FTC

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 [...]

Saying it has identified nearly 100 organizations that lost control of personal information they maintain on employees, customers or others, the FTC has notified the entities to tighten security on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks.
At the same time, the agency said it has opened “non-public investigations” of companies whose customer or employee information has been [...]

UPDATED 9:47 A.M. ET (U.S.A.) Coincidence? Part of the new partnership the FTC announced yesterday with Craigslist that urges consumers to be on the lookout for scams when responding to job and business opportunity ads online?
Messages urging caution are appearing in Craigslist ads for NarcThatCar, the Dallas-based company that says it is building a database [...]

An inmate operated a collect-call “cramming” scheme from a Florida state prison by hiding his ownership of three firms, federal prosecutors said.
Willoughby Farr, 46, of West Palm Beach, has been indicted on six counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 160 years, if convicted on [...]

The Federal Trade Commission has announced a major sweep involving numerous companies and defendants — and a new partnership with Craigslist, Microsoft, Monster.com and CareerBuilder to combat employment and work-at-home fraud.
Meanwhile, the agency said it was working with AARP’s Legal Counsel for the Elderly to keep America’s senior citizens’ pocketbooks out of the clutches of [...]

Still pushing work-at-home schemes on the Internet? The Federal Trade Commission has a message for you.
On Wednesday, the FTC will announce a major “law enforcement sweep cracking down on job and work-at-home fraud fueled by the economic downturn,” the agency said.
Investigators will release “[s]till shots from the Web sites of some of the operators [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Recidivism, the tendency to continue committing crimes or breaking laws even after getting caught and perhaps even going to prison, is a common theme in the scam universe. It has been an element in many recent cases we’ve written about, including the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme case (principals Andy Bowdoin and Clarence Busby had [...]

A court-appointed receiver has described the accounting records of Affiliate Strategies Inc. (ASI) as a mess, saying “an opinion on the accuracy of these records is not possible without an extensive audit that would require significant additional costs.”
ASI is the parent company of the Noobing autosurf, which targeted deaf people in sales promotions. ASI and [...]

A man has been jailed for ignoring a court order in a civil case and continuing to operate an envelope-stuffing scheme from the area of Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, the Federal Trade Commission announced Dec. 23.
Zoilo Cruz, also known as Zoilo Cruz Carrion, conducts business as International Marketing and Universal Wealth. The case was brought [...]

UPDATED 3:17 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) The Federal Trade Commission has asked a federal judge to find attorney Jeffrey S. Benice in contempt of court for failing to turn over $238,300 to a victims’ compensation pool as required.
Benice represented Charles Castro in the Network Services Depot Ponzi scheme involving the sale of Internet kiosks. The defendants [...]

Dear Readers,
From time to time I publish a post in letter form. This usually happens when a post in story, editorial or essay form does not seem appropriate. This is one of those times.
Honestly, just how strange could things get in Ponzi Land?
Ponzi Land, which relatively few people outside of law enforcement even knew existed [...]

When the AdViewGlobal (AVG) autosurf — now failed — was in prelaunch phase in December 2008, it positioned itself as an offshore cure for what ails the U.S. and world economies.
Less than two years earlier, promoters of the AdSurfDaily autosurf — which has close ties to AVG — implied that the individual surf accounts of [...]

A federal judge found a man implicated in an elaborate fraud scheme in contempt of court and ordered him to turn over his Las Vegas home to a court-appointed receiver or go to jail.
It was the second time Richard C. Neiswonger was found to have been in contempt of court, according to the Federal Trade [...]

The head of the Federal Trade Commission told a Senate panel yesterday that a firm associated with the Noobing autosurf embarked on a scheme to sell a $59 book and then used a telemarketing company to upsell customers to an expensive program that fraudulently sold “guaranteed” government grants from economic-stimulus funds.
“Just last week, some of [...]

In a ruling that may send shockwaves throughout the offshore autosurf “industry,” a federal judge has ordered the parent company of the Noobing autosurf to repatriate to the United States all assets and documents held on foreign soil.
U.S. District Judge Julie A. Robinson also cleared the way for any safe-deposit boxes to be opened and [...]

UPDATED 2:11 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) A company associated with the Noobing autosurf charged a 70-year-old Philadelphia man on Social Security $995 for the names and addresses of three entities that possibly could help him secure a grant to repair his rapidly deteriorating home, according to the receiver in the fraud case against Affiliate Strategies Inc., [...]

A receiver has been appointed in the case against Affiliate Strategies Inc. (ASI) and Brett Blackman, ASI’s president, chief executive officer and founding partner. Noobing, a surfing site, is in the ASI fold, but has not been named a defendant.
Regardless, the Noobing site is offline. A federal judge has granted a freeze of ASI’s assets. [...]

UPDATED 10:48 A.M. EDT (U.S.A.) The Noobing surf site is throwing a server error and will not resolve. The development came in the aftermath of a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed late last month against Brett Blackman and others, although Noobing was not named in the FTC complaint.
On July 24, a federal judge froze Blackman’s [...]

An AdSurfDaily downline group known as “oneteam” used the names of U.S. government agencies, a Congressionally chartered insurance entity for depositors and Bank of America in what appears to have been a brazen bid to disarm doubting prospects continuously in advertisements for at least 18 months.
The ads appeared online beginning in February 2007.
Among other things, [...]