What the experts say

Mexican time-share scams

A Mexican drug cartel has been targeting American seniors through their time shares, said Maria Abi-Habib in The New York Times. The simple scheme, perpetrated by the murderous cartel Jalisco New Generation, starts with “employees posing as sales representatives” and calling up time-share owners “offering to buy their investments back for generous sums.” They also demand upfront fees “for anything from listing advertisements to paying government fines.” The representatives have been able to “persuade their victims to wire large amounts of money to Mexico— sometimes as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars—and then they disappear.” The cartel has also bribed employees at Mexican resorts in Puerto Vallarta “to leak guest information” for targets. Overall time-share fraud complaints have risen 79 percent in the past four years, according to the FBI.

Five decades of rising home prices

U.S. home prices have risen 2.4 times faster than inflation since 1963, said Ana Teresa Solá in CNBC.com. “If home prices increased at the same rate as inflation” over the past 60 years, “the median price of a typical house would be $177,511,” according to real-estate data company Clever. “In reality, the cost of a typical home is closer to half a million dollars.” Mortgage rates play a role in housing costs, but another big factor is a decrease in the supply of new homes. More than half, 53.2 percent, of people surveyed say housing affordability will impact their voting plans this election, and 64.2 percent of owners and renters “have negative feelings about the economy” because of the housing market.

Surveillance in the ‘privacy booth’

Your office “privacy booth” might be getting a lot less private, said Matthew Boyle in Bloomberg. Framery, one of the world’s biggest sellers of office work pods, claims it has “found a way to embed sensors into the booths’ seats that track the vital signs—heart and breathing rates—of those in it.” The sensors “capture blood pumping through vessels in the buttocks,” and an algorithm can automatically “convert and analyze those pulse readings.” The purpose, Framery says, is to detect if employees “are getting frazzled” or agitated at work. Though Framery says that “the data is anonymized” and it does not “drill down to individuals,” privacy experts say “there’s no guarantee that Framery’s clients won’t try to do exactly that.”