NOTE TO READERS: The PP Blog anticipates that it will publish a story this evening that will say a second financial scandal involving the so-called “Congressional Medal Of Distinction” is evolving.
It is the same award claimed by AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin — and this time it has been used by a California man accused of swindling investors. The man appears to have used as many as three names and has had his picture taken with some of America’s top politicians.
The 3 Hebrew Boys' party bus. (Screen shot from for-sale ad by Beattie B. Ashmore, the court-appointed receiver. The bus, a Prevost XLII 68988 VIP/Executive Coach, is marked "SOLD.")
UPDATED 4:16 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) Yesterday U.S. District Judge Margaret B. Seymour of the District of South Carolina sentenced the “3 Hebrew Boys” — Tony Pough, Joseph Brunson and Timothy McQueen — to a combined total of 84 years in federal prison for a massive Forex fraud and Ponzi scheme.
Today the region’s top prosecutor said the fraud sentences handed down by Seymour were the “highest” in the history of the South Carolina federal district. Seymour also ordered the men to pay $82 million in restitution to victims of the colossal scam.
“As U.S. Attorney, especially in this time of economic hardship, I will continue to seek out and aggressively prosecute those who prey on their fellow citizens and deprive them of their hard-earned savings,” said U.S. Attorney Bill Nettles. “I hope that those who would defraud their neighbors, friends, and associates hear this message loud and clear.”
McQueen, 52, and Brunson, 47, each received sentences of 27 years. Pough, 47, was sentenced to 30 years because he had a prior conviction, Nettles said.
The men purchased a $5 million Gulfstream jet and a $900,000 “party bus” as part of their caper, prosecutors said. They also bought expensive cars, real estate and luxury suites at the NFL stadiums of the Carolina Panthers and Atlanta Falcons.
People of faith and members of the military were among the victims, prosecutors said.
“These schemes wrecked the lives of thousands of people,” Nettles said, pointing out that South Carolina fraudster Al Parish had been sentenced to 24 years in a separate case that involved $66 million.
Beattie B. Ashmore, the court-appointed receiver, has recovered about $20 million so far for victims, prosecutors said.
In a case that features elements remarkably similar to the AdSurfDaily litigation, a federal judge in South Carolina has sentenced three defendants in the “3 Hebrew Boys” fraud case to a combined total of 84 years in prison.
Joseph Brunson, Tim McQueen and Tony Pough were jailed immediately after their convictions a year ago in an $82 million, foreign-currency fraud and Ponzi scheme case that traded on religion. The men, who called their business a debt-relief ministry, accused former U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkens of “treason” last year and of committing acts of war against them.
The sentencing occurred today, with U.S. District Judge Margaret Seymour giving Pough 30 years and Brunson and McQueen 27 years each. The office of U.S. Attorney William N. Nettles of the District of South Carolina did not immediately return a call from the PP Blog for comment. The Associated Press first reported on the lengths of the sentences tonight, noting that the terms were “so harsh in part because the judge found they tried to obstruct justice at every turn.”
Brunson, McQueen and Pough became known as “3 Hebrew Boys” after operating a website with the same name, which is based on a biblical story of believers who escaped a furnace by relying on their faith. The Ponzi scheme operated under the name Capital Consortium Group LLC.
In 2007, the men filed a court document that described their investment program as an effort to free people from government “bondage” and referred to the investigation as “Satan’s handiwork.”
A year later, in 2008, AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin described the case against his purported Florida “advertising” firm as the work of “Satan,” comparing it to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Bowdoin, 76, was indicted earlier this month on Ponzi scheme charges.
The 3 Hebrew Boys’ operation sought to chill law enforcement, regulators and members of the media from scrutinizing operations, prosecutors said.
In an approach similar to one used by the AdViewGlobal (AVG) autosurf, members were forced to agree to a confidentially clause that purportedly prohibited them from discussing the company outside the confines of meeting places. Participants were threatened with a $1 million penalty for sharing information.
A court-appointed receiver published documents that listed an astonishing array of luxury purchases made by the 3 Hebrew Boys schemers with investors’ money. Among the items were a Gulf Stream jet, a Prevost Motorcoach and automobiles with famous names such as Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, Saab, Cadillac and Lincoln.
In the “3 Hebrew Boys” case, Brunson filed documents that appear to have asserted immunity from prosecution on the grounds of purported sovereignty. The documents appear to have been designed to force Wilkens, then the U.S. Attorney, to default on a contact to which he never had agreed. The approach sometimes is referred to as “paper terrorism” or “mailbox arbitration.”
A similar approach has been used by litigants in the ASD case.
Screen shot: Joseph Brunson declared last year that then-U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkens was guilty of treason, insurrection and conspiracy to overthow the U.S. government in his efforts to prosecute Brunson.
Brunson wrote in a court filing he described as a “Bill of Peace” that Wilkens had a duty to appear before a notary public and acknowledge Brunson’s assertion of sovereignty in “red ink.” The document demanded that Wilkens use his “Christian name” in his response to Brunson.
A refusal by Wilkens to carry out the demands within three days, Brunson said, would result in a contractual agreement that Wilkens was “an enemy of One and the [U]nited States of America and the people, Constitution, and Government thereof.”
A federal judge in California has halted a marketing scheme in which the symbols and language of government and the names of bogus government agencies with “official sounding names” were used to trick consumers into believing they’d won a sweepstakes, the FTC said.
Twelve defendants have been charged in the alleged scheme, which charged consumers a $20 fee to qualify for bogus prizes and used artwork depicting the bald eagle and the words “In God We Trust,” the agency said.
Among the defendants are National Awards Service Advisory LLC, Central Processing of Nevada LLC, International Award Advisors Inc., Spectrum Caging Service Inc., Prize Registry Bureau Inc., Consolidated Data Bureau Inc., Registered Data Analytics Inc., Lloyd Brannigan Exchange Inc., Geovanni Sorino, Jorge A. Castro, Tully A. Lovisa, and Steven McClenahan.
Some of mailers used in the scheme used names such as the “State of Illinois Commissioners of Regulation,” the FTC said. Similar mailers used the names of California, Florida and Georgia to sanitize the scheme, the FTC said.
The word “voucher” also was used as part of the scam, according to evidence exhibits.
Kenneth Wayne Leaming, also known as "Kenneth Wayne."
BULLETIN: A bizarre lawsuit filed against the U.S. government by AdSurfDaily figures Kenneth Wayne Leaming and Christian Oesch has been dismissed.
In dismissing the complaint, Judge Christine Odell Cook Miller of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims agreed with the government’s contention that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the claim.
The judge described the complaint by Leaming, Oesch and an affiliated company known as MYHUB GROUP LLC as a bid to argue about “an unlawful taking of the forfeited property” in the ASD case, which was heard in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Meanwhile, the judge ruled that MYHUB GROUP inappropriately sought to act as its own attorney.
Corporations are required to have professional counsel to appear in court, the judge ruled.
ASD President Andy Bowdoin suffered a similar setback last year when he tried to represent ASD pro se in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Leaming and Oesch appear to have tried to use the U.S. Court of Federal Claims as an appeals court for U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, while apparently seeking the staggering sum of $29 trillion from a federal judge, three federal prosecutors and a U.S. Secret Service agent involved in the ASD Ponzi scheme forfeiture case.
“Plaintiffs’ challenge took the form of presenting claims issued by Tina M. Hall, a notary public in the State of Washington to officials associated with the forfeitures,” Cook Miller noted in the order of dismissal. “Ms. Hall issued ‘Certificates of Default on February 16, 2010, against these government officials for failure to respond to plaintiffs’ claims ‘in admiralty.’ At this point the complaint deteriorates into rambling.”
The judge also barred Leaming and Oesch from seeking sanctions against the government.
“As an initial matter, this court notes that, during the course of briefing on defendant’s motion, defense counsel has suffered the opprobrium of plaintiffs’ aspersions and disparagement, including charges of unethical practices,” Cook Miller said in the ruling. “Defendant charitably characterizes this argument as hyperbole . . . and the court will lay the matter to rest by denying any request for sanctions that plaintiffs may be making.”
UPDATED 9:28 A.M. ET (U.S.A.) On Dec. 1, a federal magistrate judge set bail of $350,000 for AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin and ordered him not to commit a federal, state or local crime after his arrest by the U.S. Secret Service on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities.
Bowdoin, 76, was specifically warned that he could be held in contempt of court for violating conditions of his bail. The conditions included an order not to obstruct the investigation or tamper with witnesses.
Now an email attributed to former ASD and AdViewGlobal executive Gary Talbert has surfaced that is raising questions about whether Bowdoin is trying to suppress the victims’ count and manipulate ASD members who seek to file restitution claims with Rust Consulting Inc., the official claims administrator in the $110 million Ponzi case.
The email specifically references Bowdoin’s arrest, but makes no reference to the bail conditions set by U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas G. Wilson in advance of a scheduled appearance by Bowdoin in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Dec. 17.
Bowdoin made his initial court appearance before Wilson in Florida.
“Got a email from Andy and he told me to go ahead and send this email out to everyone,” noted the email attributed to Talbert, who filed a sworn affidavit on ASD’s behalf in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2008. “He does have a hearing on Dec. 17th in Washington D.C. He and his lawyers are still positive on the out come.”
“Here is just a idea and I think this will work for everyone,” the email continued. “This should keep everyone legal. Because I think everyone understood it was not a investment. I believe it is time to fill out the info. from Rust inc. with the following addendum.
“Where it asks for your signature write in there ‘See addendum’.
“Now put this in your own words on the addendum. Here is a out line.
“On the addendum write that you knew this was not a investment and you where purchasing advertising. Now since the gov. stopped my advertising company and I did not get my advertising I would like to get my advertising money back from whom ever is holding it now. Sign it and send it in with the forms from Rust.”
News about the email attributed to Talbert was spreading among ASD members last night. Separately, ASD figures Kenneth Wayne Leaming and Christian Oesch have filed an ASD-related lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that apparently seeks the spectacular sum of $29 TRILLION from a federal judge, three federal prosecutors and a Secret Service agent involved in the ASD Ponzi case.
On June 30, 2009, AdViewGlobal was cited as an extension of ASD in a racketeering lawsuit filed against Bowdoin by ASD members. The reference was dated June 29, 2009, the same day Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison for his Ponzi scheme.
Federal prosecutors now say Bowdoin faces up to 120 years in prison if convicted of all counts against him.
“AVG is the next iteration of the Ponzi scheme auto-surf programs, which [are] staffed with former ASD executives and Bowdoin disciples, including George Harris, the stepson of Bowdoin, who is listed as an AVG trustee, Gary Talbert, former ASD executive served as CEO of AVG and now serves as an accountant, Nate Boyd, a former compliance officer at ASD, serves as ‘Protector’ of the AVG association, and Chuck Osmin, a former ASD employee who testified on ASD’s behalf at the evidentiary hearing before this Court last fall is a customer service representative of AVG,” the RICO plaintiffs claimed.
The grand jury that indicted Bowdoin began to meet in May 2009. During that same month, AVG was scurrying to reconfigure itself after gathering money from members and offering 200 percent “bonuses” for months. AVG launched in the aftermath of the seizure of tens of millions of dollars from Bowdoin in August 2008, the filing by the government of a second forfeiture complaint against ASD-connected assets in December 2008 and the filing of the racketeering lawsuit against Bowdoin.
In January 2009, just days prior to its official launch in early February, AVG bizarrely both confirmed and denied it had ties to ASD.
The appearance of AVG graphics in an ASD-controlled webroom after the federal seizure was an “operational coincidence,” AVG memorably explained. The announcement was attributed to Chuck Osmin, himself a former ASD employee.
Even though AVG previously had denied ASD ties, the upstart surf then announced that Talbert was its CEO.
“Since Mr. Talbert was and is the C.E.O. for both companies and had worked with the same web room company while at ASD, it would be very natural for him to choose and use many of the same venders (sic) that he had used before. So, the fact that ASD and AdView Global are using the same web room hosting company is no accident, in fact it is an operational coincidence,” AdViewGlobal said.
Why the surf identified Talbert as ASD’s CEO was unclear. He was listed in his own sworn court documents in the ASD case as ASD’s “Human Resource Manager, Assistant CFO and Website Editor.”
By March 2009, AVG announced that Talbert had resigned as AVG’s chief. It also announced that its bank account had been suspended, blaming the development on members.
In May 2009, AVG announced that it had secured a new, offshore wire facilitator to help it gather money from members. The announcement was made on the same day the Obama administration announced a crackdown on offshore financial fraud. (See this story and included links for updates on AVG’s purported facilitator, KINGZ Capital Management. There is a tie between KINGZ and Minnesota Ponzi schemer Trevor Cook.)
By June 25, 2009, AVG announced it was suspending cashouts, again blaming the development on members while threatening members and journalists with copyright-infringement lawsuits for reporting the news.
Just four days later, on June 29, 2009, the RICO plaintiffs in the ASD lawsuit referenced AVG in a court filing docketed the following day, June 30. By September 2009, federal prosecutors made a veiled reference to AVG in filings in the ASD case.
By Sept. 29, 2009, an email attributed to ASD spokeswoman Sara Mattoon was circulating among ASD members. The email specifically instructed members not to fill out a government form that would be used as part of the restitution process.
“Soon after the ASD shutdown, the DOJ (Dept of Justice) set up a website for people to file a claim for the money they had in ASD,” Mattoon was quoted as saying in the email. “As soon as I heard about it, I told everyone not to do it because I could see what the Government was trying to do, but some people didn’t realize what it was and afterwards they regretted doing so.”
The Matton email referenced an earlier email attributed to ASD member and purported trainer Robert Fava. Like the Mattoon email, the Fava email discouraged members from filling out the government form, describing it as “ammunition” that could be used against ASD.
This is actually Post No. 1,007 since the PP Blog switched to the WordPress platform two years ago this month. We’d hoped to commemorate our 1,000th WordPress post in the actual 1,000th post, but missed the chance because of Breaking News concerning the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force’s Operation Broken Trust.
The PP Blog's Breaking News graphic was stolen and used in a promotion for Data Network Affiliates (DNA) earlier this year. DNA, which purports to be in the business of helping the AMBER Alert prohram rescue abducted children, now apparently has morphed into a company known as OWOW, which has instructed members to advertise a secret cure for cancer.
Several hours after we reported that the Task Force now was counting investment-fraud victims by the tens of thousands and noting that even deaf people had been targeted in massive scams, we reported that Walmart had joined the “If you see something, say something” terrorism-awareness campaign operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Walmart was instantly and savagely pilloried on YouTube, apparently for holding the view that DHS deserved private-sector help in its work to keep America safe. On. Dec. 6, when the PP Blog first observed the DHS video on YouTube announcing the Walmart partnership, the video had received only 310 views. That number now has shot up to 289,657. YouTube posters called DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano names that could peel paint. We’ll leave it at that, except to say that scores of Americans appear to have emerged as kneejerk critics and appear unwilling to view America’s economic well-being within the lens of national security.
Indeed, how safe is America — and the world at large — if fraud victims are being counted in numbers that would fill stadiums and vast sums of wealth are being consumed and disappearing down ratholes? In the Task Force announcement, Attorney General Eric Holder said that, since Aug. 16 alone, cases investigated by the Task Force have uncovered losses of more than $10.4 billion. The schemes affected at least 120,000 victims.
The victims’ count in just this relatively small cluster of cases is more than enough to fill the Rose Bowl in Pasadena or Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, America’s largest college-football stadium.
Just prior to our Operation Broken Trust post — in Post No. 999 — we reported that the AdPayDaily autosurf, which has promoters and members in common with both AdSurfDaily and AdViewGlobal, was showing signs of collapse. Flash forward to Post No. 1,002: In this post, we reported that a New York Internet Marketer had been arrested by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service for cyberstalking.
Vitaly Borker apparently believed it prudent to use the Internet to threaten to rape women who had received what investigators described as bogus and inferior-quality goods from him. A fair reading of the complaint against Borker shows that he used the same type of gutter language directed at Napolitano on YouTube — you know, for her apparent High Crime of asking Walmart shoppers to be aware of their surroundings in the Age of Terrorism.
We next reported on a 54-year prison sentence handed down to a former Indiana pastor who duped Christian investors in a Ponzi scheme. After that, we reported that a company that once did business with Steve Renner’s Cash Cards International had been implicated in a massive Forex scheme that affected at least 800 investors.
Renner was the operator of the INetGlobal autosurf, which the U.S. Secret Service said in February was operating a Ponzi scheme affecting thousands of people, including victims of Chinese descent who may have limited ability to understand English. The Secret Service said an undercover agent had been introduced to INetGlobal by an AdSurfDaily member.
On Dec. 8, we reported that a Maryland man had been arrested after the FBI intercepted his plot to detonate a car bomb at a military-recruitment center. A similar plot had been unmasked by the FBI in Portand, Ore., on the day after Thanksgiving. It was aimed at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, meaning it was aimed at children and families.
Here is one way to look at the alleged Thanksgiving plot: The arrest was announced on Nov. 26. By Dec. 6, crackpots were flooding YouTube with paint-peeling comments about Napolitano and the terrorism-awareness campaign. Two days after that, on Dec. 8, a man was arrested in the Maryland plot. He allegedly also talked about blowing up Andrews Air Force Base, which happens to be the home base of Air Force One, which happens to be the aircraft used by the President of the United States.
We haven’t even written about Wikileaks and the arrest in Britian of Julian Assange. Wikileaks’ sympathizers reacted by bringing DDoS attacks, apparently based on the belief that the best way to show support for Assange was to send out an army of bots to disrupt the websites of businesses that did not support Assange.
By week’s end, Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were surrounded by a mob unhappy about the skyrocketing costs of getting a college education in the United Kingdom. Civility, it seems, can be cast out the door in a country minute and replaced by the taunts of a mob.
Yesterday, as we again sought to commemorate our 1,000 post, word arrived about the apparent suicide of Bernard Madoff’s son on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest.
There is no doubt — none whatsoever — that Ponzi = Pain. There also is no doubt that the Internet has ushered in an era of unprecedented, mass-produced, viral crime. Criminals have been aided in their nefarious pursuits by crackpots who employ no editorial filters and simply create or repeat lies that institutionalize crime as an occupation and even celebrate it.
At the precise moment in time in which Americans and other citizens of the world could benefit most from serious words and serious research backing those words, some of the world’s great publishing companies are struggling to make ends meet. Print circulation is down. Journalists are losing jobs. Designers and salespeople are losing jobs.
The switch to electronic publishing platforms has been accompanied by piracy, wanton theft and trademark infringement that further erodes the value of words and intellectual property, undermines the economy and adds to concerns about national and international security. People, including well-intentioned people, simply copy-and-paste entire editorial wells from one site to another. The public becomes confused about the original source of material, which often is shoe-horned to fit a specific agenda.
Earlier this year, the PP Blog’s Breaking News graphic was stolen by a member of Data Network Affiliates (DNA), an MLM company that routinely targets promos at Christians and, among other things, has claimed it is helping the AMBER Alert program rescue abducted children. DNA now apparently has morphed into a company known as OWOW, which is asking members to suggest that a product known as TurboMune cures cancer.
This is not “freedom,” as the scammers would have you believe; it is theft and piracy on the high electronic seas, plain and simple. It also often is the case that this specific brand of theft also gets mixed with appeals to faith, meaning the scammers are seeking to pluck heartstrings and separate Believers from their money.
There simply is no way that any government or branch of government can be at all places at all times. Although it is fashionable to describe efforts to battle crime in the Age of the Internet and the Age of Terrorism as an effort by Big Brother to assign each individual citizen his or her own bureaucrat to bring commerce and freedom to a screeching halt, such opinions often are simple rants that lack any real-world context.
Within hours of the PP Blog’s publication of a story about the alleged Portland plot, the Blog was bizarrely assailed by an MLM aficionado for DNA/OWOW as a tool for Israel. Michael Chertoff, a former federal judge, federal prosecutor and DHS secretary, was described as a “suspect” in the 9/11 attacks, which the poster blamed on Israel while calling Chertoff an Israeli scum bag.
As noted above, when Janet Napolitano announced a simple partnership with Walmart to encourage citizens to be aware of their surroundings, she encountered vicious name-calling — and it all happened during the same week yet-another bombing plot was unmasked, the Task Force was noting that America’s largest stadiums were not large enough to accommodate recent victims of financial fraud, DDoS attacks were aimed at companies deemed by third parties to be unfriendly to Wikileaks and the future king of England and his wife were surrounded by an angry mob.
Even if one is willing to assume that Wikileaks seeks to serve a higher, noble purpose, directing DDoS attacks at businesses and government sites hardly helps Assange elicit sympathy or understanding. He lost an important round in the PR war last week, as did the unthinking crowd that assailed Napolitano and the mob that heckled Prince Charles and the Duchess.
The lionization of crackpots of all stripes is rapidly emerging as a dangerous, unintended consequence of the Internet — as are all the tortured claims that MLM products treat or cure cancer, create vast sums of wealth for ordinary participants and the tortured claim that appropriating the names of Walmart and Winfrey and Trump and Buffet and Clinton is just another word for freedom.
Far from promoting freedom, the crackpots and criminals are promoting anarchy. They do not seek to compete in either a free marketplace of commerce or a free marketplace of ideas. Rather, they seek to commit crimes on a global scale and to fill entire stadiums with victims — even as would-be terrorists speculate about throwing cocktail bombs into military-recruitment centers and shooting soldiers and staff as they flee the flames through the doors.
In Portland, meanwhile, the idea was to kill wide-eyed children contemplating the miracles of Christmas and Santa Claus with a fireball that also would consume their parents.
We conclude this 1,000 post commemoration with a simple thought: Death and taxes are not the only two certainties of life. It is equally certain that law enforcement needs the proactive participation of the public more than ever. It is one thing to direct reasonable criticism at agencies and public officials; it is quite another to cheer against the people who are responding to unprecedented security challenges while trying to make sure the stadiums fill up with football fans, not victims.
BULLETIN UPDATED 11:51 A.M. ET (U.S.A.): Mark Madoff, the older of Ponzi swindler Bernard Madoff’s two sons, has been found dead in New York on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, the New York Times is reporting.
The death was the apparent result of a suicide by hanging, the newspaper reported. Mark Madoff’s body was found this morning in his Manhattan apartment.
“Mark Madoff took his own life today,” said attoney Martin Flumenbaum in a statement released on BusinessWire. “This is a terrible and unnecessary tragedy. Mark was an innocent victim of his father’s monstrous crime who succumbed to two years of unrelenting pressure from false accusations and innuendo. We are all deeply saddened by this shocking turn of events.”
Bernard Madoff confessed his scheme two years ago today, ushering in an era of unprecedented Ponzi scheme investigations and the unmasking of so-called “mini-Madoffs” in businesses large and small across the United States.
Flumenbaum is a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Flumenbaum represents Mark Madoff and Andrew Madoff, Bernard’s Madoff’s youngest son.
Mark Madoff was 46. He had not been charged with a crime. Neither has Andrew Madoff. Lawsuits have been piling up around the massive Bernard Madoff swindle.
BULLETIN: UPDATED 4:03 P.M. ET (U.S.A.): A man has been arrested in a plot to detonate a car bomb at a military recruitment center in Maryland. The alleged plot was intercepted by the FBI.
In court documents, the FBI identified the man as Antonio Martinez, also known as Muhammad Hussain. He was charged with attempted murder of federal officers/employees and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against property owned or leased by the United States.
Martinez potentially faces life in prison, if convicted.
“[T]here was no actual danger because the people Mr. Martinez asked to help carry out his attack actually were working with the FBI,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein of the District of Maryland.
An FBI agent said in charging documents that Martinez was a “recent convert” to Islam. The plot was intercepted by the FBI in October, according to the documents.
Martinez, 21, sought to recruit three other people to launch an attack against a military-recruiting station in Catonsville, Md., according to the documents. Catonsville is near Baltimore. The plot was presaged by posts on Facebook by Martinez.
In the early stages of the plot, Martinez talked about acquiring weapons and using gasoline and propane in an attack, according to the documents. As the plot developed, Martinez spoke of stationing himself on the roof, going inside, waiting for military personnel to arrive, and then shooting “everybody in the place” with the aid of an accomplice and burning down the building to “instill fear.”
Martinez also speculated about stuffing the exhaust systems of cars with socks, which he believed could be a way to kill drivers by making deadly fumes back up into passenger compartments.
“Just some ideas,” he was quoted as saying. “You know what I’m saying?”
Later, Martinez speculated about throwing cocktail bombs into the recruiting station and shooting people as they ran out, according to the documents. He also speculated about blowing up Andrews Air Force Base.
By mid-November, the focus shifted to detonating a car bomb at the recruitment center, according to the documents.
Martinez had multiple opportunities to back away from the plot, but chose to move forward, according to the documents. He attempted to detonate the bomb earlier today, but it had been engineered by the FBI to be inert.
A similar plot in Portland, Ore., was exposed on the day after Thanksgiving by the FBI last month. The agency had arranged a sting in the Portland case.
Martinez became aware of the Portland sting operation after the fact, fretted that he was being set up — but still decided to carry out his plot, according to the documents. He found out today that, like the Portland suspect, he, too, had been targeted in a sting and had been under constant surveillance by the FBI.
A Mexican company listed as a customer of Steve Renner’s Cash Cards International (CCI) in a 2005 scam known as MegaFund now has been charged by the CFTC with running a massive Forex fraud scheme that gathered at least $28 million from more than 800 U.S. customers.
Named defendants by the CFTC were MXBK Group S.A. de CV, a private Mexican financial services holding company, and its Forex trading division, MBFX S.A. Court records show that MXBK Group S.A. de CV formerly was known as MexBank Group SA de CV or MexBank.
Separately, the SEC has charged three men with fraud for blindly pitching the MexGroup program and raising “tens of millions” of dollars in the process. Charged in Utah federal court were Clifton K. Oram, Don C. Winkler and William R. Michael.
“Beyond the fact that none of the defendants understood how the Forex market or Forex trading functioned, neither Oram, Winker or Michael took any significant steps to investigate MexGroup, its principals, or the viability of the investment,” the SEC charged. “Instead, they blindly accepted MexGroup’s representations about its background, veracity, and track record.
“Further, Michael and his company used MexGroup’s purported performance numbers on his company’s website and made misleading representations and omissions regarding their own Forex trading experience,” the SEC continued. “Even more egregious, Winkler and Oram continued to offer and sell the MBFX offering even after the November 2008 collapse.”
Renner, the operator of both CCI and the INetGlobal autosurf, currently is serving an 18-month prison sentence for tax evasion. In February 2010, the U.S. Secret Service alleged that Renner was operating a Ponzi scheme through INetGlobal.
Renner has denied the Ponzi allegations.
The CFTC case against the Mexican companies and the SEC case against the promoters were brought as a result of a joint cooperative investigation among the regulators, the FBI and the IRS, officials said.
Read the CFTC complaint, which alleges the MXBK Group Forex scam began in 2005.
Here is a snippet:
“U.S. customers sign up to participate in the Defendants’ forex trading enterprise by completing forms electronically on the Defendants’ internet website. However, when completing their customer applications, U.S. customers are required to designate certain U.S. individuals or entities, sometimes called ‘resellers’ or ‘introducers,’ who in turn act as liaisons for U.S. customers with Defendants’ operations in Mexico. The resellers or introducers receive rebates described as ‘PIPs,’ which are purportedly based upon the volume of trading.”
(NOTE: The full complaint is highly recommended reading if you follow HYIP and Forex fraud schemes.)
BULLETIN: Vaughn Reeves has been sentenced to 54 years in prison after bilking Christians in a $120 million Ponzi- and affinity-fraud scheme in Indiana.
Reeves, a former church pastor, is 66. He told investors in Alanar Inc. that it was their “Christian responsibility” to become pitchmen for his then-undiscovered bond scheme. Congregants believed they were helping raise money for church-building projects, but it was a scam that led to foreclosure proceedings against eight places of worship, prosecutors said.
The case was brought by the office of Sullivan County Prosecutor Bob Hunley, with assistance from the Indiana State Police and the office of Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita.
“Investors felt they were helping to build churches, not buy the Reeves expensive homes, fancy cars, airplanes and swimming pools,” Hunley said last year.
Three sons of Reeves — Chip, Chris and Josh — are scheduled to go on trial next year. Like their father, they were charged in June 2009.
“The Reeves allegedly targeted their victims through their faith, and then exploited their religious convictions in order to hide their elaborate Ponzi scheme from potential investors,” Rokita said last year.
NOTE TO READERS: The PP Blog anticipates that it will publish a story this evening that will say a second financial scandal involving the so-called “Congressional Medal Of Distinction” is evolving.
