Secret Service

A Colombian national implicated in an international conspiracy to launder drug money has been sentenced to 45 months in prison, federal prosecutors announced. Meanwhile, another figure in the alleged scheme — Robert Hodgins, the operator of Dallas-based Virtual Money Inc. (VM) — remains at large, prosecutors said. Hodgins is wanted by Interpol on a warrant [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Some readers will recall that one of the Secret Service’s allegations in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case is that pitchmen tried to sanitize the scheme by making false claims that ASD President Andy Bowdoin had received an award for business acumen from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Others will recall [...]

The website of AdViewGlobal (AVG), an autosurf with close ties to the alleged AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme, has gone offline. Why AVG’s site was offline was not immediately clear. One person told the PP Blog that the site had been “down for days.” AVG’s domain, which lists a registration address in Uruguay and appears to use [...]

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 [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: It has become increasingly clear that regulators and the law-enforcement community are rallying around a common theme that web-based promoters are using discussion forums and social-networking sites in bids to sanitize HYIP Ponzi schemes by positioning them as attractive investment opportunities and even a thrilling form of gambling that pays commissions. Today the [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a post in which the introduction is longer than the actual story (below). The story demonstrates the dangers of jumping on bandwagons before giving them careful thought. Longtime readers of the PP Blog will recall our coverage of Curtis Richmond, “Professor” Patrick Moriarty and ASD Members International (ASDMI). Each was a [...]

Former INetGlobal CEO Steven Keough now has some company on the list of people alleged to have tried to extort money from the Steve Renner family of companies. Renner went to court yesterday in Minnesota to seek a restraining order prohibiting Donald Allen from harassing him. The order was granted after Renner asserted Allen tried [...]

UPDATED 11:31 A.M. EDT (U.S.A.) Federal prosecutors have filed a motion to disqualify attorney Mark Kallenbach as counsel for INetGlobal and related companies, claiming that Kallenbach is attempting to be both a witness in the case and a lawyer for multiple clients involved in a Ponzi scheme, wire fraud and money-laundering probe. Kallenbach, prosecutors said, [...]

Steve Renner has no standing to contest the seizure of “the vast majority”  of the money and assets in the INetGlobal autosurf Ponzi case because the seized property was owned by corporations, not Renner, federal prosecutors said. Only $151,100 of the $26 million seized in the case came from accounts in Renner’s name, prosecutors said, [...]

Michael Greenberg, charged last week in a Ponzi scheme that allegedly bilked members of his family, investors, banks, a law firm and the U.S. Small Business Administration, has committed suicide. Greenberg hanged himself inside his home, police in Clearwater, Fla., told the Tampa Tribune. His body was found Wednesday. News of the suicide broke in [...]

A Florida man who spent time in prison for wire fraud and money-laundering in a previous Ponzi scheme embarked on a new scheme after his release, federal prosecutors said. Within two years of being released from custody in 1996 — and while still on supervised probation — Michael Greenberg, 50, started a new Ponzi and [...]

UPDATED 1:04 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) In yet another case that portends disaster for the so-called “autosurf” industry, a federal judge has ordered the Noobing autosurf to be added as a receivership defendant in a fraud case brought against its parent company. The FTC and attorneys general from Minnesota, North Carolina and Kansas brought the case [...]

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, [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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” [...]

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 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 [...]