Purported Andy Bowdoin Christmas Email With Prayerful Message Causes A Stir Among Members; ASD President Has Not Refuted Authenticity Of Greeting
Andy Bowdoin
Several PP readers reported Thursday and Friday that they’d received a prayerful email purportedly sent as a Christmas greeting by AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin.
We did not receive a single correspondence from a reader who was happy about receiving the email. In one way or another, the readers questioned the prudence of sending such an email.
“Does this mean he is fighting the govt. and there will be more court dates over the next year?” one reader inquired.
“I just received an email Christmas Card from Andy,” another reader wrote. “He wishes me a year of prosperity and believes that this year he will prove that ASD is NOT a ponzi and that they will be back in business during 2010. If you did not receive it, I will be happy to forward it to you.”
We are skeptical that the email came from Bowdoin, despite the fact ASD’s address in Quincy, Fla., appears at the bottom. Regardless, Bowdoin, so far, has not publicly refuted the authenticity of the email. The more time that passes, the more it will look like Bowdoin sent the email, authorized it to be sent or could not prevent it from being sent.
It’s bad news for him whether or not he is the author.
If Bowdoin waits too long to issue a statement, then people will question why he did not refute the authenticity of the email earlier and why someone other than Bowdoin seems to have control over the ASD database. If he acknowledges the email came from him, then he’ll appear to be every bit as delusional as federal prosecutors said he was in a September court filing.
Some ASD members say they are viewing the email as a sick joke by an unknown person. Others say they believe that Bowdoin actually sent it, speculating that he is so out of touch that he actually believes that ASD will return to business next year, as the email suggests. The email also implores members to rely on their religious faith.
A few lines in the email don’t strike as Bowdoin-like, perhaps particularly an exultation that ASD will rise again and “will blow your socks off.”
That sounds more like a prankster or amateur than it does Bowdoin. Even so, it would have to be a prankster or amateur who had access to names and email addresses in an ASD database.
Or it might not be a prankster at all. ASD was fundamentally corrupt from top to bottom. The email could be from someone who has the database in whole or in part and is testing it to achieve an end that is unclear.
There are lots of interesting possibilities — something always in play with ASD because of its history of sending impossibly mixed messages. Although it purports to be a professional communications firm, the company has displayed remarkable tone-deafness and a tin ear for anything even remotely resembling an understanding of real-world PR.
If there is a lightning rod, ASD will touch it. If there is a speeding train bearing down on ASD, the company will not step out of harm’s way. In September, for instance, Bowdoin informed members in a conference call that the money the government has seized in the Ponzi scheme forfeiture case was seized from participants, a story completely at odds with a story he told a federal judge in court filings.
Indeed, Bowdoin had insisted in sworn court documents that the money belonged to him, not the members. The U.S. Secret Service transcribed the conference call and presented it to the judge in a filing.
Bowdoin’s erratic behavior and history as a con man leads to all sorts of questions about the purported Christmas greeting. Could Bowdoin or someone else be using the ASD database to test support or weed out perceived spies and critics to eliminate them from the database?
Could people who respond to the email with anything other than “You rock, Andy!” be deleted for posing a continuing danger to the next enterprise?
Paranoia runs high in the ASD enterprise and among its promoters. The only truly safe members under this scenario are those who can be relied on not to rat. Some of ASD’s more ardent supporters have used thuggish language, calling critics and doubters “rats” and “maggots” and “cockroaches,” for instance.
Such words generally are not used by legitimate enterprises or enterprises that have a core understanding of public relations. They are more consistent with enterprises that are trying to enforce cohesiveness through fear of reprisal.
Could another form of deception be in play? Could it somehow serve a useful purpose for Bowdoin to have sent the email or silently approved its sending, only to refute it later and suggest others within the enterprise have hijacked the business?
Bowdoin and a progeny autosurf known as AdViewGlobal (AVG) have a history of blaming members for unsettling developments in the companies. Prosecutors said Bowdoin had at least one “silent” partner in ASD, which leads to the possibility there was more than one. Meanwhile, ASD members now say Bowdoin was the silent head of AVG.
In March 2009, AVG blamed the reported suspension of its bank account on members. It later blamed members for its inability to pay members. At one point, AVG appeared to be using some of the same arguments ASD had used to explain troubling events, suggesting that members who questioned the company and insisted AVG operate in transparent fashion by identifying its owners and managers and providing proof of its geographic location were responsible for the company’s troubles.
Is someone using the ASD database to try to build an All-Criminal Team or to determine the identities of members who’d be most inclined to do business with criminals?
Could Andy Bowdoin be the victim of a practical joke or an effort to make him look as bad as possible in the eyes of the membership at large?
We don’t know.
What we do know is that the very nature of ASD has led to scores of questions, a laundry list of possibilities and one unqualified PR and legal disaster after another.
For now, we’re going with the theory that a person or entity unknown to the email recipients is trying to determine the identities of ASD members most inclined to do future business with criminals.
That would be very useful information — so useful, in fact, that it could aid an unknown person or entity to create a list consisting of the names of people who don’t mind doing business with criminals. That would not be a bad thing if prosecutors could obtain such a list and use it as a filter to segment the names of criminal perpetrators from the names of actual victims of ASD’s corruption.
It seems to have gone out to the ASD mailing list, judging by the email address I received mine from. So I’ll go with the theory that it is a Bowdoin groupie…..
I didnt know whether to laugh or cry when I read it.
Laugh? Because it is the sort of pathetic last ditch carp that one would expect from Mr. T. A. Bowdoin & Co. that no one could possibly take seriously.
Cry? Because there will surely be at least one desperate victim who will try to believe that there is hope for their lost money
However, the vast majority of the ASD membership will doubtless be hoping for their New Years Wish for some justice for the victims and punishment for those responsible to be granted. Lets hope that this is the last year that the ponzi founders and ponzi promoters of the world enjoy their Christmas Turkey in their own homes and that next year they will have to line up with the rest of their fellow inmates for their plate.
True or false; voluntary or provoked; it’s still a pretty sick message – whoever sent it.
Evidently there is a little more to it thn just a random email… As you know, I have taken an extremely active adversarial position against ASD, Bowdoin, Panda and Busby since July 12, 2008.
I have not recieved any such email, and in a quick poll of about 25 key ASDMBA members, not a one had received a email from ASD and/or Andy. If you want, I will send out a email inquiry to all 1800 plus ASDMBA members and see what they have to say.
Suffice to say, it appears there is someone, or some group, with knowledge of what individuals are in the database that was used to send the email..
Bob Guenther
Bob, once again, you speak with forked tongue; back in July you were all but kissing Andy’s butt, wanting to start a company just like it and so you said on the first few ASDMBA phone calls. The key 25 members are probably family. Please do send out an email to the imaginary 1800 ASDMBA members and pretend to get a response.
Merry Christmas to you and yours..from me and mine..
Can you remind me – was that date before or after your lawyer declared ASD not a ponzi? I forget the exact date the recorded conference call was made.
Quite a few of us still have that recording, Tony. It certainly makes one wonder about Mr. Friedman’s legal skills!
One of the sadest results of the “Bowdoin Christmas Letter” is that, whilst deleting upset and angry comments on the Surfs Up thread “To Andy and Faye – Thanks from the ASD Members”, comments such as “THANK YOU ANDY AND FAYE FOR NEVER GIVING UP!! WE’RE STILL HERE & BEHIND YOU!!” have been allowed by the Mods
I did post a plea for tolerance and sensitivity towards those ASD members who have suffered greatly at the hands of Bowdoin and Co, and do not feel so generous towards them, but that too was deleted.
It doesnt say a great deal for the sensibilities of the moderators of that forum towards the overall ASD membership – even at Christmastime.
That is sad too.
Bob,
I know this is gonna be a shock to you, but the world doesn’t revolve around you…..you’re pathetic, you know that?
I was thinking of sending Andy a large fruitcake. One with a hacksaw in it, or maybe a few hundred Ad Packs. He can use them to barter in prison.
For those that have received the email, has anyone dissected the message header to determine where it came from, at least geographically? That in itself may help narrow down who the true sender was…
Jerry
Quick note:
Just hours after ASD members received the email noted in the column above, the FDIC announced that seven more U.S. banks had failed, bringing the total for the year to a staggering 140. Three banks failed in 2007.
Of course, the Bowdoin advocates would have members believe that Ponzi schemes such as ASD and AVG are the cure, not the disease.
Between Georgia and Florida, 39 banks have failed this year. Those two states alone have recorded nearly 28 percent of the U.S. failure total this year. Looking at it as a fraction, its 39/140.
Or, looking at it another way, better than one in four of the U.S. banks that have failed this year were situated in either Georgia or Florida, with Georgia leading the way nationally. Yet another way to look at it is to say that, if a U.S. bank was going to fail this year, there was better than a 25 percent chance that it would be located in Georgia or Florida.
Mortgage and Ponzi/HYIP fraud are rampant in Florida. There are three major Ponzi/HYIP investigations under way in Sarasota alone — and that’s not even counting ASD, which has a heavy presence in Florida’s southern Gulf Coast region and along what could be called the I-75 Corridor from North Central Florida, veering gradually southwest through the Gulf Coast counties and then veering virtually due east to Miami.
Of course, if you look at Florida on a map, you see that the Gulf Coast county of Collier extends half way across the state and is bordered on the east by both Broward and Miami-Dade counties, themselves hotbeds of Ponzi and other forms of fraud.
If I were a government investigator looking to triangulate the area of ASD’s greatest danger, I’d draw a fairly narrow triangle from Atlanta in the north, to Naples on Florida Gulf Coast and to Miami on the east.
And I’d draw another, broader one in roughly the North Central/Midwest/Mountain West areas of the United States, to accommodate Minnesota in the North, Utah on the western extreme, Ohio on the eastern extreme, with Iowa being roughly in the center.
I think Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Utah, Georgia and Florida took a pretty good hit from ASD, but not to the exclusion of other places, including California and Texas.
This map is from Wikipedia; I drew in a rough triangulation of areas in which ASD appears to have had strong influence.
https://patrickpretty.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/usasdtriangulationmap.gif
Patrick
Patrick:
You forgot to connect Texas to your links. Remember Bob had all those executives with the Dallas Cowboys, Police officers and his good buddy the Lawyer who were members of ASD. Of course that is if you believe anything that blowhard bob has to say. The only thing that Bob and his buddy Larry has done for those 1800 people is take their money with false promises and line his pockets and that of his friends and family.
Just like Pam and Dan Richardson who are now trying to distance themselves from Bob by claiming they have had a falling out with him. That does not ring true since they are members of Bobs down line in Jaffa and were one of the first people to get their money back when that scam fell apart.
Jack
Bob:
How much money have you scammed from the mmougals people with your latest Business Members Association Trust? We know that you paid your Lawyer in Arizona $25,000.00 using money you conned from investors.
Have a lousy Christmas!
Your worst nitemare.
Jack
Who’s Bob?
Isn’t that a childrens party game involving apples and a tub of water?
[…] is not popular in all ASD circles. In 2009, some ASD members expressed disgust after they received a purported Christmas greeting from Bowdoin. Earlier, in March 2009,some ASD […]