I had a great-uncle Balthazar, so there is at least one (quite old but not Magi old) example of the naming being used.
My step-grandfather’s first two names were “Alva Dempsey”. He was born in 1884, so wasn’t named after Jack Dempsey, but perhaps after Thomas Edison.
My dad’s side of the family was full of names from “Way Back, een Old Country, maybe 1700s”.
We got a lot of “suggestions” of what to name our son (“He ees last of thee bloodline, yes!”). The “Last Chance” is approaching middle age, and showing no imperative to procreate. Which is fine with us.
That’s my youngest daughter. My wife’s grandparents had two kids; my wife’s dad and my wife’s aunt. My wife’s aunt has no biological children. So, my wife is the only grandchild of her paternal grandparents.
My wife and I have only one daughter (and we are not having any more kids, nor can we biologically anyway, we made sure of that). That means that our daughter is the last descendant of her great-grandparents.
(I have an older daughter from my previous marriage, but needless to say she is not a descendant of my wife’s family.)
We will see if my daughter has any kids, and how many there are. If so, they will be the last descendants.
When my S-I-L was pregnant with their first child I suggested Balthazar if it was a boy. They named him James instead. 
Mild irony that Reuters is hitting up potential readers for a subscription before they can read the scam article.
The horticultural eBay and Amazon scam I’ve mentioned on the Dope previously, where crooks post grossly photoshopped images of plants that are imaginary or don’t exist in the pictured colors, and attempt to gouge customers for seeds that supposedly morph into these beauties, exists on Etsy too. Never knew caladiums came in electric lysergic acid colors, but wow, there are photos proving it!
I especially like the one that’ll tower over your garage.
My reports to Etsy have sadly gone unanswered. As long as they get their cut of sales from scammers, it’s apparently OK.
My mother was just exchanging texts with someone pretending to be Samuel West, a guy from the TV show ‘All Creatures Great and Small.’
She showed me the texts where he started trying to get her to move over to Telegram, send her a photo of herself and not share the texts with anyone.
Thankfully she didn’t do any of these things. I told her how I’m susceptible to con artists too and reminded her of those situations from my life. I think it was good for her the way I explained it to her.
Telegram? Telegram??? That’s a scam! Western Union stopped sending telegrams 20 years ago (tomorrow) 
I semi got caught by a scammer today. Brief background is that I can’t pay my gas bill online because you need a telephone number to set up an account and none of the numbers I have tried have matched what they have. I usually send a check but I didn’t get to it with the weather so decided to call and pay via phone.
I dialed the number on my bill and got a you have reached the gas company message then a statement that I would be receiving a $100 promotional rebate. I was transferred to an agent and told her I just wanted to pay my bill online. She said that I had accidentally been transferred to the promotions department and that she would transfer me to the correct agent but first she wanted to be able to send out my gift card. She wanted my name and address and even though I had called her I gave my business address which is not the address on the account. She then started some blather about a $4.95 fee and I told her I didn’t want any free card if I had to pay anything. She asked why I was giving up free money and I told her I didn’t accept anything free that I had to pay for and hung up.
I tried the number again and got various responses including one saying that the number could not be reached. I then double checked the number online and saw that I was one digit off. I looked at the paper statement again and still thought I saw the original number I dialed but my eyes are getting old.
I then called the online number and it sounded legit but I kept getting cut off. They sent me to one agent who wanted to transfer me to a secure payment area but ended up sending me back to the initial phone tree which got me a second agent who again sent me to the secure payment site but this time it was in a foreign language I didn’t understand. I called the online number (which I confirmed at their actual website) again and got another agent who wanted my name and address which I gave but demanded she give me the exact amount of my bill before I would confirm anything else. She was able to give the amount and I asked if she could change the telephone number. She gave me the number on the account which sounded familiar ( it may have been my work number from 20 years ago) and I changed it to the current number.
I was then able to set up an online account after going through several layers of security including codes sent to my email and phone. When I finally logged in they had my data. I went to pay and found they already had my bank account information. The only thing I can think is that I previously paid online with a check and the information was on my account.
So now I am questioning everything but luckily after paying the bill there is very little money in that account. I do feel very stupid for not catching on the the scam fast enough but I kept justifying that I had called them with the number on my bill.
Anyway, tl:dr
I misread a telephone number for the gas company and ended up giving them my name and work address before realizing it was a scam and also found that the real gas company apparently had my bank information on file
Thank you for sharing this…..this is a fairly recent development in scam world, but scammers have been grabbing up a lot of “one digit off” numbers for banks and utility companies and running scams.
It’s been effective, people are a lot less cautious (rightfully so) about giving out personal information when they initiated the call.
Before you hit send on a call one of these companies, carefully check the number you entered. Warn you friends and family about this and pass on the advice.
It sounds like it’s very similar to typosquatting, where someone creates a web site with a URL extremely similar to the URL to some common legitimate web site. They make everything look as similar to the original site as possible, so you think you went to the proper site, and don’t realize until too late that you were never on the proper site to begin with.
This is the same idea, but with phone numbers.
China has executed 11 members of a notorious mafia family that ran scam centres in Myanmar along its north-eastern border, state media report.
The Ming family members were sentenced in September for various crimes including homicide, illegal detention, fraud and operating gambling dens by a court in China’s Zhejiang province.
The Mings were one of many clans that ran the town of Laukkaing, transforming an impoverished backwater town into a flashy hub of casinos and red-light districts.
Their scam empire came crashing down in 2023, when they were detained and handed over to China by ethnic militias that had taken control of Laukkaing during an escalation in their conflict with Myanmar’s army.
Thus ending the Ming Dynasty
Ming die nasty.
I threatened them once and they just yelled “All your vase are belong to us!”
Well, the Ming’s were merciless!
I’m not sure this belongs here, because I don’t know if it’s a scam. But - I’m not sure what this is.
Any ideas?
I don’t know which is worse: The shit they are selling, or the shit they are smoking.
At least they are not claiming it works.
I reported the sale, see if eBay actually does anything.