PatrickPretty.com: PatrickPretty.com: Covering Ponzi Schemes, pyramid schemes, securities fraud, investment fraud and Internet crime.

Investors turned over more than $30 million to a felon who hid his conviction and even managed to persuade clients to give him power of attorney, the CFTC said. Robert Mihailovich Sr. was released from federal prison on June 27, 2007, after serving 21 months for mail fraud, the CFTC said. On Oct. 14, 2008 [...]

Gina Cook, the wife of acknowledged Ponzi schemer Trevor Cook, received a wire transfer of $103,437 on June 23, 2009, one day after six attorneys and accountants from the SEC began a “surprise” investigation at the scheme’s Minneapolis headquarters and served Trevor Cook with a subpoena, according to the court-appointed receiver in the case. Receiver [...]

BULLETIN: The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged General Electric Co. and two foreign subsidiaries in an alleged kickback scheme with the Iraq government “to win contracts to supply medical equipment and water purification equipment.” Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, did not mince words when announcing the charges and a settlement [...]

Is it the maximum case of Kaboom! — coupled with the maximum case of denial? The government of South Africa hit Maritjie Prinsloo with a whopping 122,000 counts of fraud, racketeering and money-laundering in a pyramid-scheme case that involved an estimated $205 million. (R1.5 billion.) Prinsloo was found guilty last month. South African media now [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: R.J. Zayed, the court-appointed receiver in the Ponzi and Forex fraud case brought by the SEC and CFTC against Trevor Cook and Pat Kiley, has said many investors were made destitute by the scheme. Not all investors lost their money, however. Yesterday Zayed filed petitions to claw back millions of dollars in “preferential [...]

Data Network Affiliates (DNA) is asking members to drive traffic to yet-another URL: LockInYourFreeSpot.com. LockInYourFreeSpot.com is at least the third URL DNA has featured this year in bids to recruit members into a multilevel-marketing (MLM) program that purportedly offers everything from license-plate data to cell-phone service and juices. Why DNA, which says it is launching [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The story below outlines civil allegations filed in Idaho against Brock Bruegeman, Brian Birch, Brandon Johnson and Sonny Jensen in which the state alleges they operated a pyramid scheme tied to what federal prosecutors have alleged was an upstream, $100 million Ponzi scheme operated in Utah by Rick Koerber. Koerber, who has denied [...]

BULLETIN: Yet-another bizarre paperwork attack on U.S. law enforcement has occurred. A California man has been charged with filing “false liens” in Nevada against federal officials and employees of the SEC, the Secret Service, the IRS, four federal judges and staff members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, federal prosecutors [...]

UPDATED 4:51 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) A convicted felon who emerged from prison and almost immediately launched a $1 million fraud scheme known as PPSN threatened to prosecute and sue a consumer who had filed an online complaint, federal prosecutors said. Although the threat caused the consumer to withdraw the complaint against Philip Pestrichello, Pestrichello’s bid [...]