The Thamesmead Grump

Sick Baby Scam

Kati Ringer, internet troll.
Stole a picture of a sick baby to fund
a fake "Go Fund Me" appeal
then threatened to "find and Rape"
her when the Mother complained.

Kati Ringer, a 21 year old internet troll has just been convicted of two counts of sending malicious communications to a mother whose baby she threatened to "find and rape". 

In 2015, she was sentenced to three years in prison after sending doctored pictures of babies with abusive comments to their parents.

This time she was stealing photographs of sick children from other people's Instagram accounts and using them to try and pass them off as her own in order to solicit payments to a "Go Fund Me" account. It was when the mother of one of the children whose photograph she had stolen challenged her that she became threatening and abusive.

These sort of scams appear with depressing regularity on social media sites like Facebook with claims that Google or Amazon or whoever will donate money in exchange for "liking" or "sharing" the post. No matter how many times it's been made clear that all these types of post are some sort of scam, people still get fooled by them.

The next time you are invited to believe that ten likes = one prayer, or that typing "amen" will somehow make the child better: that liking the picture of the woman with a limb or two photoshopped out "because her partner thinks she is too embarrassing to be seen in public": that the RV showroom is going to give away 10 of their vehicles for free: that Apple have to give away 100 iPhones because they have been opened, then please think again; you are contributing to a particularly nasty criminal activity. You can read more about this sort of scam by clicking the link here.

One would expect that any man who contacted a woman and threatened to rape her baby would be looking at a pretty long prison sentence, especially after being jailed for similar activity previously. Kati Ringer, well, she was given a 30 week suspended sentence and ordered to pay £225 costs.

Creepy Crawly casserole anyone?

I was going to illustrate this item with a
picture of a plate full of grubs, but they were
all so stomach-churningly disgusting I decided
to use this picture of some proper food.

According to this BBC article, (one of several they have published over the years), we may be able to "save the planet" by eating insects. They don't say what we are supposed to be saving the planet from but apparently the idea is that we replace eating meat for insects. Animal farming, we are told, produces large amounts of methane gas which contributes to global warming: so it's not the planet we would be saving, rather our dominant position on it.

The article goes on to tell us that eating insects is quite common in some parts of the world already, so it seems to me that all we have to do is to tell the people already eating them to eat more and let the rest of us stick to our regular Sunday roast, thank you very much.