Joe Borg Of Alabama Securities Commission Tells WSFA That Profitable Sunrise Worked Because People ‘Kind Of Glossed Over The Mathematics’
Joe Borg of the Alabama Securities Commission. From: WSFA news report.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Alabama was one of the first U.S. states to take action against the Profitable Sunrise HYIP “program,” issuing both an Investor Alert and a cease-and-desist order last month. The C&D lists two alleged “agents” of Profitable Sunrise, demonstrating that a “program” can create problems for pitchmen, perhaps even as the “program” operators make a getaway or disappear into the darkest corners of the Internet.
Profitable Sunrise had at least five purported investment plans, including one dubbed the “Long Haul” that promised a payout of 2.7 percent a day.
Whether the bizarrely named “Long Haul” plan was a deliberate taunt at regulators and possibly even the pitchmen who helped the scheme gain a head of steam remains unclear.
Listed as agents in the Alabama order were Melton McClanahan and Adam York. “An investigation of the company’s actions revealed that the men allegedly promoted at least five different ‘investment plans’ through a website used to promote Profitable Sunrise investment program and disseminate information to potential investors regarding the company’s various investment opportunities,” the Alabama Securities Commission said in the order.
Also listed in the order were purported Profitable Sunrise operators Roman Novak and Radoslav Novak. In a complaint last week, the SEC said that “Profitable Sunrise operates for the benefit of unknown individuals and/or organizations doing businesses through companies formed in the Czech Republic and using bank accounts in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, and China, among other places.”
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Joe Borg of the Alabama Securities Commission (ASC) has dealt with massive fraud schemes that traded on faith, including the Greater Ministries International Church caper in the 1990s that led to criminal convictions against five individuals.
Back in 1999, ASC and the Ohio Division of Securities filed a joint complaint in federal court in Florida to shut GMI down. The purported “opportunity” took in more than $550 million by touting “divinely-inspired investments in the foreign currency market and gold, silver and diamond mines in Africa and the Caribbean,” ASC said at the time.
Now, Borg and other state and provincial regulators are tacking the Profitable Sunrise scheme, which traded on faith and promised absurd returns.
“I think because they used a per-day percentage, people kind of glossed over the mathematics,” Borg told WSFA.
Yep, no one ever bothers to do the math…..
It is interesting that fraudsters kept harping about “power of compounding” (even claimed to be quoting Einstein), and people didn’t power to REALLY check into power of compounding takes the promises into absurd levels.
Well, Melton McClanahan says he’s sorry. But he wants to make it very clear that no matter how many States say that he was an agent of Profitable Sunrise, he was just an affiliate like all the other victims. He’s an internet marketer and he’s good enough at it that he got regulatory attention.
But again, he isn’t an agent, and he’s sorry. On to the next program.
youtu.be/BCDmp3h2pa0
[…] yesterday for video pitchman Melton McClanahan of Fairfield, Calif. McClanahan was identified in a March order by the Alabama Securities Commission (ASC) as a Profitable Sunrise agent. McClanahan then posted a YouTube video denying he was an agent […]