. Legitimate businesses will happily provide these. If someone starts getting aggressive or evasive when you ask basic questions, that tells you everything you need to know.
“The simplest check you can do is ask them to write down exactly what you’re buying, when and where it’s happening, and their contact information. Watch how they react – genuine sellers will do this without hesitation, while scammers will usually make excuses or try to rush you into paying immediately.”
Joyce Birdwell survived the North Complex fire in 2020, though it devoured her home, and a life she loved, in the mountain town of Berry Creek.
Her partner, Art Linfoot, built the house they lost, a cabin with a wraparound porch and a year-round brook where deer drank and the sound of the water lulled the couple to sleep. Birdwell fired up her chain saw nearly every morning, she told me, aware that keeping the brush at bay was crucial for safety.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
But the fire that came through their Butte County home didn’t care about her trimmed trees, or her hard work or our persistent belief that everything will somehow be OK after a disaster. Birdwell, 69, and Linfoot, 80, are in Irvine now, with no intention of returning, or rebuilding.
Berry Creek Elementary School burned to the ground in the North Complex fire in 2020.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
“I never thought twice about it as soon as we went back there and saw what was left,” she told me. “I know how long it takes for a tree to grow, and I just knew this would never, never work out for us.”
Hers is a bit of wisdom that is too often lost in our conversations about urban fire: Sometimes, recovery is not rebuilding. Politicians won’t admit it, but the ethos of #strong — measuring success with how quickly we can raise up houses on scorched earth — is snake oil, an emotional rallying cry that often delivers little more than a slippery bit of comfort that benefits the rich more than the rest. Because even rebuilding the most beloved of homes at the fastest of paces will not restore lives or communities to what they were. Or what they need to be. And by focusing on this powerful but narrow idea of recovery, we do a disservice to individual survivors and our collective good.
We need to change our understanding of what recovery is, because we live in an era when the climate crisis has created not just survivors, but refugees and migrants in California and the United States — and they deserve more than a slogan that, to steal a favorite phrase from our governor, does not “meet the moment.”
As we hurl forward to rebuild after January’s fires in the Palisades and Altadena — and all the disasters yet to come — it’s time to acknowledge that recovery and rebuilding, for all our talk, is never fair. There is a bias toward the rich embedded in the process. And for every recovery that we allow to be unfair under the guise of #strong, we march deeper to a California where the elite live in comfort and the rest live in fear — a rightful anxiety that everything we have is tenuous, given and taken as afterthoughts in a tug-of-war between Mother Nature and the wealthy.
‘Conspicuous resilience’
The idea that fire recovery is fair has always been a scam. In his infamous 1998 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” the much-revered and equally despised environmental activist and historian Mike Davis wrote that the “flatland majority” has always been paying “the ever increasing expense of maintaining and, when necessary, rebuilding sloping suburbia,” those rarefied neighborhoods that consider themselves part of Los Angeles proper only when they need something from the rest of us.
If that was true at the turn of the millennium, it’s even more so now.
A 75-year history of fires in the Santa Monica Mountains
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1999
2000-2009
2010-2019
2020-2025
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES
When Davis wrote his controversial piece, he also noted that “late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles.” More than three decades later, climate change has intensified our weather so much that floods and fires haunt almost every month of the California calendar, eclipsing the chthonic terrors of earthquakes that rattle us only now and then.
Summer Gray, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies the inequities in our responses to climate change, says disaster recovery can be “highly performative, often driven by more privileged members of the community” who have the money and clout that allow them to suck up resources. She saw this firsthand by examining recovery after the debris flows in Montecito in the wake of the 2017 Thomas fire.
Though talk in the ultra-wealthy enclave was all about community recovery, Gray concluded — through interviewing community members — that those with the ability to speak loudest and earliest often received more help, and set the agenda for what recovery included, and didn’t. She found that “narratives of resilience were actually obscuring systemic inequalities.”
Gray warns that sometimes, whether consciously or not, these privileged groups leverage “the optics of this collective recovery to accelerate their own rebuilding,” leaving working-class survivors “sidelined or ignored.” Gray calls this attitude part of “conspicuous resilience,” conflating being temporarily displaced and inconvenienced with being oppressed and vulnerable, leading to the celebration and glorification of a recovery that mostly benefits the few.
“I am not saying that our billionaire class has bad intent,” Gray said. But the elite, “don’t really understand what the needs are.”
My colleague Liam Dillon reported not long ago that before the fire, “the average home in Pacific Palisades cost $3.5 million, the median household earned $325,000 and the total number of rental units restricted as affordable housing was two.”
Two.
When Dillon asked former mayoral candidate and developer Rick Caruso, whose super-high-end mall is an anchor of Palisades commerce, if that should be expanded at this unique moment when everything must be rebuilt anyway, Caruso told him, “Now is not the time for outside groups with no ties to the area to slow down the ability of people to rebuild their homes by trying to impose their agenda.”
Two people ride past a burning house off Enchanted Way in the Marquez Knolls neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in January.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
No ties to the area except our tax dollars, of course, and our erstwhile equality as Angelenos and Californians.
Mayor Karen Bass’ now-ousted recovery czar, developer Steve Soboroff, who supported more affordable housing, put the mood more succinctly.
“We’re not rethinking,” Soboroff said. “We’re rebuilding.”
But if now is not the time to rethink, when is?
The climate crisis is costly, whipping up more and more disasters each year. When Davis wrote his book, there were about six natural disasters in the U.S. every year where the costs of recovery exceeded a billion dollars. Last year, there were 27. This year, we stopped counting, as part of government cost cutting, but that has not stopped floods, fires and heat waves.
Even if the federal government, largely through our taxes, was able to pick up the tab for every tornado, hurricane and wildfire, our current administration has made it clear it does not want to. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been gutted, and may hand off many of its former duties to states, including California, that even if prosperous, lack the money to cover those costs.
Add to that the financial precariousness of tariffs that are making building more expensive, immigration policies that are decimating our construction workforce and insurance costs that are skyrocketing, if you can get a policy, and the prospect of the poor and middle class recovering from fire as quickly as the rich seems naive at best.
Fixes for the future
There are three actions we can take that have the potential to keep California from further devolving into climate rich and poor, housing winner and housing loser.
First, we need to end the fixation on speed.
“If it’s speed without a plan, it means you’re more likely to return to the status quo,” Laurie A. Johnson told me. She’s an urban planner who specializes in disaster recovery and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery convened by L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath.
Johnson views a focus on speed as “an empowerment of those who have everything they need, or who can easily get it.”
Volunteer archaeologists Elyse Mallonee, left, and Parker Sheriff carefully sift through rubble and ash while looking for cremated remains at a house in Altadena on Feb. 18.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Why don’t we acknowledge that fire destroys more than owner-occupied houses and give equal weight to graduation rates for affected students or the number of renters successfully relocated to safe apartments? What about measuring success around health outcomes for those with asthma or heart conditions exposed to the smoke, or count the number of people who feel their mental health needs have been met or their jobs stabilized?
Certainly home ownership is emotionally and financially important, especially in unique places such as Altadena where a Black middle class found refuge and economic security. But home ownership — and by extension rebuilding — is predominantly a measure of an upper-class recovery, especially in L.A. County, where less than half of the people own the place where they live.
It’s time to slow down, and, yes, rethink.
The second action that will help us reform how we handle disaster is even more difficult: Openly talk about who gets to recover with public money (which repaves roads and fixes water systems and sewers, for example) and who gets to decide who recovers with public money.
Returning to Davis’ point all those years ago, do we continue to rebuild in places that we know, for certain, will experience fire again? What do we owe places such as Malibu, where housing values have increased significantly with each post-fire rebuilding and which have made their elitism part of their identity? What do we owe places such as Altadena, if we allow homeowners with modest means to rebuild without robustly mitigating risk of a future fire?
Maybe not every place should be rebuilt. Maybe in some places, it’s time to let Mother Nature win, or at least create buffers so that she doesn’t have the upper hand.
Our better natures want to help everyone who faces loss, rich or poor. The idea that we would tell a community that they cannot have the money to restore themselves sounds like a political and moral absurdity. But it is increasingly likely that there simply will not be enough money in the future to rebuild everything.
It is absolutely time to impose a recovery “agenda” that takes into account the realities of climate change and our housing crisis and seeks to create communities that are safe and in service of our collective needs. Anything less ignores the reality of the majority, and nearly ensures that these places will return more gentrified, wealthier and even more exclusive, the exact opposite of what public dollars should support.
The Tahitian Terrace mobile home park, destroyed by the Palisades fire, is seen along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu on Jan. 10.
(Zoe Meyers / AFP via Getty Images)
The last action we need to take to better face a difficult future is to expand what recovery means. It is not always rebuilding. More often than we like to acknowledge, it means moving on. But currently, few of our resources or even our conversations include help for those who don’t want to stick around. In fact, they’re often scorned or simply forgotten.
The Palisades fire wiped out 600 homes in Malibu, 5,500 overall. The Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,000 homes and buildings. Almost certainly, something will be built on all of those lots. Developers are already snapping some of them up. But almost as certain, many of the people who once lived in these places will not return — and probably shouldn’t.
Age, finances, health — there are myriad reasons why spending five to 10 years rebuilding a lost home is not the right decision. Recovery needs to support other options with government money, including moving elsewhere, without shame and without the pressure of the elite-driven #strong ethos that forces us to believe recovery looks like the past.
California’s best example of what this could include is the ReCoverCA Homebuyer Assistance (HBA) Program. This program gave financial assistance of up to $350,000 per household through a forgivable second mortgage loan to low- and middle-income folks, mainly renters, displaced by past fires — basically helping to buy houses for economically-challenged survivors.
The catch? The new home had to be outside a high-risk fire zone. That’s a win for displaced people, for the climate, and for encouraging safe housing and wealth building for the future. But the state is not currently funding the program for fire survivors, though some impacted by floods have a shot.
None of this is to argue that rebuilding is wrong, or that losing a home is undeserving of sympathy or help. It is. But there is so much more to survivors, and recovery, than a house.
Birdwell, who lost her home in Berry Creek, still thinks of that cabin as a “slice of heaven” and reminiscences “about how life used to be.” But she is left with anxiety — a remnant of the fire for which no one has offered her help — and a sense of dislocation and discontent. A few nights ago, she dreamed fire was coming at her again.
“I woke up, my heart was beating out of my chest,” she said. “That might be something that will happen the rest of my life.”
In the next 30 years, we will assuredly have more climate refugees, more climate migrants, like Birdwell and Linfoot and the thousands of Angelenos still reeling from our recent fires. We can plan for that now if we choose to, leave behind the gratifying but false camaraderie of #strong and instead broaden our response to ensuring everyone who survives climate tragedy has options and equity.
If we don’t, we will simply move further into a future that bends recovery to benefit the wealthy, as Davis predicted long ago — prioritizing the rebuilding of hazardous communities again and again until the only people who can afford to live in them are the people who can afford to watch them burn.
Joyce Birdwell survived the North Complex fire in 2020, though it devoured her home, and a life she loved, in the mountain town of Berry Creek.
Her partner, Art Linfoot, built the house they lost, a cabin with a wraparound porch and a year-round brook where deer drank and the sound of the water lulled the couple to sleep. Birdwell fired up her chain saw nearly every morning, she told me, aware that keeping the brush at bay was crucial for safety.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
But the fire that came through their Butte County home didn’t care about her trimmed trees, or her hard work or our persistent belief that everything will somehow be OK after a disaster. Birdwell, 69, and Linfoot, 80, are in Irvine now, with no intention of returning, or rebuilding.
Berry Creek Elementary School burned to the ground in the North Complex fire in 2020.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
“I never thought twice about it as soon as we went back there and saw what was left,” she told me. “I know how long it takes for a tree to grow, and I just knew this would never, never work out for us.”
Hers is a bit of wisdom that is too often lost in our conversations about urban fire: Sometimes, recovery is not rebuilding. Politicians won’t admit it, but the ethos of #strong — measuring success with how quickly we can raise up houses on scorched earth — is snake oil, an emotional rallying cry that often delivers little more than a slippery bit of comfort that benefits the rich more than the rest. Because even rebuilding the most beloved of homes at the fastest of paces will not restore lives or communities to what they were. Or what they need to be. And by focusing on this powerful but narrow idea of recovery, we do a disservice to individual survivors and our collective good.
We need to change our understanding of what recovery is, because we live in an era when the climate crisis has created not just survivors, but refugees and migrants in California and the United States — and they deserve more than a slogan that, to steal a favorite phrase from our governor, does not “meet the moment.”
As we hurl forward to rebuild after January’s fires in the Palisades and Altadena — and all the disasters yet to come — it’s time to acknowledge that recovery and rebuilding, for all our talk, is never fair. There is a bias toward the rich embedded in the process. And for every recovery that we allow to be unfair under the guise of #strong, we march deeper to a California where the elite live in comfort and the rest live in fear — a rightful anxiety that everything we have is tenuous, given and taken as afterthoughts in a tug-of-war between Mother Nature and the wealthy.
‘Conspicuous resilience’
The idea that fire recovery is fair has always been a scam. In his infamous 1998 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” the much-revered and equally despised environmental activist and historian Mike Davis wrote that the “flatland majority” has always been paying “the ever increasing expense of maintaining and, when necessary, rebuilding sloping suburbia,” those rarefied neighborhoods that consider themselves part of Los Angeles proper only when they need something from the rest of us.
If that was true at the turn of the millennium, it’s even more so now.
A 75-year history of fires in the Santa Monica Mountains
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1999
2000-2009
2010-2019
2020-2025
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES
When Davis wrote his controversial piece, he also noted that “late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles.” More than three decades later, climate change has intensified our weather so much that floods and fires haunt almost every month of the California calendar, eclipsing the chthonic terrors of earthquakes that rattle us only now and then.
Summer Gray, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies the inequities in our responses to climate change, says disaster recovery can be “highly performative, often driven by more privileged members of the community” who have the money and clout that allow them to suck up resources. She saw this firsthand by examining recovery after the debris flows in Montecito in the wake of the 2017 Thomas fire.
Though talk in the ultra-wealthy enclave was all about community recovery, Gray concluded — through interviewing community members — that those with the ability to speak loudest and earliest often received more help, and set the agenda for what recovery included, and didn’t. She found that “narratives of resilience were actually obscuring systemic inequalities.”
Gray warns that sometimes, whether consciously or not, these privileged groups leverage “the optics of this collective recovery to accelerate their own rebuilding,” leaving working-class survivors “sidelined or ignored.” Gray calls this attitude part of “conspicuous resilience,” conflating being temporarily displaced and inconvenienced with being oppressed and vulnerable, leading to the celebration and glorification of a recovery that mostly benefits the few.
“I am not saying that our billionaire class has bad intent,” Gray said. But the elite, “don’t really understand what the needs are.”
My colleague Liam Dillon reported not long ago that before the fire, “the average home in Pacific Palisades cost $3.5 million, the median household earned $325,000 and the total number of rental units restricted as affordable housing was two.”
Two.
When Dillon asked former mayoral candidate and developer Rick Caruso, whose super-high-end mall is an anchor of Palisades commerce, if that should be expanded at this unique moment when everything must be rebuilt anyway, Caruso told him, “Now is not the time for outside groups with no ties to the area to slow down the ability of people to rebuild their homes by trying to impose their agenda.”
Two people ride past a burning house off Enchanted Way in the Marquez Knolls neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in January.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
No ties to the area except our tax dollars, of course, and our erstwhile equality as Angelenos and Californians.
Mayor Karen Bass’ now-ousted recovery czar, developer Steve Soboroff, who supported more affordable housing, put the mood more succinctly.
“We’re not rethinking,” Soboroff said. “We’re rebuilding.”
But if now is not the time to rethink, when is?
The climate crisis is costly, whipping up more and more disasters each year. When Davis wrote his book, there were about six natural disasters in the U.S. every year where the costs of recovery exceeded a billion dollars. Last year, there were 27. This year, we stopped counting, as part of government cost cutting, but that has not stopped floods, fires and heat waves.
Even if the federal government, largely through our taxes, was able to pick up the tab for every tornado, hurricane and wildfire, our current administration has made it clear it does not want to. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been gutted, and may hand off many of its former duties to states, including California, that even if prosperous, lack the money to cover those costs.
Add to that the financial precariousness of tariffs that are making building more expensive, immigration policies that are decimating our construction workforce and insurance costs that are skyrocketing, if you can get a policy, and the prospect of the poor and middle class recovering from fire as quickly as the rich seems naive at best.
Fixes for the future
There are three actions we can take that have the potential to keep California from further devolving into climate rich and poor, housing winner and housing loser.
First, we need to end the fixation on speed.
“If it’s speed without a plan, it means you’re more likely to return to the status quo,” Laurie A. Johnson told me. She’s an urban planner who specializes in disaster recovery and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery convened by L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath.
Johnson views a focus on speed as “an empowerment of those who have everything they need, or who can easily get it.”
Volunteer archaeologists Elyse Mallonee, left, and Parker Sheriff carefully sift through rubble and ash while looking for cremated remains at a house in Altadena on Feb. 18.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Why don’t we acknowledge that fire destroys more than owner-occupied houses and give equal weight to graduation rates for affected students or the number of renters successfully relocated to safe apartments? What about measuring success around health outcomes for those with asthma or heart conditions exposed to the smoke, or count the number of people who feel their mental health needs have been met or their jobs stabilized?
Certainly home ownership is emotionally and financially important, especially in unique places such as Altadena where a Black middle class found refuge and economic security. But home ownership — and by extension rebuilding — is predominantly a measure of an upper-class recovery, especially in L.A. County, where less than half of the people own the place where they live.
It’s time to slow down, and, yes, rethink.
The second action that will help us reform how we handle disaster is even more difficult: Openly talk about who gets to recover with public money (which repaves roads and fixes water systems and sewers, for example) and who gets to decide who recovers with public money.
Returning to Davis’ point all those years ago, do we continue to rebuild in places that we know, for certain, will experience fire again? What do we owe places such as Malibu, where housing values have increased significantly with each post-fire rebuilding and which have made their elitism part of their identity? What do we owe places such as Altadena, if we allow homeowners with modest means to rebuild without robustly mitigating risk of a future fire?
Maybe not every place should be rebuilt. Maybe in some places, it’s time to let Mother Nature win, or at least create buffers so that she doesn’t have the upper hand.
Our better natures want to help everyone who faces loss, rich or poor. The idea that we would tell a community that they cannot have the money to restore themselves sounds like a political and moral absurdity. But it is increasingly likely that there simply will not be enough money in the future to rebuild everything.
It is absolutely time to impose a recovery “agenda” that takes into account the realities of climate change and our housing crisis and seeks to create communities that are safe and in service of our collective needs. Anything less ignores the reality of the majority, and nearly ensures that these places will return more gentrified, wealthier and even more exclusive, the exact opposite of what public dollars should support.
The Tahitian Terrace mobile home park, destroyed by the Palisades fire, is seen along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu on Jan. 10.
(Zoe Meyers / AFP via Getty Images)
The last action we need to take to better face a difficult future is to expand what recovery means. It is not always rebuilding. More often than we like to acknowledge, it means moving on. But currently, few of our resources or even our conversations include help for those who don’t want to stick around. In fact, they’re often scorned or simply forgotten.
The Palisades fire wiped out 600 homes in Malibu, 5,500 overall. The Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,000 homes and buildings. Almost certainly, something will be built on all of those lots. Developers are already snapping some of them up. But almost as certain, many of the people who once lived in these places will not return — and probably shouldn’t.
Age, finances, health — there are myriad reasons why spending five to 10 years rebuilding a lost home is not the right decision. Recovery needs to support other options with government money, including moving elsewhere, without shame and without the pressure of the elite-driven #strong ethos that forces us to believe recovery looks like the past.
California’s best example of what this could include is the ReCoverCA Homebuyer Assistance (HBA) Program. This program gave financial assistance of up to $350,000 per household through a forgivable second mortgage loan to low- and middle-income folks, mainly renters, displaced by past fires — basically helping to buy houses for economically-challenged survivors.
The catch? The new home had to be outside a high-risk fire zone. That’s a win for displaced people, for the climate, and for encouraging safe housing and wealth building for the future. But the state is not currently funding the program for fire survivors, though some impacted by floods have a shot.
None of this is to argue that rebuilding is wrong, or that losing a home is undeserving of sympathy or help. It is. But there is so much more to survivors, and recovery, than a house.
Birdwell, who lost her home in Berry Creek, still thinks of that cabin as a “slice of heaven” and reminiscences “about how life used to be.” But she is left with anxiety — a remnant of the fire for which no one has offered her help — and a sense of dislocation and discontent. A few nights ago, she dreamed fire was coming at her again.
“I woke up, my heart was beating out of my chest,” she said. “That might be something that will happen the rest of my life.”
In the next 30 years, we will assuredly have more climate refugees, more climate migrants, like Birdwell and Linfoot and the thousands of Angelenos still reeling from our recent fires. We can plan for that now if we choose to, leave behind the gratifying but false camaraderie of #strong and instead broaden our response to ensuring everyone who survives climate tragedy has options and equity.
If we don’t, we will simply move further into a future that bends recovery to benefit the wealthy, as Davis predicted long ago — prioritizing the rebuilding of hazardous communities again and again until the only people who can afford to live in them are the people who can afford to watch them burn.
Aug. 4 (UPI) — FBI officials in Philadelphia on Monday issued an advisory warning international college students about a scam that involves foreign impersonators. They advised potential victims to report it.
Officials at the Philadelphia office of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation say that college and university students studying abroad in the United States — particularly Chinese citizens — are at risk of an ongoing scheme that involves a foreign government impersonator.
“We are actively engaging with the public, academic institutions, and our law enforcement partners to identify and support those impacted by this scheme,” Wayne Jacobs, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Field Office, said in a statement.
According to FBI officials, since 2022 the Philadelphia office has seen an uptick in criminal activity with actors attempting to make a victim believe they are a Chinese police officer in order to defraud them.
A scammer will tell a victim they are under investigation for an alleged financial crime in China and will need to pay in order to to avoid arrest.
The typically four-phase scam will see a fraudster call from what appears to be a legitimate phone number associated with a mobile telephone service provider. They will inform a victim their private information had been “linked to either a subject or a victim of a financial fraud investigation,” officials say.
They added that a criminal actor will involve another person who acts as a provincial Chinese police officer and will seek to apply further pressure in attempts to get a potential victim to “return to China to face trial or threaten them with arrest.”
“Criminal actors direct victims to consent to 24/7 video and audio monitoring due to the alleged sensitivity of the investigation and/or to demonstrate the victims’ innocence,” the FBI’s Philadelphia field office stated Monday.
“Victims are instructed not to discuss the details of the case, not to conduct Internet searches, and to report all their daily activities,” it added.
The bureau gave a similar notice last year about China-based imposters seeking to extort money from victims.
Other scams in the past also have affected Chinese victims. In 2019, the Chinese mother of a Stanford University student expelled in the college admissions scandal said she was duped into paying over $6 million in the belief the money was for college-related costs.
Jacobs, the FBI’s Philadelphia field office chief, says the scams “inflict more than just financial harm.” He said many victims “endure lasting emotional and psychological distress.”
A popular tourist destination in Greece has often been known as an idyllic escape during the summer holidays, but for one traveller, it became a holiday from hell
Gabriella Barras visited Santorini earlier this month(Image: Jam Press)
A summer getaway to Greece is about immersing yourself in the culture, soaking up the sun-soaked rays, indulging in the local delicacies and wandering around the enchanting cobbled streets. But for one traveller, their luxury holiday to Santorini left them less than impressed as they battled the crazy crowds taking over the Greek island.
Gabriella Barras, 27, visited Santorini on holiday earlier this year this month after scenic images of the island caught her attention on social media. The four-day trip cost her £2,200, but it wasn’t anything like she imagined, with an “overflow of tourists”.
“I expected Santorini to be a picturesque, relaxing and gorgeous holiday,” Gabriella, who lives in Dubai, told Luxury Travel Daily. “I wanted to experience Greek culture and food.
Gabriella shared the expectation vs. reality of her trip to Santorini on social media (Image: Jam Press)
“Photos of it looked incredible. While it was indeed picturesque and the views were phenomenal, I didn’t think that there was much old school tradition and culture. It’s so commercialised to the point where I didn’t necessarily find it relaxing at all.”
She added: “The overflow of tourists at every given spot we went to was overwhelming and definitely not the gorgeous, relaxing retreat I was expecting. There were hundreds of people trying to see the sunset at once.”
In addition to the overcrowding, Gabriella found it tricky when it came to the stairs on the island. She explained: “We rented a car, so getting around wasn’t difficult; however, a lot of the accommodation is up a whole load of stairs up the mountain.
“At some places, getting your luggage to and from your room or even just getting yourself up can be strenuous and maybe not possible for everyone.”
The traveller said, ‘There were hundreds of people trying to see the sunset at once’(Image: Jam Press)
Gabriella isn’t the only traveller to have slammed Santorini. Claire Smith, 25, stayed in the popular tourist destination for six nights just a few weeks ago, which set her back £600. However, instead of admiring the crystal clear waters through the iconic white and blue buildings, her main view became the overcrowding of tourists.
Claire, who hails from Sydney, Australia, stayed in Fira, the capital of Santorini, but caught buses to Oia, one of Santorini’s most popular towns, and Kamari, a village on the east coast of the island, for the day. “Trying to get on a bus was animalistic mayhem,” she explained.
“I wanted to explore beaches and relax. I expected the stunning views and the classic pictures of the caldera that you see all over Instagram, the blue dome buildings and for it to be very hot.
“Oia was the most crowded and jam-packed in reality. That made it hard to enjoy. It was beautiful, but the main streets in the town were so jam-packed that it took ages to walk through, and it was also super hot with no shade anywhere. That was probably the worst part.
Travellers have slammed Santorini for overcrowding(Image: Jam Press)
“We walked the steps down to Ammoudi Bay, which were covered in donkey poo, so it smelled pretty bad. I had to squeeze up against a wall on the way back up, as there were donkeys on their way down. I was kind of worried they’d squash me.
“We were getting the bus back from Kamari to Fira, and the bus stop had heaps of people all scrambling to get on it. There was no line at the bus stop to make it orderly, so it was a free-for-all.
“We luckily got on the bus, but I heard an Australian family saying that one American couple didn’t manage to get on the bus and they’d also missed the previous one, so I felt really bad for people like that.
“Fira was easier and accessible for walking around. It was crowded but not to a crazy extent, where it makes it hard to appreciate anything.”
Following her experience, Claire advises other holidaymakers to avoid Santorini during the peak season. She shared: “I would still recommend it to people because I think it’s a pretty unique island with the incredible views, the caldera, white buildings and sunsets.
The Greek island is known for breathtaking views and golden sunsets (Image: Jam Press)
“My advice would be to probably not stay in Oia, and to avoid July and August if you hate the crowds and peak summer heat. I’d aim for the slightly calmer months when you can probably appreciate it a bit more.”
Meanwhile, Gabriella said she’s not in a hurry to return and recommended visiting quieter destinations in Greece, such as Milos, Koufonisia and Amorgos. “I wouldn’t go again. I’ve been to much better islands and don’t feel the need to see Santorini again,” she said.
“I’d recommend people to go see it as a bucket list trip, but two to three days is more than enough, and I’d highly recommend other less commercialised islands.”
People heading abroad this summer are being warned to beware of a growing airport scam targeting holidaymakers’ precious items, with thieves going for those who’ve just arrived on holiday
You don’t want to end up feeling like this at the airport(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Brits warned of airport scam where most people don’t realise they’ve been robbed
People heading abroad this summer are being warned to beware of a growing airport scam targeting holidaymakers‘ precious items.
Jeweller, designer goods and high-end watches are all in the sights of sticky-fingered thieves who operate at airports. Security experts say distraction thefts and “switch” scams – where a thief subtly swaps your real item with a fake – are rising in hotspots like baggage claim areas, duty-free counters and outside taxi ranks.
And it’s not just obvious valuables like Rolexes or diamond jewellery at risk. Mid-range watches are also being eyed up by organised thieves who strike when tourists are tired, distracted or unaware.
Don’t get caught day-dreaming at the airport(Image: Busakorn Pongparnit via Getty Images)
Danny Toffel, managing director at Watches2U, says there are a few simple ways to protect your valuables when travelling.
“We’re seeing more reports from customers who’ve had close calls or actual thefts at airports abroad. It often starts with a small distraction – someone asking for directions, offering to help with bags or creating a minor commotion,” Danny said.
“While you’re looking the other way, they or an accomplice take the opportunity to grab a loose bag or swap an item.”
The most common locations for watch and jewellery thefts in airports include baggage reclaim areas, especially if you step away from your trolley or bags even momentarily.
Duty-free counters are another hotspot, particularly when people are distracted trying on jewellery or inspecting items behind glass. Outside taxi ranks and pick-up zones, thieves often work in pairs, using the moment someone is loading luggage to make a move on a visible item or unsecured bag.
Danny warns that visibly wearing high-end items, or placing watches in easily accessible bag pockets, makes you a prime target.
“Scammers tend to look for signs that someone is carrying something expensive – and whether they’re too distracted to notice something being taken or switched,” he said.
The security expert recommends keeping your watch on your wrist or in secure hand luggage rather than in jacket pockets or checked bags. Tourists should also be wary of helpful strangers at baggage belts or taxi queues who seem unusually interested in assisting with bags or directions.
“Wearing a cheaper travel watch is a smart move if you’re flying into busy tourist hubs. Keep your expensive pieces for secure evenings or hotel safes – not airport terminals,” Danny said.
He also stressed that most thefts are opportunistic, adding: “Being aware of your surroundings and keeping valuables close – and discreet – can make all the difference.”
A Benidorm expert has warned Brits that a common crime in the popular tourist hotspot has taken a “scarier twist” in recent times – and she knows from personal experience
Liam McInerney Content Editor
08:00, 17 Jun 2025
Stock image of people walking along the Benidorm promenade(Image: GETTY)
A Benidorm specialist has issued a stark warning to Brits, stating that a common crime in the popular holiday destination has taken a “scarier twist”.
Michelle Baker, who moved to Spain 40 years ago and raised a family in Benidorm while running a newspaper for two decades, now shares information through her Facebook group, Benidormforever. She has urged visitors to stay alert.
“Phone theft is the No1 crime in Benidorm and it’s now taken a scarier twist,” she penned, revealing details about a new phone scam.
She added: “I’m generally very positive about Benidorm, but several people I know personally have told me this happened to them recently (all of whom I consider streetwise individuals and none were drunk).”
Michelle revealed that she nearly fell victim herself to this crime in recent weeks, describing it as “clearly common and very easy to fall for”, before explaining what the crime involved.
Michelle Baker has lived in Benidorm longer than most Brits (Image: Benidormforever)
She explained: “You’re approached by an agitated young individual who has ‘lost’ his friends and can’t remember where he’s staying. He explains vaguely where he thinks it is and you open Google Maps on your phone to help him find his way.
“Once your phone is unlocked he snatches it and runs FAST; with adrenaline on his side he’s a two second head-start before you even react. Quickly passing the phone to tech savvy experts, within minutes passwords were expertly changed and large amounts of savings swiped.
“I was lucky; I didn’t get my phone out I simply told the chap who stopped me where his hotel was… but my friends weren’t so lucky and are absolutely gutted to have fallen for this.
“It’s even sadder when you consider the many recent genuine stories of tourists getting lost, sometimes with tragic endings..
“So the moral of the story is; keep your phone out of sight; at best it’ll be swiped from a bar table and sold on for a few euros… but now it appears you’ll have all your money nicked too.”
Brits in Benidorm watching King Charles’ coronation in the sun (Image: Getty)
Michelle emphasised that while the incidents were non-violent, they could still “ruin your holiday”.
She added, if you are approached by someone seemingly lost asking for help, guide them to the nearest hotel rather than whipping out your mobile.
Following the incident, two young individuals, aged 19 and 20, were apprehended by the Policia Nacional.
The authorities subsequently issued advice to never enter passwords or codes into your phone if there are onlookers, and to utilise different passwords for banking applications as a precaution against theft.
The Foreign Office has issued a warning to travellers, stating: “Be alert to the risk of street crime. Thieves use distraction techniques and often work in teams. Take care of your passports, money and personal belongings, particularly when collecting or checking in luggage at the airport, and while arranging car hire.
“Do not carry all your valuables in one place. Keep a copy of the photo page of your passport somewhere safe. Make sure your accommodation has adequate security. Keep all doors and windows locked. If you’re concerned about the security of your accommodation, speak to your travel operator or the property owner.”
After she was assaulted by her romantic partner in 2000 while living in Los Angeles County, Maria Gutierrez Saragon turned to a family friend who said he could help her secure immigration papers.
Because she had been the victim of a crime, the friend said, he could help her obtain authorization to stay in the U.S.
While it’s true that immigrant crime victims qualify for special benefits in some instances, the promise to get Gutierrez Saragon citizenship within three months at a discount dragged on for more than a decade. A housekeeper with a modest income, she was slowly bled for more than $100,000 through a mix of false assurances and threats.
“I had to give him all my money instead of being able to buy my children what they need,” she said between sobs in an interview. “It was like torture. Every time the phone rang or every time a paper arrived for me, they were asking for more money.”
She was a victim of so-called notario fraud, in which scammers acting as lawyers extract large sums from vulnerable immigrants.
The swindle is not a new one. But despite longstanding campaigns to raise awareness, advocates and law enforcement officials say they are concerned about a resurgence under the second Trump administration. Sweeps by federal agents and the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, they say, have created a climate of fear ripe for exploitation.
The hundreds caught up in the recent raids will be seeking affordable legal help as they fight to keep the lives they have built in the United States. Compounding matters, attorneys who specialize in immigration law say there is a shortage of qualified people working in the field. Unless separately appearing in state or federal court on criminal charges, people in civil immigration proceedings are typically not entitled to a court-appointed lawyer.
The scam that bilked Gutierrez Saragon, a native of Mexico, hinges on confusion over what a notary public does in the U.S., and how it differs from Latin America and elsewhere, where “notarios” have far more legal standing.
A notary public in the U.S. serves as an impartial witness when important documents are signed. But in other parts of the world, the term refers to an attorney with special credentials who has received the equivalent of a law license and who is authorized to represent others before the government, according to Victor D. Lopez, a professor of legal studies at Hofstra University.
The type of fraud can vary. Some victims pay money to notarios who promise to represent them in hearings with immigration officials and never show up. Others see valid asylum claims end with deportation orders because the information submitted was false, bearing no resemblance to the harrowing experiences that forced them out of their home countries.
“It’s the type of crime that preys upon the most needy and desperate people,” Lopez said, adding that few places outside of Colorado have taken meaningful steps to crack down on immigration-related abuses.
Because of underreporting, he and others said, there is little reliable data on how many fraud victims there are each year. Many who have suffered losses are afraid to contact law enforcement because of their immigration status.
Gutierrez Saragon recounted in Spanish how she was duped by her notario, whom she and an attorney she found to help unravel the scheme identified as Fidel Marquez Cortes.
It started small, Gutierrez Saragon recalled: A few hundred dollars to process her fingerprints. Several hundred more for background checks. Trips to New York and Washington, D.C., which he claimed he needed to take to collect her passport. Each time, she gave him money to pay for the flight, hotel, rental car and gas, she said, but he always came back with an excuse for why he needed more time and cash.
Whenever she pushed back, she claimed, Marquez Cortes warned that she’d lose her chance at citizenship. She recalled how he would show her official-looking documents that he claimed were from a law firm in Orange County — all written in English and full of legal jargon she didn’t understand.
Only later did she learn that he had created a fake letterhead for the law firm, and was using the money she gave him to pay for his back taxes, child support and even a speeding ticket, she said.
Eventually, in February 2011, Gutierrez Saragon found a lifeline in the Immigrants Rights Project, a Los Angeles nonprofit that offers pro bono services for people seeking a path to citizenship or permanent residency. She came into their office terrified that it was her last day in the country, attorney Gina Amato Lough recalled.
“She was trembling,” Lough said.
Her new client’s first words, Lough said, suggested she thought she was turning herself in to the authorities rather than seeking free legal counsel: “I know that you’re the immigration service and you have the power to deport me. But the day has come where I just have to know what’s happened to my case.”
Lough encouraged her to file a police report the following day at Olympic Division station. But an officer at the front desk turned her away, saying it wasn’t a crime and that she needed to go to a courthouse to file a civil complaint. Lough accompanied her the following day and was told by another officer that they didn’t take reports for such cases “because it’s so common in L.A. that we couldn’t possibly prosecute it.”
After Lough protested, police agreed to take a report and eventually, the man was charged with grand theft and convicted.
Despite what Lough described as “a lack of reputable immigration attorneys” to help people through the labyrinthine U.S. immigration process, her group fought against a proposal by the state bar association to help bridge the justice gap by creating a paraprofessional classification, which would lower the bar to entry in the field.
Lough worried such a change would create more confusion and lead to more fraud. She called for local authorities to take seriously an issue that is often overlooked.
Most district attorneys are reluctant to prosecute unless there are “multiple cases and hundreds of dollars in losses,” she said. “There is a huge lack of enforcement within L.A. County.”
Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis echoed that sentiment.
Solis said she has fought for stronger regulations for a problem that isn’t confined to the Latino community, pointing to recent cases in the county involving immigrants from Asian and European countries.
“How do you deter the behavior if there is no teeth in the law?” Solis asked.
Some attorneys who practice immigration law say they are coming across scams that play out entirely online, allowing perpetrators to vanish before authorities even have a chance to investigate.
Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said she recently had a client arrive saying they were expecting to collect a green card after sending money to someone they had been communicating with on WhatsApp.
The person on WhatsApp told the client they could pick up the proof of permanent residency status with Toczylowski’s organization, which was a lie.
“Essentially that person was masquerading as a nonprofit organization,” Toczylowski said, adding that her group is preparing a public service announcement to warn about the scam.
Other times, immigration consultants aren’t out to defraud their clients, but still sometimes “make promises that they can’t keep,” she said.
Toczylowski’s center relies on local, state and federal funding, the latter of which has been threatened — a troubling development that comedian John Oliver highlighted on his show “Last Week Tonight.” After the episode aired, Toczylowski said the center received a flood of online donations, but not nearly enough to offset potential cuts to federal funding.
The center is also a plaintiff in an ongoing federal lawsuit out of Northern California against the Department of Human Services over slashed funding, she said.
When the case involving Marquez Cortes, the man who defrauded Gutierrez Saragon, finally went to trial, he was found guilty and a superior court judge ordered him to pay three installments totaling $66,000 in restitution or face a two-year prison sentence.
He eventually fled to Mexico, where a bail bondsman tracked him down and he was arrested by local police, according to Lough.
Lough said she pushed for the man to be extradited back to the U.S. to serve out his sentence, but to this day she’s not sure what his fate was. Gutierrez Saragon hasn’t recovered her losses.
“She’s never seen a dime,” Lough said. “And he’s never spent not a day in jail.”
A ‘scam’ is rife on the streets of Benidorm according to a British man who has lived in the resort town for 13 years – and others have admitted to falling for it and ending up losing money
A British man has alerted holidaymakers to a new ‘scam’ in Benidorm (stock)(Image: Getty Images)
If you plan on travelling to Benidorm this summer, you may wish to heed the advice of a Brit living in the Spanish resort who has sounded the alarm over a new “scam” said to be sweeping the region. Frank moved to the Mediterranean coast 13 years ago, and as well as hosting parties as ‘The Stag Man’, he also offers advice to fellow Brits heading to the coastal city.
Taking to TikTok on Tuesday (June 10), he said fraudsters have a new trick that you “probably won’t be aware of”. In video recorded on the streets of Benidorm, Frank pointed out a number of people holding clipboards who are approaching passers-by. And after turning down the opportunity to fill out a “petition” himself, he explained: “As you’ve seen there, this is one of the scams that runs along the beachfront.”
But how does it work? Frank claimed that holidaymakers are asked to sign petitions, which once completed, they are pushed into making a donation.
His partner interjected, stating: “They’ll say it’s for the blind or the disabled and that they are petitioning to get something sorted here in Spain.”
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However, she slammed: “It’s full of a load of rubbish and illegal to do this here in Spain.” Frank added: “They’re illegal, scamming, and they will take your money. Some people even get their wallets out and give them a few quid.”
Proving that some Brits are falling for the trick, one TikTok user responded: “My husband fell for this in Old Town. A guy claiming he was deaf, my husband being deaf, we didn’t realise the scam till after.”
A second praised: “Thank you for the heads up. We are coming next Monday. I got scammed with the potato game three years ago.”
A third revealed: “I had this scam done to me and my partner luckily we had no cash on us.”
A fourth detailed: “I got caught in Old Town, he wanted €10 from me, when I said no he was so rude until my husband showed up.”
Whilst a fifth TikTok user recalled: “I had the same guy do it at Placa del Castell last Wednesday. Told him no three times for him to go away. Felt bad for the ones who stop and listen to him that don’t know any better.”
In a separate clip last week, meanwhile, Frank pointed out another “big problem” with holidaymakers having their phones stolen. He explained: “Generally, what happens is, someone comes up to you and they’ll say to you ‘oh, I’m with some friends, and I’m lost, and I don’t know where I’m going. Can you do a Google Map search for me?’
“What you do, because you’re a nice person, is you whip your phone out, you get your Google Maps up, and as soon as you get your Google Maps up, they grab the phone and run off with it.”
Benidorm sits in the middle of the Costa Blanca and according to an index from online holiday provider, Travel Republic, British tourists accounted for 45% of overnight stays in this city alone in 2024, totalling over 600,000 visitors.
The city boasts 32 British pubs, many of which stream live sports daily and are known for their very low beer prices.
June 5 (UPI) — The Justice Department has seized more than $7.74 million dollars related to an illegal employment and cryptocurrency scheme operated by North Korea, officials announced Thursday.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District court in Washington, alleges that IT workers were illegally hired and collected cryptocurrency for the North Korean government as a way to avoid sanctions imposed by the United States.
“This forfeiture action highlights, once again, the North Korean government’s exploitation of the cryptocurrency ecosystem to fund its illicit priorities,” Matthew R. Galeoti, director of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a release. “The department will use every legal tool at its disposal to safeguard the cryptocurrency ecosystems and deny North Korea all its ill-gotten gains in violation of U.S. sanctions.”
The Justice Department said North Korean workers used false identities to obtain employment with U.S.-based companies, often remotely, as a way to avoid sanctions and illegally obtained cryptocurrency, which they then sent back to North Korea.
“Those IT workers have generated revenue for North Korea via their jobs at, among other places, blockchain development companies,” the Justice Department release continued.
To send the cryptocurrency to North Korea, the IT workers allegedly laundered it by setting up accounts with fictitious names, sending funds in small amounts, converting funds or moving them to other blockchains or converting them to other forms of currency. They also allegedly commingled their funds with other money to hide their origins.
Earlier this year, the FBI issued guidelines on how to recognize extortion and theft of sensitive company data, and offered rules on how to address it.
May 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Treasury Department Thursday sanctioned a Philippines-based computer infrastructure company and its administrator for allegedly providing services for sites involved in cryptocurrency scams.
Treasury said Funnull Technology and administrator Liu Lizhi provides infrastructure for hundreds of thousands websites allegedly involved in the scams known as “pig butchering.”
“Today’s action underscores our focus on disrupting the criminal enterprises, like Funnull, that enable these cyber scams and deprive Americans of their hard-earned savings,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender said in a statement.
The sanctions were imposed in close cooperation with the FBI.
The Treasury described the “pig butchering” scams as Southeast Asian organized crime using victims of labor trafficking to scam millions of unsuspecting people worldwide.
“The scammers leverage fictitious identities, the guise of potential relationships, and elaborate storylines to deceive victims into believing they are in trusted relationships. The scammers then steal victims’ assets by convincing them to invest in virtual currency through a fake website designed to look like a legitimate investment platform that reflects significant, but fabricated, returns on the investment,” the Treasury said.
When victims stop paying more into the scam, the Treasury said the scammer “will abruptly cease communication, taking the victim’s entire investment with them.”
Funnull’s role, according to the Treasury, is to buy IP addresses in bulk from major cloud services companies and then sell them to cybercriminals to host the scam web platforms.
Treasury said Funnell is linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI.
U.S. victims, Treasury said, have lost over $200 million with an average loss per person of $150,000.
The Treasury alleged that in 2024 Funnell bought a repository of code used by web developers and “maliciously altered the code to redirect visitors of legitimate websites to scam websites and online gambling sites, some of which are linked to Chinese criminal money laundering operations.”
According to Treasury the Lizhi, a Chinese national, is an administrator of Funnell involved in tasks allegedly including “assigning domain names to cybercriminals, including domains associated with virtual currency investment fraud, phishing scams, and online gambling sites.”
