Caffeine group accused of community-service scam

Published July 29, 2014 12:11am ET



NEW YORK (AP) — A group hawking e-books on the effects of caffeine actually sold another service: a bogus way to satisfy court-ordered community service requirements by doing little more than taking an online quiz, prosecutors said Monday.

Instead of cleaning up a park or scrubbing toilets, for instance, defendants paid a fee, took a test about caffeine and didn’t even have to get the answers right, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s office said as the Caffeine Awareness Association and founder Marina Kushner pleaded not guilty to false filing and other offenses.

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