EDITORIAL: God, Las Vegas, Satan, The 9/11 Terrorists, The Shills, Andy Bowdoin, And The U.S. Secret Service
Andy Bowdoin
A claim was made yesterday in a now-deleted Surf’s Up post that AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin “would not sell us out and he has stood his ground firm since August of 2008.”
It was a lie by Bowdoin through a shill. The source to prove the lie is Bowdoin himself. Bowdoin has acknowledged in his own court filings that he previously was “cooperating” with prosecutors and investigators so he “could possibly avoid a prison sentence.”
Bowdoin, in fact, advised a federal judge in his own sworn court filings that one of his meetings with the government “lasted three days.” Another meeting lasted at least one day. Bowdoin advised U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer that he had “revealed significant information against my interest.”
The meetings were held in December 2008 and January 2009. Bowdoin’s affidavit implies that the December meeting was the one that lasted three days. So, Andy Bowdoin met with the government for a period of at least four days and revealed “significant information” against his interests and presumably the interests of others — and now Bowdoin, through his Surf’s Up shills, is trying to tell the membership that “he has stood his ground firm since August of 2008.”
It was all there in black and white at Surf’s Up yesterday — until it was deleted, of course.
There was no mention of the proof to the contrary: Bowdoin’s sworn affidavit.
Two Whoppers Since September
This was the second time since late September that Bowdoin has lied to the membership. During a Sept. 21 conference call, Bowdoin told listeners that the tens of millions of dollars seized in the wire-fraud, money-laundering, securities-fraud and Ponzi scheme case belonged to the members. The U.S. Secret Service listened to this call, transcribed it and presented it to the judge.
The trouble with Bowdoin’s claim that the money belonged to members is that he told Collyer in three sworn documents he signed on Aug. 13, 2008, that the money belonged to him and his companies.
Bowdoin now is trying to have Collyer disqualified from the case. It is not the first time an effort evolved to force Collyer to step down. Curtis Richmond, an ASD member who has declared himself a “sovereign” being in other cases and has attempted to have judges and litigation opponents jailed, also tried.
A Devil In The Details
Here is how Bowdoin, the purported “Christian,” sought to rally members in August 2008:
“This is an attack of Satan because we were helping tens of thousands of people around the world,” members quoted Bowdoin as saying in describing the forfeiture case. “But we are more than over-comers, and we get our strength from God. And with God all things are possible. And we’re on our way to a miracle folks. I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’ll be back in business, stronger than ever. It’ll take all the doubts away from all these people about being a Ponzi, because it’ll be proven that we are NOT a ponzi.”
Of course, the same Andy Bowdoin solicited testimonials from the membership to assist in his battle to retain his money before all of the facts of the case were in. Thousands of trusting members — many of whom identify themselves as Christians and have described Bowdoin as a grandfatherly Christian — provided testimonials.
Only later did they find out that Bowdoin was “advertising” a failed, dissolved business in his own rotator to qualify for “rebates” and that Bowdoin had told the Secret Service that ASD had $1 million in a bank on the Caribbean island nation of Antigua in an account under a different name.
Let’s walk that one back: ASD, a purported “advertising” business, was so effective that even a company that no longer exists could make money. Prosecutors later said that Bowdoin paid an an employee to surf for Bowdoin’s son, so the son could make money.
Bowdoin apparently forgot to tell his own attorneys about the Antigua money. Prosecutors reminded him of it, though, after Bowdoin filed for emergency release of $2 million in seized funds, saying ASD could not pay its rent or hosting bills.
On or about June 10, 2008, less than two weeks after a May 31 ASD “rally” concluded in Las Vegas with Bowdoin talking about his relationship with God, Bowdoin’s wife and her son, George Harris, used money from two ASD Bank of America accounts and opened an account at a separate bank.
More than $157,000 of the opening deposit was used to pay off the mortgage on the Harris home in Tallahassee. In the following days, ASD money was used to buy jet skis, a Cabana boat, marine equipment and two automobiles, according to prosecutors.
Flash forward two months to August 2008 — and Bowdoin’s remarks that ASD had been on the receiving end of an attack from “Satan.”
“[O]n Friday August 1st we had a 9/11 but it was about 30 times worse,” ASD members quoted Bowdoin as saying on Aug. 12, 2008.
On the very next day, Aug. 13, Bowdoin signed the sworn affidavits saying the ASD money belonged to him and his companies.
Bowdoin did not mention the cars, the jet skis, the boat, the marine equipment and the paid-off Harris mortgage at the time. He did not tell members that he was paying an employee to surf for his son. His core message was to inundate the offices of investigators and lawmakers with letters that told the recipients what a poor job they are doing, how unfair they are being, that people are hurting because of the actions prosecutors had taken the previous week in freezing certain ASD assets.
Only 15 days prior to Bowdoin’s invocation of “Satan” on Aug. 12, 2008, ASD money was used to purchase a Lincoln luxury sedan for $48,244.03. About 16 days after Bowdoin invoked Satan and compared the Secret Service to the 9/11 terrorists, Bowdoin sent a check for $100 to his victims in an Alabama securities scheme a decade earlier.
At the time, the victims were owed about $45,000, about $3,244 less than the purchase price of the Lincoln.
God As A Stage Prop
Yesterday will go down in history as one of the oddest days in ASD’s odd history. Bowdoin, through a shill, told the troops he was still fighting the good fight. The Surf’s Up missive implored members to “get a little excited folks!â€
“Andy explained a few things to me of which I cannot share them all, but I can say that the government attorney’s ‘have’ finally admitted to some things that are totally in our (ASD) favor,†the email from the shill claimed.
Bowdoin, according to the email, just knew ASD would be back better than ever. The email did not reference a fresh ruling from Collyer that Bowdoin no longer even had standing in the forfeiture case.
In fact, the email treated the membership as simpletons. It did not acknowledge the proffer letter Bowdoin had signed in the case, his meetings with prosecutors in which he provided information against his interests, his acknowledgments that ASD was operating illegally, his cooperation with the government, his decision to submit to the forfeiture in January 2009 to maximize his chances of avoiding prison time.
What the email did was insist that Bowdoin had stood “firm” since August 2008, despite the overwhelming proof to the contrary. Indeed, the same man who invoked “Satan” and the 9/11 terrorists to destroy the reputation of the agency that guards the Treasury and the life of the President of the United States — the same man who tried to destroy the reputation of his defense counsel — is the same man who now is trying to have a federal judge removed from the case.
Collyer can’t be fair, Bowdoin says — and he apparently says it with a straight face, just as he did when he said this on May 31, 2008, in Las Vegas:
“We need to have an attitude of gratitude with God.
“And I always say, ‘Thank you, God, for developing me into a money magnet.’ And I see myself as a money magnet in attracting money and, I say, attracting large sums of money.â€
Only 11 days later, the money was deposited to pay off the Harris mortgage.
It is difficult to imagine how anyone could still side with “poor Andy” and how the evil government has turned against such a doddering old man, who would have no conscience about taking your life savings and your gold crowns.
I hope he enjoys being a “boyfriend magnet” in prison.
Patrick,
This is another unbelievably great article, but I have to take issue with one word in this phrase:
“So, Andy Bowdoin met with the government for a period of at least four days and revealed “significant information†against his interests and presumably the interests of others — and now Bowdoin, through his Surf’s Up shills, is trying to tell the membership that “he has stood his ground firm since August of 2008.â€
The part I take issue with is the phrase “…and PRESUMABLY the interests of others…”. There is no “presumably” about it! First of all, the DOJ didn’t turn ASD over to the SEC for a “routine” securities fraud prosecution. The DOJ from the start kept this case for themselves. By November of 2008, if not earlier, the DOJ had Andy dead to rights and needed nothing from him EXCEPT information about crimes committed by his inside team and closest confidants: Robert Garner, Mindy Bales, Barb Alford, Rayda, Fava, the Surf’s Up Mods, and others who can still be found on the Internet in old videos and columns, encouraging people to “invest” in the ASD Cash Generator program and get rich. They can be read and heard telling potential victims to ignore the naysayers (who will be sued for libel and slander by the attorneys Andy has hired for $750,000). When they KNEW it was a total lie, right up until the day the Feds stepped in, these people knowingly solicited funds from people who they knew would never get their money back, saying over and over that ASD had been “proven” to be legitimate. Their claims about Andy’s honesty and business acumen, made after people like Jack Arons and the MLM Watchdog (Cook?)exposed Andy, show the requisite intent to defraud. And Andy, by his own admission, has already told the DOJ that his team of insiders knew ASD was illegal but kept up the same story, just to keep the money coming in.
As you point out so eloquently, Andy has already turned “state’s evidence,” giving sworn statements that he must stick with or face perjury charges in addition to all his other problems. Just look at Andy’s track record when he’s gotten in trouble in the past! Far from being intelligent, Andy is a buffoon — just like he sounds on those horrible videos! But he’s a sly buffoon, and knows how to look out for himself. To heck with 3 ex-wives, one current wife who faces criminal charges in Florida, with Federal charges to come.
I believe the DOJ thinks the people who will be prosecuted with the Bowdoin Harris Enterprises crooks were greedy, and won’t believe any claims that they were duped by Andy. They may have pretended to believe Andy not was god-like, and his false piety didn’t hurt, but Andy has admitted the inside team was right there with Andy, robbing the ASD rank and file members without a hint of remorse. THE insiders who will find a U.S. Marshal on their doorstep before long are the ones who could cash out when no one else could . Their cash outs while the ASD house of cards was collapsing, when panic was raging for most members as they could clearly see on Internet blogs, is a matter of record — banking records, deposit records, and Andy’s 3 days of confessions, where he gave up everyone he could to save himself. Anyone whose account was credited for activity of their downlines at rallies and otherwise, while most members couldn’t get credit and couldn’t cash out, is another indication of the insiders INTENT to defraud, and their use of insider information about the upcoming collapse to make sure they got their funds out when others were told that cash outs had been “suspended” for a period of time. People who got money out after the suspension of cash outs are sitting ducks for the DOJ. Remember Martha Stewart? Thanks to Andy’s constant garrulousness and love of his own voice, all of ASD’s false information about why funds can’t be cashed out “temporarily,” can be found in the ASD “Breaking News” website, to this day!
The insiders who will be prosecuted along with Andy won’t get in legal trouble for saying, after ASD was closed down, that it’s the DOJ and a Federal Judge who are committing crimes. EXCEPT, that is, that it shows a total lack of remorse on their part. Speaking of lack of remorse for the ASD fiasco, the AVG group was likely the most target rich group as far as the DOJ was concerned, and Andy was certainly an insider, related to other insiders, in a second wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and using the mails to defraud Ponzi scheme.
The DOJ is going to prosecute to the fullest extent possible, and after convictions are secured they’re going to throw away the keys to the prison cells, when they get around to prosecuting the AVG group. They’ll keep an eye on the statute of limitations, but I bet they’ll soon be getting calls from AVG insiders who hired lawyers, who recommended calling the DOJ and offering to cooperate BEFORE a U.S. Marshal shows up at their doorstep with an arrest warrant. These people are going to prison, no doubt about it, except, perhaps, for the very first people who have valuable insider information, and who offer to cooperate before they’re arrested. I’d hate to be waiting for the ax to fall, if I was Andy, Faye, George, Judy, Barb Alford, Gary Talbert, the Surf’s Up Mods who supported AVG and that “association” that offered no legal protection whatsoever. (They might as well have drafted it at Arby’s.)
As it happens, there is a medium security (lots and lots of razor wire) Federal women’s prison right in Tallahassee – 30 miles from ASD/AVG headquarters! Isn’t that convenient??!!
Are you writing the full length book on this multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme that took place very near the Redneck Riviera?
Hi Marci,
I would tend to agree with you on this. Andy and the Feds did not spend four days talking about the weather or Florida State football.
This is a key point, which hasn’t gotten enough attention. It goes along with the theory that some insiders were using ASD itself to launder money by selling “ad-packs” directly to customers, depositing the money in their own accounts, and transferring the corresponding number of “ad-packs” to enrollees via ASD’s in-house system.
It struck me one day that the “rally” bonuses could be used in such a way as to create “profits’ out of thin air for the insiders. In effect, they could use enrollees’ money as their own, thus setting themselves up to “earn” money from what effectively was a fictitious outlay capable of generating “compounding profits” — while passing the cost of the corrupt deal-making to the rank-and-file.
No wonder the criminals loved it! They didn’t even have to use their own money to make money, and they could guarantee their own “rebates” by cheerypicking cash from enrollees. They could use the enrollees’ cash to get themselves matching bonuses if they chose, and since the enrollees themselves qualified for bonuses, the corrupt deals had the effect of creating what could be described as “double bonuses” — all capable of generating “compounding” profits.
There is ZERO chance that ASD even knew its own real bottom line because of money that had been cherry-picked, “ad-packs” that has been transferred internally with additional bonuses perhaps attached and just generalized internal corruption.
People still clinging to the notion that ASD was not a Ponzi because it “paid” need look no farther than AVG to see what was in store for ASD had the Feds not intervened.
I’ve also noticed recently that the Feds have been stressing the theme that all Ponzis “pay” — and it is very clear that the FBI is making Ponzi-busting a top priority.
Of course, an SEC case against the GQI Ponzi demonstrated that federal judges don’t waste much time in dispatching U.S. Marshals when the “playas” start messing with them.
So, the knock at the door could be from the marshals, the FBI, the Secret Service, the postal inspectors, the IRS or any of a host of state or local agencies — as has been the recent experience of Ponzi schemers in Michigan, Florida, Colorado, California, New York, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other states.
Patrick