How not to commit insurance fraud

March 18, 2021, 7:33 PM PDT by Parkzer • 2018 GMC Canyon, Video

This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.

Before it was commonplace to film everything ever, it used to be difficult to prove things. This was particularly troublesome for insurance companies when they receive a claim from one involved party saying that something happened, but then they hear from the other involved party saying that what happened was actually completely different. It ended up being one person’s word against the other, and with very little concrete evidence, it was difficult to prove things one way or the other.

Now that everyone is eager to whip out their phones and start recording everything around them—even if it entails failing to act, and filming an emergency in lieu of helping a person or situation in need—it becomes much easier to see what actually happened.

As dash cams become much more popular, people attempting to commit automobile insurance fraud are discouraged because it’s very difficult to get away with something if there is video evidence clearly illustrating that the alleged perpetrator was actually the victim. Dash cam footage can literally be the difference between getting charged with manslaughter if someone intentionally jumps in front of your vehicle, and proving your innocence and avoiding prison time. So, of course, I have a dash cam.

Luckily, my situation wasn’t quite as severe as the manslaughter example above. I also don’t know if this was actually attempted insurance fraud, or if it was just a malfunctioning vehicle. Either way, I’m glad I have the dash cam footage in case I later get wrongly accused of a hit-and-run, and because it makes for an entertaining blog post.

12:57:57	Heading westbound on Sahara Avenue, I merge into the left-most left turn lane and approach a white sedan already at the light before me.
12:58:14	I come to a complete stop. The brake lights of the white sedan in front of me turn off and the vehicle slowly begins creeping backwards.
12:58:27	The white sedan makes impact with the front of my vehicle. For a few seconds, I continue feeling the white sedan pushing back against me, my truck supporting the weight of the sedan. The driver of the white sedan begins making hand gestures and looks visibly distressed, but does not exit her vehicle. I suspect that she is attempting to commit insurance fraud, so I point towards my dash cam. She stops motioning and pulls forward. I drive a bit closer to read her license plate, but due to the dark tinted cover mounted on top of her plate, I’m unable to read the characters.
12:59:43	The light turns green and the white sedan begins driving. I follow the vehicle for nearly two minutes, but it does not pull over.
13:01:26	The vehicle changes lanes into a two-lane left turn, so I merge into the lane next to it and pull up beside her.
13:01:36	I roll down my passenger-side window to converse with the driver. The driver rolls down her window and begins yelling, asking why I had rear-ended her and whether I had a problem with her. I, having nothing to be mad about, calmly inform her that she is the one who backed into me, then pointed to my dash cam again, reminding her that I have video footage. I ask her if she is having a medical emergency that caused her to lose control of her vehicle, and whether or not I needed to call EMS, to which she did not respond. She states that it is impossible she backed into me because she puts her vehicle in Park at stop lights. I inquired whether she intends to pull over, to which she did not respond. She asks if there is any damage to the rear of her vehicle, to which I respond that I am unsure, as it is difficult to see from far away. I offer to pull over into a nearby parking lot with her to assess her vehicle for any damage and file a police report if needed. She replies “no, thank you” and rolls up her window.
13:02:17	She pulls her vehicle up so we can no longer make eye contact.

So to get the obvious question out of the way: Why didn’t I force her to pull over, continue following her, put more effort into getting her license plate, etc.?

Well, I drive a pickup truck with a grille guard mounted to the frame that protects the front end of my vehicle. These things can easily clock in at over a hundred pounds of steel, and are designed to protect the vehicle against threats like unexpected wild animals, plow through thick branches while driving through dense forests, and deflect rocks kicked up by vehicles in front of you in off-roading situations.

Needless to say, a small sedan backing into me wouldn’t even leave a scratch.

So, what do I think happened? Of course, this could have been an attempted insurance scam, where she backs into me and claims that I rear-ended her, then if I didn’t have dash cam footage of the incident, I would be blamed because it’s more likely that I drove into her when she was stopped still at the red light than it is for her to put her car into reverse and back into me.

But, remember how she said that it’s “impossible” that she backed into me because she puts her vehicle in Park at stop lights?

I think a more likely explanation of what happened here is that, after stopping at the red light, she intended to shift her automatic transmission to Park, but didn’t shift it all the way, and stopped it at Reverse instead. Thinking she was in Park, she let go of the brake pedal, causing her vehicle to roll backwards. After thinking she was in Park, she might have distracted herself (e.g., by looking down at her phone) and not even noticed she was rolling backwards.

Moral of the story? Get a dash cam.

Cat #3 is here

March 17, 2021, 8:12 PM PDT by Parkzer • Cats

And by cat #3, I actually mean cat #1. Mochi is a Scottish Fold and is actually my roommate’s first cat, which she got during the summer of 2019.

Mochi was pregnant with a litter of kittens while my roommate was in the process of moving from New York City to Las Vegas, so she left Mochi behind with one of her friends so she wouldn’t be flying across the country with a pregnant cat. That ended up being a wise decision, as Mochi gave birth during the time when we were still in my studio condo before our two-bedroom unit was available. That wouldn’t necessarily have been bad, but it would’ve definitely been inconvenient.

Mochi has been getting settled in for a few weeks now, and she’s doing well. She’s actually getting accustomed to her new environment fairly quickly (as opposed to the other two cats, which were much more shy and reserved before beginning to explore the entire new condo). In fact, she was actually being the aggressive one for a bit, and was bullying Pudding and Pumpkin when she first arrived.

Now that Mochi is here, my roommate got a third litter box. Before we had an opportunity to get it set up, Pumpkin decided that it would be a fantastic bed. … Everything is a viable bed for Pumpkin.

Hi Pudding.

My roommate’s fans’ favorite thing about Pumpkin is usually his appearance. People tend to like the folded ears, but another thing about Pumpkin is that his pupils get extra large when it is dark at night. Here is Pumpkin lurking within my pillows, ready to pounce. (Lighting has been artificially enhanced in the photograph so you can actually see him.)

Because we live in a high-rise condo with floor-to-ceiling windows, it can get overwhelmingly bright inside during the day. To further increase the magnitude, my roommate’s old apartment was a literal hybrid ground floor and basement unit that got very little to no sunlight. I imagine that Mochi had to take some time to get used to all the sun. For a while, one of her favorite spots was a cloth cubby with its backside turned towards the windows.

I usually keep my closet door closed, but I obviously open it a few times a day to actually get clothes in and out when I’m changing. The closet door has a distinct metallic clink sound when the door opens and closes because it has one of those rolling securing systems that doesn’t have a lock but uses friction and physics to keep the door from randomly swinging ajar.

I guess the cats really love the inside of my closet, because when they hear it open, they’ll often run over and run inside.

And finally, here is Pumpkin and his tongue.

My non-registered, non-certified investment advice for you

March 11, 2021, 12:41 PM PST by Parkzer • Finance, Highlights

As is hopefully clear by the title, I want to point out that I am not a registered investment advisor and do not have the qualifications to become one. This anecdote outlines my personal experiences only, and is not to be used as guidance to manage your assets in lieu of a certified professional.

With that being said, my advice to you is actually very similar to the disclaimer above, and it is: Do not trick yourself into making unjustifiable investment decisions based on others’ experiences if you are not fully informed of the entire situation.

The reason I’m writing this blog post is because I’ve been chatting quite a bit lately with my friends about investments. Most have listened to my experiences and intelligently used them as learning opportunities to do their own research about the related topics, but a few others… have made some questionable decisions.

It’s fun to talk about the wild and unexpected nature of the stock market, and it can be thrilling to share stories of huge successes or massive failures. What isn’t fun is talking about the steady growth of reliable index funds. Thus, if you were to ever ask me about my investments, I will probably talk about meme stocks, because talking about meme stocks makes for an inherently more interesting conversation.

A very important thing to remember is that the ratio of topics in a conversation does not necessarily correlate with the ratio of my actual investment distribution. That means, if I spend 95% of my time talking with you about meme stocks and the remaining 5% about index funds, that does not mean I own 95% meme stocks and 5% index funds.

If you misinterpret that and assume I have 95% meme stocks, then proceed to align your own portfolio to have 95% meme stocks, then you have probably made an incredibly stupid decision. That isn’t to say that you won’t see success—if you’re lucky, you could become a millionaire overnight, and I never said that there can’t be stupid millionaires—but you have just as likely of a chance of losing almost everything.

I always keep that last point in mind—that you have a chance of losing almost everything. That’s why the amount I invest in meme stocks and other extremely high-risk securities is limited only to the amount that I am comfortable losing. I am not comfortable losing my entire portfolio, so I choose to put a vast majority of it in things that I know will not suddenly vanish overnight.

I have a simple way to visualize this. Here is a table of the diversity of my portfolio.

Cash This includes money in my online savings account and a tiny amount in my checking account, as well as money market settlement funds for money that has been transferred to my brokerage in preparation for investment that I haven’t had an opportunity to use yet.	17.70%
Index funds – Domestic This includes a variety of United States index funds ranging anywhere from the general S&P 500, to funds specifically targeting objectives like growth and dividends, covering across a variety of small- to large-capitalization companies.	37.19%
Index funds – International This provides me with exposure to the international stock market, including both developed and emerging international economies.	6.96%
Target retirement funds I use Vanguard to manage my tax-advantaged retirement accounts. Within my Roth IRA and SEP-IRA, I keep my money in the target retirement funds VFFVX and VTTSX, which are funds managed by Vanguard with dynamic composition so it prioritizes rapid growth during youth and stability closer to retirement. These target retirement funds have a mixture of domestic and international index funds, as well as some bonds later as retirement years approach, which is why I itemized this out separately.	27.59%
Bonds When I was a much younger investor, I was far less tolerant of risk for two main reasons: (1) I overestimated the risk and volatility of index funds, which was caused by my inexperience with investing, and (2) I had low net worth so I had more of an incentive to protect what I had. I bought some bonds back then, but haven’t added to my bond balance since; I figured I might as well keep the bonds I already purchased, seeing as it’s a very small portion of my portfolio.	2.35%
Real estate investment trusts (REITs) REITs are a way for you to diversify your portfolio to gain exposure to real estate without having to go out and purchase a property. I am definitely interested in purchasing actual real estate sometime in the future, but until then, I decided to invest a small amount into REITs.	2.59%
Cryptocurrency I’ve researched and experimented with cryptocurrency for a while, but for now, I’ve settled on owning some Bitcoin and Ethereum.	4.20%
Speculative stocks These are individual stocks that I purchase directly through a brokerage, rather than stocks that are included in index funds or ETFs. As of right now, a majority of my speculative selections have been in travel companies, but these are stocks that I actively trade depending on where I think the market is headed. I do this primarily for fun, with capital growth only being a secondary objective.	1.03%
Meme stocks Just so I can say I was a part of the retail investor movement, I own shares in GameStop (GME), AMC Entertainment (AMC), Blackberry (BB), and other strange securities as recommended by the Reddit community Wall Street Bets.	0.37%

If you loosely categorize my investments, you can say that I have 94.39% in “safe” holdings and 5.61% in “dangerous” holdings.

Let’s assume that disaster strikes. Bitcoin crashes and falls from $58,000 to just $4,000 like it was throughout a lot of early 2019, losing 93%+ of its value. Ethereum faces a similarly proportional crash. COVID-19 mutates into COVID-9001 and locks down the entire planet again, causing travel companies’ stocks to plummet to only 20% of their current value. And of course, GameStop, AMC, and Blackberry all go entirely bankrupt. In this theoretical scenario, I lose 5.11% of my portfolio.

Not ideal, but I’m ok with that.

An even greater mitigating factor is that this loss is based on the current value of my portfolio. If you’re familiar with cryptocurrency, you know how fast it’s risen in value. If you calculate my losses relative to cost basis rather than current value, then the percentage of money I would lose is even less.

So if you’re ever interested in buying Bitcoin or shares of GameStop because of me or someone else talking excitedly about the topic, and you want to “copy” us because we seem to sound like knowledgeable investors, keep the table above in mind. Don’t let our excitement falsely trick you into thinking that we’ve gone all-in on meme stocks.

To be clear, this is not me telling you whether you should or should not go all-in on meme stocks; this is me making sure you know that I absolutely did not.

Hello again, Long Beach

March 9, 2021, 11:32 AM PST by Parkzer • Tempo, Travel

It’s been just over a month since my last visit to SoCal, so I made an extended weekend trip over to Long Beach again to visit the Tempo staff. The beginning of every month is usually straining from a work perspective because of end-of-month finance tasks I have to wrap up from the previous month, so making a visit to SoCal is a nice change in scenery for a bit while I recover from the Tetris effect, except with rows, columns, and cells instead of Tetris pieces.

Our group activity of the trip was a team lunch at The Crab Pot Restaurant & Bar.

Because of the pandemic, we were only able to dine in with outdoor seating, and our party of 7 had to split into two separate groups.

The cold in Long Beach is a special kind of cold. I grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs where it just randomly blizzards throughout the winter, but I guess I never got used to the cold. It does also get cold in Las Vegas—it can drop below freezing temperatures overnight during the winter. But, the cold in Long Beach, even though it’s technically numerically 10+ degrees warmer than Las Vegas right now, feels much colder because of the ocean wind.

While we were waiting for some tables to open up, we were seated at a “bar area.” The bar was still a table, but I imagine it’s some technicality that allows them to remain operational during the pandemic if they split up their tables by classification. The “bar” table wasn’t that cold; we got a few appetizers, including some oysters.

After our actual meal table was ready, we were relocated closer to the oceanfront, where I proceeded to begin freezing to death. The restaurant had some heat lamps, so I asked for the one near our table to be turned on, and I sat myself down directly under it. I know for a fact that it helped a lot, because the person sitting to my left had a little container of liquified butter, and her butter literally started forming ice on the top because of how cold it was.

After our meal, our friend saw a different party getting some dessert, and she wanted some as well, so she ordered a mud pie for us. We found out that mud pie wasn’t cake, but rather, a massive glob of excessively sweet ice cream covered in chocolate syrup and whipped cream. We got through a decent chunk of it together, but we eventually couldn’t handle the sweetness and passed it on to the other table that had the other half of our party.

This was a fairly quick trip just to visit staff; I’ll be headed back to Long Beach again not too long from now for a more long-term stay. Before my flight back home, I stopped by a French bakery to get some macarons for my roommate. It had a nice, warm aura to it, so I snapped a photo.

How not to steal

February 26, 2021, 7:29 PM PST by Parkzer • Highlights

Today felt like a long day. I’ve been going to sleep and waking up relatively late lately, but I had to get up before 9 AM PST this morning for class. My sleep tracker says I got less than 6 hours of restful sleep last night, which is not very good considering I have an overactive thyroid and need a lot of sleep. Classes have also been difficult lately, because sitting in a teleconference for remote learning during the pandemic doesn’t really engage my mind as much as traditional classroom settings do, so it’s a constant struggle not to fall asleep the entire time.

At 4 PM, my class finally wrapped up. I spent about an hour catching up on some work tasks that I missed during the day, then laid down in bed to watch some videos and relax.

After I finished petting the cats and getting comfortable in bed, I got an email notification from DoorDash. Apparently my account had a new log-in from an unrecognized device. I definitely didn’t just log into DoorDash, and I would never commit such as sin as to use a device with iOS, so I came to the conclusion that my account got hacked. I got out of bed and logged into my computer.

My credit card protects me against unauthorized charges, but that claim process is a hassle and I wanted to stop the theft from happening before the suspect had an opportunity to follow through. As quickly as possible, I changed my password and removed my saved credit card details from my account. Not only did this stop the suspect from completing the checkout process, but it would’ve also thrown an error, because I have a free DashPass subscription courtesy of the Chase Sapphire Reserve that requires a CSR credit card number to be tied to the account. By removing my card details, I changed my account’s eligibility status on particular promotions, and DoorDash would refresh the storefront and reapply any relevant delivery and service fees.

That worked, because the purchase never went through. However, during the few minutes it took me to do this, the suspect did a little work on my account.

Once I was done locking down my account, I saw a few things pop up that weren’t there before.

In addition to informing me that the suspect was interested in purchasing 30 traditional wings from Buffalo Wild Wings, they were also gracious enough to provide me with their address and phone number.

I looked up their address on Google Maps and saw that it pointed to a dormitory on a university campus. I looked up some local law enforcement agencies that had jurisdiction over the area and found a university police department, city police department, and county sheriff. I pulled up the information of the university police department and gave them a call to let them know what happened.

An officer picked up the phone, listened to my story, and passed my call onto someone else, as he was unsure how to proceed. A different officer came on the line, listened to my story, and said that this is the first time something of this nature had been reported to them. The officer ran a records check for the phone number in the description of the DoorDash delivery address, and it came back as a match to a current student.

I let the officer know that I was not interested in pressing charges—this is literally a hungry college kid who made a mistake, and I don’t want to damage their reputation and future by putting them through the criminal justice system. (Also, even if this did go to court, unless the student confessed, it would be extremely difficult to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, as the defense could claim that an unrelated third party hacked my account and attempted to send food to this student without their knowledge or consent.)

However, I did say that I would like the police to at least speak with the student as a preventative measure to discourage the student from doing something like this again, if it was indeed the student. I also informed them that this could end up being a liability issue for the university because, if this student was on dormitory Wi-Fi, they were technically using university technology systems to commit a cybercrime across state lines, making it a federal offense.

The officer noted everything and said that he would go with my wishes and just process the student through the university system instead of going through the court system. I followed up via email with the officer and provided him with the evidence above (unedited and uncensored, of course) for their records. Due to privacy reasons, I imagine I won’t ever find out what actually happened, but hopefully me doing this helped set a student on a better path to a brighter future, and protected a potential future different victim from credit card fraud.

So if you ever had plans to hack someone’s DoorDash account and get yourself some free food, I highly discourage you from doing so… not only because you shouldn’t steal, but also because providing your address and phone number to your victim generally isn’t the best idea.

Cat mom is out traveling

February 25, 2021, 10:47 PM PST by Parkzer • Cats

My roommate is traveling out-of-state back to her hometown to visit friends and family for Lunar New Year, so I’m alone with the cats for a few weeks. With my roommate gone, the cats are spending a lot more time together and with me, presumably because they don’t have their regular owner around to bother.

When I say “spending a lot more time together,” I mean really spending a lot more time together. That includes watching each other going to the bathroom in the litter box.

Most people use their living rooms as a hangout place. They get a couch, maybe a table, and hang up a television on the wall. Well, my roommate and I aren’t “most people.” We use our living room for something far more utile—as a cat play area. Here are Pumpkin and Pudding surrounded by over a dozen of their toys.

When they’re not lounging around in the living room, they also have their own combo bed that one of my roommate’s fans sent her. It has a little tunnel area that Pumpkin likes to lay in, while Pudding rests in the padded area outside the tunnel.

They also like lounging around on my bed. I moved my pillows to the corner and laid out my blanket so they have a nice play area. Here, I managed to capture them playing with a toy mouse.

After it gets late and the cats are done playing, I convert my bed back to normal so they can snuggle up against pillows and wrap themselves around the blanket to go to sleep. It was a little too bright for Pumpkin though, it seems.

I have a fake sheepskin rug by my bed so my feet can feel something nice and soft and fuzzy when I wake up in the morning. Pudding also likes this rug and runs around in circles playing on it. Sometimes he lays very, very still, and I assume that he is pretending to be a chameleon blending in with his surroundings.

Sometimes, Pumpkin likes to troll me. One day, I noticed that Pumpkin had gone missing, so I started going around searching for him. He sometimes sneaks into the closet after I open it to get something, and I accidentally trap him in there once in a while, but I checked all the closets and couldn’t find him. Then I randomly decided to check in the litter box… and there he was. Just peacefully laying there on top of his and Pudding’s poop.

Here is Pudding being a distinguished gentleman.

I had another incident of Pumpkin randomly disappearing, similar to the litter box incident above. This time, the litter box was one of the first places I checked, but I couldn’t find him in there. After a few minutes, I discovered that he was laying inside some Amazon boxes that I was getting ready to take downstairs to the trash compactor.

And finally, here is Pumpkin being an almost-distinguished gentleman… if only he had crossed his legs. (I tried crossing them after this photo, but he doesn’t really like it when you touch his feet, so he ran off.)