With A New Month Approaching, PP Blog Again Asks For Donation Assistance From Readers, Encourages Them To Use The Blog’s Tools To Peel Back The Online Fog And Strip Away The Web Thicket That Provides Cover For Fraudsters

Dear Readers,

The PP Blog is read each day by Ponzi scheme victims, victims of affinity fraud and various forms of securities fraud and commodities fraud, victims of online scams, researchers, media outlets, members of the antiscam community, financial-services companies and law-enforcement agencies. We are pleased that they turn to the Blog for information.

Our current editorial well consists of 1,310 posts and nearly 11,000 comments from readers. All in all, the Blog publishes approximately 17,622 internal links and links to scores of offsite sources of information. The Blog’s internal search function and 5,537 cloud tags enable readers to find meaningful information quickly. The Blog’s most popular tags are found in the lower section of the sidebar on the right. The search function is in the upper-right corner of the Blog.

The tags are important for a number of reasons. If you look at our current, 29-entry tag on Club Asteria, for instance, you’ll notice a cloud archive of our coverage. If you scan the headlines of the stories that reference Club Asteria, you’ll see that the headlines may reference other entities. And if you read the stories, you’ll find information that may help you ask questions, fill in the blanks, connect dots, solve mysteries and resolve conflicts that have been swirling in your head. It very often is difficult to connect dots online and to spot and analyze incongruities. The tags and search function of the Blog can help you do these things.

In the Club Asteria example, for instance, readers may find themselves asking why a company that purports to elevate the world’s poor out of poverty was being promoted by well-known hucksters on forums associated with Ponzi schemes — and why purported “earnings” from a program targeted at a vulnerable population were being broadcast on the TalkGold forum, for instance. They also may question whether the presence of Club Asteria promotions on the Ponzi boards polluted Club Asteria’s revenue stream — and whether the world’s poor received proceeds from a polluted stream.

Meanwhile, they may ask whether the impoverished people of the world were the real winners — or whether the serial Ponzi hacks and apologists were — even as they were promoting and collecting commissions and “earnings” from, say, Centurion Wealth Circle or AutoXTen or JSS Tripler or Exotic FX after earlier promoting and collecting commissions from, say, Pathway to Prosperity and perhaps ignoring this document from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. (See the cloud tag for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service here. The Blog has cloud tags for many law-enforcement agencies. These tags help readers understand the cases investigated by the agencies and the types of occurrences that may draw their attention, the expansion of white-collar crime, the challenges the agencies encounter — and the strange if not downright bizarre nature of some of the cases under investigation.)

Things often do not occur in a straight line on the Internet. There may be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of hopscotching points before a true picture emerges. Finding useful information online that enables you to make informed choices can be an exercise in futility. In the case of corrupt online “opportunities,” for example, a program’s sponsor and affiliates may employ a keyword strategy that seizes on the word “scam” — and then directs traffic to pages that explain why the purported “opportunity” is not a scam. The fog and ground-level thicket that emerges can become impossibly deep, a situation that provides cover for both scams and scammers.

Our search function, tags, archives and internal and external links can assist you in piercing the fog, navigating the thicket and analyzing the “Big Picture.”  Because the big picture often ends in misery,  the faster you see it, the better for you and your pocketbook.

On July 26, the Blog enabled a donation button. We received seven donations, which enabled us to get through the month of August. Now, at the end of August, we are confronting a lack of resources needed to get through the month of September.

Publishing simply isn’t healthy right now. Our challenge was made more difficult by the DDoS attacks against the Blog, an increase of our hosting costs and the underperforming economy.

We are gratified that the Blog has become a useful resource for readers. We are grateful for the thoughtful communications we receive from readers.

And now, as was the case last month, we again ask our readers for their help. For security reasons, we will not publicly reveal the Blog’s precise monthly costs. On April 6, the Blog was subjected to a threat and a bid to chill our reporting, and reported the incident to a federal law-enforcement agency. The threat concerned our hosting and security arrangements. What the Blog is able to say publicly is that a sum of about $400 monthly from its readers would make a considerable difference to the Blog.

The donation button is active in this post, and it continues to be active in the sidebar to the right.

Thank you.

Patrick