Fraud Scam A to Z

 The frauds listed at this link have been compiled by the Federal Government of Canada and the list is intended as a navigational aide, not as a comprehensive or official list of all scams affecting Canadians.

To view the site and for more information on the Frauds and scams listed go to Scams by A-Z index. Many of the Frauds I have listed are aimed at certain groups in the population. Some I am not familiar with, but others I am. Listing the site can help but it is up to you to go to the link and find out the information you need to protect yourself.

A

Air duct cleaning

Asian community, telephone calls targeting the

B

Bank investigator

Bomb threat

Business executive spoofs and wire fraud

Business grants and loans

Business opportunity

Business proposals, fake

C

Canada Revenue Agency

Car wrapping

Card-not-present

Charity

Collection agency

Continuity

Counterfeit merchandise

D

Denial of Service (DOS)

Directory

Donation

E

Emergency

Explicit video

Extortion

F

Fake business proposals

Fake grant

Financial agent

Financial industry client spoof

Foreign lottery

Foreign money offers

Franchise opportunity

G

Gem

Government documents, help with

Grant

H

Head office spoof

Hitman

Hostage

Hydro

I

Identity theft and fraud

Immigration extortion

Immigration website

Inheritance

Initial Coin Offerings

Investment

J

Job

Job: counterfeit cheque

L

Loan

Lottery, foreign

Low interest rate offers

M

Merchandise

Money offers, foreign

Mystery shopper

O

Office supplies

P

Pardon

Payroll spoof

Personal information

Phishing

Ponzi

Prize

Prize winner call

Psychic

Pump and dump

Pyramid

R

Ransomware

Recovery pitch

Resale

Romance

S

Sale of merchandise

Service

Sextortion

Sim card swap

Spear phishing

Subscription trap

Supplier/contractor swindle

T

Taxpayer

Tech support

Telephone calls targeting the Asian community

Timeshare

Timeshare resale

V

Vacation

Video, explicit

W

Weight loss grants

Time keeps on drifting away

As I get older, the mysteries of the mind grow more interesting. One of the mysteries that puzzles me is how do we understand the passage of time. Some days’ time goes by so slowly (The Righteous Brothers)  yet on other days’ time keeps slipping into the future (Steve Miller Band). I have as I imagine you have, sat and watched time slowly slide by and at other times time rushes past. So, what do the Scientist say about how we view time.

The ability to tell and keep time plays an integral role in what we do every day - from recognizing speech patterns to creating music. Yet, no one knows how the brain keeps time. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have begun to unravel the mystery by showing that a network of neurons kept alive in a petri dish could be "trained" to keep time. The research will enhance understanding of how the brain works and how certain conditions that have resulted in time-keeping deficits, such as dyslexia, could be treated.

The neurons, derived from the brain of a rat, were trained to fire for specific amounts of time, depending on how long they were stimulated by electric current. The team stimulated two sets of neurons with simple patterns, which consisted of electric stimuli separated by different intervals lasting from a 20th of a second up to half a second. After two hours of electric stimulation, the scientists tested to see how each cell responded to just a single electrical pulse. In the networks trained with a short interval, the activity lasted for a short period of time. Conversely, in the networks trained with a long interval, network activity lasted for a longer amount of time. Based on the three-year study, scientists have hypothesized that the ability to distinguish time is more generalized in the brain, meaning that pockets of neurons throughout the brain can keep time on their own without tapping into a centralized area.

The researchers used an electrical current to stimulate networks of cultured brain cells, similar to giving the cells an electric shock. While these networks contained tens of thousands of neurons, they make up only a small fraction of the 100 million or so neurons present in a rat brain. (The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons.)

The cells were stimulated at specific time intervals, ranging from one-twentieth of a second (50 milliseconds) to half a second (500 milliseconds).

After two hours of cell shocking, the scientists tested to see how each cell responded to just a single electrical pulse. They saw the network activity — the way the neurons fire, and whether this firing spreads or propagates throughout the network — differed depending on the training interval.

In the networks that had been trained on the short intervals, say 50 ms, the activity lasted for about 50 ms before dying out. But in the networks trained at 500 ms, the activity lasted for longer, around 500 ms.

Scientists don't know whether this ability to tell time depends on a single part of the brain, a sort of centralized clock, or whether the function is more generalized, so networks of neurons throughout the brain are inherently capable of keeping time on their own without an orchestrator.

The results give weight to the latter hypothesis since the segregated neurons could learn to keep time without tapping into a centralized brain area.

Ultimately, learning how the brain tells time will help us better understand how the brain works, which is important for figuring out what goes wrong when the brain has problems, Interestingly, there are no known diseases in which a person's ability to keep time is completely lost. This is in contrast to something like forming memories, where lesions in certain parts of the brain can prevent people from making long-term memories. This further supports the idea that timing keeping is generalized rather than centralized.

The study was published in 2011 in the Journal Nature Neuroscience

Sources:http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/06/15/ucla.scientists.teach.cultured.brain.cells.keep.time 

www.livescience.com/health/brain-cells-keep-time-100618.html

 

What’s a hypnic jerk?

 Did this ever happen to you, your mind begins to wander off, fading into the nightly oblivion and you start drifting off to sleep. Then…

You stumble, trip, fall. Your body jolts. Your leg kicks. Your heart pounds. Huh? What happened? Did you mistakenly fall asleep on a trapdoor?

Nope. You simply experienced a hypnic jerk. What’s a hypnic jerk?

They are most common in children when our dreams are most simple, and they do not reflect what is happening in the dream world - if you dream of riding a bike you do not move your legs in circles. Instead, hypnic jerks seem to be a sign that the motor system can still exert some control over the body as sleep paralysis begins to take over. Rather than having a single “sleep-wake” switch in the brain for controlling our sleep (i.e., ON at night, OFF during the day), we have two opposing systems balanced against each other that go through a daily dance, where each must wrest control from the other.

Deep in the brain, below the cortex (the most evolved part of the human brain) lies one of them: a network of nerve cells called the reticular activating system. This is nestled among the parts of the brain that govern basic physiological processes, such as breathing. When the reticular activating system is in full force, we feel alert and restless - that is, we are awake.

A hypnic jerk, or sleep start, is a phenomenon that occurs when your body transitions from wakefulness to sleep. It involves a sudden involuntary muscle twitch and is frequently accompanied by a falling or tripping sensation. It’s that strange muscle spasm that happens when you are lying-in bed, trying to sleep, and are suddenly jolted awake because you feel like you stumbled over something. Hypnic jerks are common and benign.

Researchers have come up with two hypotheses that may explain hypnic jerks.

Hypothesis 1: Your body twitches as daytime motor control is overridden by sleep paralysis. When you’re asleep, your body is paralyzed. This is called REM sleep atonia and it prevents you from acting out your dreams.

REM atonia works by inhibiting your motor neurons. It does so by raising the bar on the amount of electricity the brain must send down a motor neuron to trigger a movement. So, for instance, the little bit of electricity that your brain sends down to your finger to make it move when you’re awake is no longer enough when you’re under REM atonia. However, sometimes, during this wrestling match between the two subsections of your brain, some motor neurons are fired randomly, causing your body to twitch.

Hypothesis 2: Another theory is evolutionary, stretching back to our primate ancestors. Frederick Coolidge, a psychologist at The University of Colorado, has suggested that a hypnic jerk could be "an archaic reflex to the brain's misinterpreting the muscle relaxation accompanying the onset of sleep as a signal that the sleeping primate is falling out of a tree. In this theory, it means that we’ve inherited some monkey brain routines that no longer serve any purpose. According to this hypothesis, one of them is a reflex that jolts you awake when you’re falling from a tree.

Imagine you’re a monkey and the last rays of sunlight have just disappeared behind the green forest canopy. It’s getting dark and you say to yourself: time for sleep. Your eyelids become heavy and your breathing slows down. The outside world begins to fade. Sounds become distant.

At this point, the subconscious part of your brain takes over. “Perfect,” it says, “time to boot up the dream images.” Your brain initiates the dream procedure and just when you’re about to nod off completely, it notices that all your muscles have suddenly and unexpectedly relaxed. “HOLY BANANA!” your brain screams panic-stricken, “Mayday! Mayday! We’re in freefall! Dammit! Wake up! Wake up! Oh no, crap, poop! Brace for impaaaact!”

Hypnic jerks are involuntary muscle contractions that occur during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. They’re most likely to occur if you’ve been gulping down too much coffee, have been stressed or sleep-deprived, or did some vigorous exercise before going to bed. About 70% of people have experienced them. Even so, they are not well understood.

Either way, hypnic jerks are benign and nothing to worry about. The worst that can happen is probably an occasional kick against the shin of whoever is sharing the bed with you, which should be okay if you don’t wear steel-toe boots in bed.

Source:

BBC: Why your body jerks before you fall asleep.

McGill Office of Science and Society: What are Hypnic Jerks?

Business Insider: Why You Sometimes Feel Like You're Falling And Jerk Awake When Trying To Fall Asleep

Health and Wellness Institute

The following is from the President of Council of Senior Citizens Organization where he talked about the Seniors Health and Wellness Institute, COSTCO. The federal charity, Seniors Health and Wellness Institute-COSCO, was established in 2007. It offers free workshops on a large variety of topics that are of particular concern to seniors, to any seniors group that asks for a workshop.

The first workshop was Falls Prevention. Additional workshops were added over the years. Currently, there are 44 workshops listed on the Society's web site involving healthy living, safety, personal planning, and legal and financial issues. Many of these workshop summaries are offered in) languages other than English. The workshop summaries are offered in Chinese, Japanese, and Punjabi.

Since the Institute was established, we have seen close to 3000 workshops conducted around the province with a total attendance of approximately 50,000 seniors. The workshops are presented by our volunteer facilitators. As a result, of the current Covid-19 virus situation, workshops are presently presented virtually and of the 44 we regularly have, 28 are offered virtually.

COSCO is involved in many other on-going advocacies such the advocacy and lobbying efforts in respect to the establishment of national standards for long term care, in-home care, and a national Pharmacare program.

The workshops now can be delivered to any senior group in Canada or other countries. Visit our webpage, Seniorshelpingseniors.ca  to learn how to book an online workshop.