Fraud And Boiler Room Investigations

Hewlett-Packard said it planned to take WebOS “global” by naming Steven DeWitt, the head of HP’s PC business in the Americas, to lead the WebOS business.



And Jon Rubinstein, the man who led WebOS, will now serve as senior vice president for product innovation within its Personal Systems Group, which oversees its PCs, HP said Monday. In June, HP also underwent a shakeup in its enterprise space, paring down some of its top management.

When Betty Wagoner of Ferrum received a $3,920 check in the mail, she knew it was “too good to be true,” so she gave the check to a police officer.



Along with the check, Wagoner received a letter, stating that she had won $55,000 because she was chosen at random from customers of Walmart, K-mart, Kohl’s, Safeway or Best Buy.



The letter instructed her to use the check to pay the government taxes of $2,785.



“If you receive a check in the mail that you are not expecting, you should know it’s a scam,” said Investigator Jay Mason with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office.

Recent disclosures by three insurance companies regarding increased asbestos claims are a “warning flag” for those companies and the U.S. property and casualty industry as a whole, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

In its Weekly Credit Outlook, Moody’s notes that The Hartford, MetLife and American Financial Group have all said asbestos claims increased over the last two weeks. The Hartford reports a pre-tax charge of $290 million due to increased asbestos reserves, and American Financial reports a pre-tax charge of $28 million. MetLife did not disclose the impact on its reserve estimates, Moody’s says, but the company did say that new asbestos claims increased by around 14 percent during the 2011 first half relative to the same time period in 2010.