Alleged Ponzi Schemes

By PatrickPretty.com • March 16th, 2010

A Florida man has been arrested by the FBI on 21 counts of wire fraud amid allegations he operated a forex Ponzi scheme, collecting more than $10.2 million and pocketing $1 million for himself.
The announcement of the arrest of Patrick H. Rakotonanahary, 34, of  Punta Gorda, Fla., was made in Hawaii after a joint probe [...]

It entered the autosurf world in January 2009 with the stern bang of a drum in a promotional video. The message was dire: “The World Is In Crisis,” it warned. “Turn On The News, And You’ll See. The Stock Market Is At A Record Low. Foreclosures Are At An All-Time High. Thousand’s (sic) Are Losing [...]

Welcome to the rapidly evolving world of Planet Fraud, U.S. Region — or, more precisely, the U.S. Region of Planet Cyberfraud, the electronic web of deceit that often exists out of view and is sucking wealth at an alarming pace.
Its capitals last year, according to a new report from The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), [...]

UPDATED 2:24 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) If you’re wanting to visit Steve Renner’s INetGlobal.com and AdPacs.com sites, at the moment you’ll land on pages that say “InetGlobal is currently down for maintenance. We’ll to (sic) be back by 12:00pm CST.”
The message on InetGlobal.com and AdPacs.com has been in place for at least three hours and, despite [...]

UPDATED 5:21 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) On Feb. 23, the U.S. Secret Service raided the Minneapolis offices of INetGlobal, a company operated by Steve Renner under the Inter-Mark Corp. umbrella. The raid occurred amid allegations that INetGlobal was operating an autosurf Ponzi scheme and also engaging in wire fraud and money-laundering.
A week later — on March [...]

The president of a Florida-based autosurf company implicated in a Ponzi scheme by the U.S. Secret Service says he is appealing a forfeiture order that gave the government title to more than $65 million seized from his personal bank accounts in 2008.
Notice of the appeal by Andy Bowdoin of AdSurfDaily was filed by his attorneys [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Untargeted, unfocused traffic and participants who did not have websites to advertise are two of the issues in the AdSurfDaily autosurf Ponzi scheme case. They also are issues in the INetGlobal case.
UPDATED 8:20 A.M. ET (March 10, U.S.A.) Public records and other information suggest INetGlobal was becoming largely dependent on cash from Mainland [...]

UPDATED 2:20 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) Did people associated with a company implicated by the U.S. Secret Service in a Ponzi scheme, wire-fraud and money-laundering case participate in a misinformation campaign?
A Twitter website with a tie to the Inter-Mark companies operated by Steve Renner claims that federal officials are “leaking” information to the PP Blog.
“Didn’t happen [...]

It’s starting to read like Ian Fleming fare, something straight out of James Bond and “Octopussy.”
R.J. Zayed, the receiver in the alleged Trevor Cook/Pat Kiley Ponzi scheme in Minnesota, says he did not find Cook’s collection of Faberge eggs when, armed with a court order, he searched Cook’s home in Apple Valley. The precise size [...]

UPDATED 2:25 P.M. ET (March 2, U.S.A.) The vice president and director of public relations for V-Newswire — a company in Steve Renner’s INetGlobal family — authored an opinion piece lambasting a Minnesota newspaper’s coverage of a Secret Service raid at INetGlobal’s Minneapolis offices last week on his personal Blog, but did not disclose his [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sybille Yates, the subject of the story below, contacted the PP Blog Feb. 26 and Feb. 27  from an IP in the Czech Republic, after reading our coverage of the Ponzi scheme allegations against INetGlobal. The PP Blog asked Yates questions in follow-up emails, and this story is based on her responses and [...]

Narc That Car has told the Dallas Better Business Bureau that only “1% of total commissions paid out to independent consultants are for the sale of license plate information to third parties,” the BBB said today.
That 1 percent, which Narc That Car referred to as “client share,” is the “only repeatable form of compensation which [...]

In a case that may spread a chill among fraudsters who use YouTube to promote bogus money-making schemes, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has charged a Virginia man with fraud.
Ronald W. Smith Jr. of Vansant used a YouTube video to promote a Forex Ponzi scheme that gathered more than $800,000 from 34 investors, CFTC [...]

UPDATED 11:07 A.M. ET (U.S.A.) One of the undercover Secret Service agents who joined INetGlobal discovered that the company had implemented an “automatic repurchasing” program by default and that the program could not be switched off, thus distancing participants — many of whom may not have understood English — from their money.
Although it is unclear [...]

The court-appointed receiver in the fraud case against the parent company of the Noobing autosurf has asked a federal judge for the authority to add Noobing to the receivership probe.
Larry Cook, the receiver, said that Noobing and 14 other companies under the Affiliate Strategies Inc. (ASI) umbrella have become the subjects of “numerous inquiries” from [...]

The U.S. Secret Service observed Minnesota-based INetGlobal’s operations for weeks in January, dispatched undercover agents to join the autosurf, learned that a bank recently had closed accounts tied to the firm amid money-laundering suspicions — and already had received incriminating information from the firm’s former chief executive officer prior to executing multiple search warrants Tuesday, [...]

UPDATED 2:59 P.M.  ET (U.S.A.) Both sites discussed in story below are back up. . . .
Two websites associated with AdSurfDaily mainstay Bob Guenther are offline. The sites — asdmba.com and jaffapartners.com — both are returning this message:
“OOPS. This site is currently unavailable.” The message includes a prompt for ASDMBA and JaffaPartners to contact the [...]

UPDATED 10:40 A.M. ET (U.S.A.) Federal and state agents have raided the Minneapolis offices of Inter-Mark Corp., seeking evidence of a Ponzi scheme, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis/St. Paul is reporting.
Inter-Mark Corp. is operated by Steve Renner, who also operates a purported “advertising” service known as INetGlobal. In a scene that resembled the August 2008 raid [...]

Robert Guenther and a woman referenced as “Jane Doe” are listed as defendants in a shareholder lawsuit filed Feb. 2 in Arizona by investors in Cheyenne Mountain Games (CMG) and Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment (CME).
Guenther is the de facto head of the ASD Members Business Association (ASDMBA), an entity that came to life in the aftermath [...]