The owners of six Bay Area residential care homes were arrested and charged with human trafficking and grand theft in a sweeping probe by state law enforcement officials who uncovered a trove of illegal weapons in recent raids, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Friday.
Surrounded by 14 seized assault weapons, including three untraceable “ghost guns,” Becerra outlined 59 charges against four members of the Gamos family: Joshua Gamos, 42; Gerlen Gamos, 38; Noel Gamos, 40; and 67-year-old Carlina Gamos.
The family operated the now-shuttered Rainbow Bright care centers — four adult and two child care facilities — in South San Francisco, Daly City and Pacifica.
The family allegedly exploited hundreds of Filipino immigrants over nearly a decade, cheating them out of $8.5 million in wages while failing to pay state and federal income taxes and workers compensation. Operators forced employees to work 24-hour days and sleep on floors and in garages, according to the complaint filed by the attorney general’s office.
In some cases, workers were locked outside in the rain when the owners were not home, officials said. In three cases, victims were raped, Becerra said.
The residents at the facilities were not named as victims in the case.
“No worker in the United States should live in fear or be subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation at the hands of their employer,” Becerra said. “The charges against the Gamos family members are despicable. We must not turn a blind eye to abusive labor practices. Report it, and we will investigate and prosecute.”
The Gamos family, Becerra said, kept their employees silent by threatening to turn them over to federal immigration officials and confiscating some of their passports.
The four family members were charged with 26 counts of grand theft, one count of conspiracy to commit grand theft, eight counts of human trafficking, one count of conspiracy to commit human trafficking, nine counts of fraudulent tax filing, nine counts of failing to pay unemployment insurance taxes, one count of worker compensation fraud, one count of failing to secure workers compensation insurance and three counts of rape.
While law enforcement officials executed search warrants Thursday, they uncovered several firearms that are illegal under the state’s assault-weapons ban. Three of the weapons were “ghost guns,” which are manufactured without serial numbers so they are untraceable to state regulators.
Law enforcement officials said they also found a loaded revolver on a table in one of the child care facilities where children were present.
The Gamos family did not use the guns in the crimes, Becerra said.
Attempts to reach the family’s attorneys were unsuccessful.
The arrests were the result of a yearlong probe by the California Attorney General’s Office Tax Recovery and Criminal Enforcement Task Force.
Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com TWitter: @EvanSernoffsky
Patients At Silicon Valley San Mateo Medical Clinics May Be Getting Data-Raped
By Susan Conway- Submission For The San Jose Mercury News
When San Mateo Medical Clinics ask to take your picture, say "No". Your image will be face scanned and end up on databases at Google, Facebook, Instagram, the DHS Fusion Center and, via obscure companies such as Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, Theranos, 23 & Me and others (all under federal investigation), on political election manipulation repositories.
You may have heard of the so-called HIPAA patient privacy rights laws, but those laws do not protect you in San Mateo, California where a high-tech plan to be "cool and geeky" brought Big Brother into the doctor's office.
Whistle-blowers at The Innovative Care Clinic at 222 West 39th Avenue, on the third floor, in San Mateo, California have spilled the beans on some issues that are a bit frightening.
San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics still have Juniper Networks, Cisco, Intel, AMD and other hardware devices and motherboards touching their network where your personal medical information is kept. All of those devices have hardware level spy back-doors built into the electronics of those devices that any 14 year old can open up in a few keystrokes. This is common IT knowledge and can be easily proven by any "black hat hacker". Hackers have offered to pull out any record from the San Mateo Medical Center within any 24 hour period...for a small fee. The same way that The Hillary Clinton and DNC emails got hacked can also get all of your medical records on the public web instantly. The website: KREBS ON SECURITY says this is one of the biggest threats to the average person in the modern world.
San Mateo opted to not switch out their hardware in order to save money but that savings puts patients at severe risk. Russian and Chinese hackers target every institution in Silicon Valley to search up spy data and blackmail opportunities with employees of big tech companies. If Senator Dianne Feinstein did not know that her main aide was a top Chinese spy for 20 years then how can medical centers near her jurisdiction know who and what is secure in their buildings.
San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics are where all of the "poor people" are sent. They are targets for hacking because low level workers at nearby Facebook, Google and Netflix buildings are thought to be more "easily influenced: by Chinese and Russian spies.
New laws say that it is even more illegal to exploit the poor. Recent federal court decisions have ruled that 8th Amendment rights of the homeless, or poor, cannot be violated at the whim of others. San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics not only have been regularly hacked but they also sell your data directly to your enemies. Does that not violate your human rights?
Third party intermediaries can get their hands on your private medical data for benign sounding "anonymous" studies through Google's Calico, 23 and Me and other groups that sound like they are "just helping the medical community" when, in fact, they are selling your personal profile data to The Democratic Party data harvesters, The IRS, The Israeli intelligence group called Mossad and other creepy operations who do creepy things with your information.
A company called IAC, which Chelsea Clinton helps run, has built a massive facial database for it's match.com, OKCupid and other sexual interlude services. They acquire "faces and profiles" from third party supplies. They can reconstitute who you actually are from tiny bits of medical record data and a few Facebook posts. Do you really want Chelsea Clinton's dating service knowing about your hemorrhoid problem from your last visit to the San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics?
San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics are setting themselves up for massive class action litigation by the public. Local class-action litigation firms have referred to the situation as "prime pickings" for such a law suit.
Speaking of lawsuits, are you in a law suit? Opposition researchers and private eyes, hired by the people you are suing, can get your medical data from San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics and use it to blackmail you, force a settlement or discourage you from taking your case forward. We spoke with a San Mateo County Medical Center executive who said it was "impossible" for anyone to get into your private state medical records and then we offered to show them private state Medi-Cal records that were easily provided, upon request, about strangers. The current San Mateo County Medical Center is NOT safe and can be easily hacked.
San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics think they are being cool and hip by calling their offices " The Innovative Care Clinic" and using computers, cameras and digital gadgets. What they have allowed to happen, though, has ended up being not cool.
The IT staff are unwilling to make too big of an issue about the breaches and risks for fear or getting fired.
San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics networks have been breached over-and-over. Until San Mateo approves a complete hardware switch-out to back-door-free equipment, the problem will accelerate geometrically. The hacker community is growing daily and China has tripled the "finders fees" it will pay be for high tech region breached data.
Are poor people and non-whites more "likely to be criminals"? San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics forward record data of poor and immigrant people to 70% more law enforcement and NSA-type databases than they do for white people.
Assertions that your data is "scrubbed", "sanitized" or "anonymized" are utter BS. The FBI figured out who the Unabomber was from a single word in his manifesto. The Trump White House saboteur is being tracked from just two data points. Peter Thiel's Palantir and other Silicon Valley companies offer to find or "reconstitute" anybody, and all of their life data from any blind set of three, or more profile points.
Anything that leaks out about you, even the tiniest detail, can be cross-referenced on the web to find all of your dating site activity, credit card purchases, Uber rides and motel uses. You are not safe on any network.
Your data is the new oil. There is a gold-rush type urgency to acquire and archive your private data in order to manipulate your politics, buying decisions and "social mood". It is no secret, based on the recent Congressional hearings, that Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc. will do anything to get your data in order to manipulate your for political elections. Your medical records are the things that make you the most vulnerable. Between them, and their financiers, like In-Q-Tel, they have over 200 brand name boutique companies who exist just to harvest your data and build life-long psychological and activity dossiers on you.
The owners of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Theranos, 23 & Me, et al, have been charged with horrible unethical abuses of the public, engaging in sex trafficking, political bribery, tax evasion, sociopath behavior and other craziness. Are these the best information butlers to allow near our most personal information.
Whistle-blowers feel that the problem stems from a set of policy issues:
1.) San Mateo County Medical Center's Clinics are under-funded and certain "business development" executives are always looking for money. Selling your data in "name redacted" format is a good way to get the cash. The truth is that your data can be tracked back to you in seconds, by modern harvesting software, no matter how much hospital staff delete certain fields in the forms.
2.) IT staff will get punished with retribution, reprisal and not get raises if they speak out about how bad the problem is. Embarrassment is "non-profitable" for San Mateo County Medical Center executives so some of the bosses hush up the problem. This, and other articles, will end that practice.
3.) A wishful thinking attitude of "maybe if nobody says anything it will go away" plagues the whole process. The right thinking should be: "This is bad and getting worse and patients are not safe under current conditions".
4. ) EVERY SINGLE Juniper Networks, Cisco, Intel, AMD and other hardware device and motherboard touching the San Mateo County Medical Center network must be thrown away. While the initial effort is costly, that cost is offset by making those device manufacturers pay San Mateo County Medical Center for selling them tainted equipment. The cost is also offset by the damages award of even a single class-action lawsuit.
5.) Patients and, pending patients, must be made aware of the problem and they need to raise hell at the reception windows when asked to have their picture taken or when asked for too much personal information.
6.) The board of directors of San Mateo County Medical Center are technically unsophisticated old-school medical people who do not understand the technical risks of hacking, data harvesting, data political manipulation and profile reconstruction by online systems.
The bottom-line here is that people are being harvested like cattle, for their manipulation and exploitation potential, and that is morally reprehensible.
"BIG DATA' is a concept forced on the world by Silicon Valley's Steve Jurvetson, Tim Draper, John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. They created and sold the government and Madison Avenue the idea of Big Data. All of these men have now been charged with sex deviance, political bribery, tax evasion, etc. Are they the best stewards of our most private information?
BIG DATA does not seem to have caught a single terrorist or stopped any crimes. It is a sham sold by Silicon Valley oligarchs to tom-fool administrators in order to line the venture capitalists pockets. With huge national elections coming up, hackers have promised to triple their efforts to suck every medical repository dry for extortion and leverage data.
San Mateo County Medical Center executives need to stop being suckers, get rid of their crappy gear, stop data harvesting and face scanning new patients and realize that digital is not cool, it is dangerous and it puts patients at extreme risk.