PatrickPretty.com

Category: Writing And Branding

  • UPDATE: JSS Tripler Promoters On Ponzi Boards Scoff At CONSOB Action, React By Making ‘I Got Paid’ Posts; Like AdSurfDaily, Purported ‘Opportunity’ Calls Payouts ‘Rebates’ And Employs Confluence Of Payment Schemes

    “I dont care what the CONSOB or whatever says because I am not an Italian.” — TalkGold poster known as “WallStreetIsAPonzi,” Jan. 28, 2012

    Even as CONSOB, the Italian securities regulator, is publishing an announcement on its website that promoters of a bizarre HYIP known as JSS Tripler are under investigation amid preposterous claims that investors receive an annualized return of 730 percent, promoters on Ponzi forums such as MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold are thumbing their noses at the news.

    JSS Tripler is an arm of “program” known as “JustBeenPaid” (JBP). Whether JBP plans to assist any of the companies or individuals identified in the CONSOB announcement in navigating the regulatory waters and preparing a defense in the weeks ahead is unclear.

    What is clear is that some JBP promoters are reacting to the news by posting fresh “I got paid” posts on the Ponzi boards, even as JBP continues to use its website to advertise returns of “2%+ per Day” and “60% per Month!”

    Visitors are advised they can “Increase Earnings with Daily Compounding” and glean affiliate “bonuses” totaling 15 percent over two tiers — on top of the annualized returns of 730 percent.

    In the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case in 2008, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer described “a confluence [of ASD] payment schemes” very similar to the payment schemes purportedly in place at JBP. JBP, though, is advertising a return rate double that of ASD, whose operator, Andy Bowdoin, later was arrested on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities.

    Bowdoin faces up to 125 years in federal prison and fines in the millions of dollars, if convicted on all counts.

    In her 2008 ruling in the ASD case in which she refused to release money seized by the U.S. Secret Service as part of an international Ponzi probe, Collyer noted that ASD called its payouts to members “rebates.”

    Separately, documents from Canadian investigators show that the word “rebates” was used in international scams, including Flat Electronic Data Interchange (FEDI) and the mysterious “Alpha Project.” At least one FEDI promoter is jailed in the United States, as is FEDI operator Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, also known as “Michael Mixon,” who was convicted on charges of operating an investment-fraud scheme and financing terror.

    At MoneyMakerGroup yesterday — on the heels of the CONSOB news — a poster published seven purportedly recent payment proofs from JSS Tripler. Each of them used the word “rebate,” demonstrating that the purported opportunity also is using the same language as ASD and FEDI to describe payouts to members.

    The MoneyMakerGroup member said he planned to buy a “motor home” and “start traveling the US” with his JSS Tripler money.

    In the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case, several automobiles were seized as the alleged proceeds of a criminal scheme. A boat and marine equipment also were seized, along with computers and real estate valued at more than $1 million. All in all, the cash seizures to date in the ASD case total more than $80 million, including cash seized from individual promoters in at least four U.S. states.

    U.S. federal prosecutors say that ASD in part tried to mask its $110 million Ponzi scheme by calling its payments to members "rebates." JSS Tripler, an arm of a "program" known as "JustBeenPaid," also refers to its payouts to members as a "rebate," according to this post yesterday at the MoneyMakerGroup Ponzi forum.

    Although Frederick Mann, the purported operator of JBP/JSS Tripler, is described by supporters as a business genius and creator of a “masterpiece,” the program is using the same sort of language and bizarre presentations that drew the attention of law enforcement in the ASD and FEDI cases.

    Elsewhere on MoneyMakerGroup, a member described the CONSOB development as “NONSENSE!”

    Another member observed yesterday that JBP payouts came from an email address on a domain styled BigBooster.com. Why the payouts are associated with the BigBooster domain is unclear, but the BigBooster domain previously has been linked to the alleged ASD Ponzi scheme and Frederick Mann, the purported operator of JBP/JSS Tripler.

    Separately, the TalkGold forum deleted a link to a PP Blog report on the CONSOB action. In the ASD case, a forum known as “Surf’s Up” routinely deleted links to the PP Blog. ASD members who relied on the Blog for information were described on the forum as troublemakers, and posters willing to consider the government’s point of view were described as “rats,” “maggots” and “cockroaches.”

    ASD figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming was arrested by the FBI in November 2011 on charges of filing bogus liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD case, including a federal judge, three federal prosecutors and an active-duty agent of the U.S. Secret Service who did some of the early legwork in the case.

    The Secret Service employed undercover operatives in bringing the ASD prosecution.

    One MoneyMakerGroup poster yesterday suggested that the CONSOB action was “crap” and claimed outright that JSS Tripler had “paid out over 10 million bucks.”

    Whether the poster ever had seen the verified, audited books of JBP/JSS Tripler and other financial records such as bank and payment-processor statements to substantiate his claim is unclear. But even if the $10 million claim is true, the claimed sum was not broken down by recipient — and online scams are infamous for siphoning cash and concentrating it in the pockets of program sponsors and insiders.

    Promoters of fraud schemes often pass along company lies and deceptions to recruits and prospects, a situation that U.S. government agencies, including the Secret Service, the SEC and the CFTC,  have noted in prosecutions involving individual, commission-based promoters.

    The same MoneyMakerGroup promoter also ventured the CONSOB action came because “governments are not getting a cut of this revenue,” further asserting that  “the only reason they are starting to do probes and crap (sic) not because they care about protecting you from loosing (sic) your money.”

    ASD members made similar claims. Like JBP/JSS Tripler, ASD also was promoted on the Ponzi boards — as were at least three purported ASD clones, all of which have ceased to operate. The cost to investors is unknown.

    Like ASD, JSS Tripler also appears to have a clone — one that actually uses JSS Tripler’s name to form its own name. That “program,” known as JSS Triper 2 or T2, appears now to be changing its name to T2MoneyKlub. Regardless of the name, T2 also was hawked on the Ponzi boards and appears even to have given birth to itself on a Ponzi board as a result of a dispute with JBP/JSS Tripler.

    Federal prosecutors said ASD also changed its name, morphing from just plain AdSurfDaily into ASD Cash Generator. Court records suggest that changing names was part of ASD’s criminal plan and that the change occurred after the initial ASD Ponzi collapsed and after certain payment conduits began to come under government scrutiny.

    Among the MoneyMakerGroup posters who published “I got paid” posts for JBP/JSS Tripler yesterday was “10BucksUp” — his second such post since the CONSOB action became public.

    “10BuckUp” previously pushed Club Asteria, anotherPonzi-forum darling that came under CONSOB scrutiny. In addition to displaying no apparent respect for CONSOB, “10BucksUp” let it be known in September 2011 that he also was a pitchman for Cherry Shares, a collapsed program referenced in June by Canadian regulators.

    Cherry Shares also was a Ponzi-forum darling.

    Whether “10BucksUp” and other JBP/JSS Tripler promoters planned to tell their existing recruits and prospects about the fact CONSOB is targeting individual promoters in a 90-day suspension order related to the purported JBP/JSS Tripler program is unclear.

    Also unclear is whether JBP/JSS Tripler will inform existing participants and prospects about the CONSOB action.

    Members of any “opportunity” that purports to pay an absurd return always are at great risk. The risk becomes even greater if they are denied information about investigations. Promoters who do not disclose the presence of an investigation or simply rely on the company line (or lack thereof) potentially are at greater risk of prosecution as individual promoters.

    In the ASD case, for instance, federal prosecutors said the company was collecting money from new members and funneling it to original members affected by ASD’s first collapsed Ponzi — without informing new enlistees and prospects that their money was being used to prop up losers from the initial scheme and to help the second Ponzi gain a head of steam.

    The personal assets of a number of individual ASD promoters were targeted in forfeiture actions or affidavits, with the government seizing sums in several bank accounts in multiple U.S. states. These sums totaled in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to court records.

  • [DONATION POST UPDATE]: PP Blog Is At The Brink . . .

    Dear Readers,

    Our donation post this month was in this editorial, which doubled as our 1,500th post.

    The post resulted in one contribution from a reader. We are short of where we need to be heading into February. A key service bill for $100 is coming due, and there is no money to pay it. Once again the Blog is at the edge of an abyss.

    It is our hope that out readers will be able to provide a minimum of $100 within the next 24 hours. It is the bare minimum we need to keep publishing in February and does not take into account other expenses, including core necessities.

    We pass the hat reluctantly, but pass it we must.

    Patrick

  • URGENT >> BULLETIN >> MOVING: JSS Tripler Promoters Targeted By Italian Regulator CONSOB In Securities Probe

    URGENT >> BULLETIN >> MOVING: Your time soon may be up if you’re flogging the absurd HYIP known as JSS Tripler.

    CONSOB, the Italian securities regulator, has opened a probe into the activities of multiple promoters amid concerns the purported “program” is being offered to Italian citizens unlawfully as a security. JSS Tripler is an arm of “JustBeenPaid,” a Ponzi-forum darling that has been serving up a heavy dose of the bizarre for months.

    The agency has issued a 90-day suspension order.

    Details of the CONSOB probe and the precise number of investigative targets were not immediately clear to the PP Blog, owing to the lack of a quality Italian-to-English translation. But the websites of multiple entities or individuals who appear to be JSS Tripler affiliates are referenced by CONSOB in a 90-day order dated Jan. 20 and made public Jan. 23.

    JSS Tripler’s name also is referenced in the order.

    If a JSS Tripler-related domain cited in the translation is accurate, the domain appears to be hosted in the United States.

    Among the bizarre claims associated with JSS Tripler promoters were that the company was moving to “offshore” servers and performing a restart.

    Affiliates were required to affirm they were not government spies or media lackeys.

    JustBeenPaid is known to have promoters in common with ClubAsteria, a “program” that came under CONSOB’s lens last year. The purported opportunity also is known to have promoters in common with the alleged AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme.

    Some JSS Tripler affiliates identify Frederick Mann as the honcho-in-chief. In May 2008, Mann positioned ASD as a “cash cow,” claiming he pocketed $6,000, according to records. Last year, the purported JustBeenPaid “opportunity” was trading on celebrity names such as Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey — and even fictional space man “Mr. Spock.”

    Here is the CONSOB announcement — via an English translation by Google Translate.

    Another “program” apparently named “System Explosion” also is referenced in the CONSOB suspension order. The domain for that program, which appears to be an HYIP or arbitrage program of some sort, also appears to be hosted in the United States.

    Among the payment processors listed on the JSS Tripler-related domain and the System Explosion domain are AlertPay, SolidTrustPay and LibertyReserve.

    An ad for JustBeenPaid appears on the SystemExplosion domain. When clicked, it appears to route to a subdomain of the JustBeenPaid domain, which beams this bizarre and vacuous message:

    “JustBeenPaid! (JBP) and Its (sic) related programs are Licenced (sic) under United States Patent 6,578,010.”

    The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, however, is not the agency that regulates securities programs and purported business opportunities, even if JustBeenPaid could demonstrate that some sort of patent exists. As a practical matter, it is virtually impossible to conceive that market regulators in any country could be thwarted from opening probes based on claims that a system was patented.

    If anything, such a claim in the context of programs that purport to pay a return may only intensify regulatory scrutiny. CONSOB, for instance, referenced JSS Tripler’s purported returns of 2 percent a day.

    JSS Tripler is not to be confused with JSS Tripler 2 (T2), an equally bizarre “program” that appears to be a knockoff on the name of JustBeenPaid’s JSS Tripler arm. T2 also uses AlertPay.

    Like JSS Tripler, T2 also was promoted on Ponzi forums such as TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup.

  • ALERT! On Heels Of SEC’s Complaint Against Alleged Latvian Hacker Accused Of Manipulating Stock Prices By Hijacking Brokerage Accounts, FINRA Warns Of Plots Targeting Email Accounts

    “Investors who suspect that their email account has been hacked should immediately notify their brokerage firm and other financial institutions, and anyone who suspects they have been defrauded should file a complaint with FINRA.” — Gerri Walsh, vice president for Investor Education, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Jan. 26, 2012

    The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) yesterday issued an alert and regulatory notice, saying that it “has received an increasing number of reports involving investor funds being stolen by fraudsters who first gain access to the investor’s email account and then email instructions to the firm to transfer money out of the brokerage account.”

    FINRA’s announcement occurred on the same day the SEC charged that a 34-year-old Latvian trader “broke into” customers’ brokerage accounts between June 2009 and August 2010 and made trades to manipulate the prices of stock he owned to create a personal windfall while causing losses to customers and broker-dealers.

    In just one 32-minute period on Oct. 26, 2009, Igors Nagaicevs “generated more $14,000 in illegal profits” by twice taking a position a NYSE-listed security, driving up the stock price by purchasing shares through a hacked account and then “liquidating his position at a profit.”

    All in all, Nagaicevs repeated his fraudulent scheme 159 times over 14 months, manipulating the prices of “104 different NYSE and Nasdaq securities” and pocketing more than $850,000 in illegal profits, the SEC charged.

    Nagaicevs, in effect, caused his hacking targets to lose at least $2 million while passing the bill for the losses to broker-dealer firms, which reimbursed the affected customers, according to the SEC complaint in federal court.

    FINRA did not reference Nagaicevs in its alert yesterday, but warned that email intrusions were on the rise.

    “In some instances, the perpetrators appear to have obtained customers’ brokerage information by accessing customers’ email accounts and searching contact lists or emails sent from the account,” FINRA cautioned in its regulatory notice.

    After breaching the email accounts, FINRA said, the scammers typically “email brokerage firms from customers’ personal email accounts with instructions to wire funds to an account, often overseas, controlled by the perpetrator.”

    Document forgeries may follow the initial email chicanery, FINRA said.

    “The instructions may be accompanied or followed by fraudulent letters of authorization also emailed from compromised email accounts. In some instances, firms have released funds after unsuccessfully attempting to verify emailed instructions by phone. In at least one case, the fraudulent email stressed the urgency of the requested transfer, pressuring the firm to release the funds before verifying the authenticity of the emailed instructions.”

    Read the FINRA Alert.

    Read a new alert from the FBI, the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) that warns that scammers are using devious email plots to siphon cash from “banks, broker/dealers, credit unions and other institutions.”

    NOTE: If you follow the criminal madness on the various Ponzi-scheme boards, you’ll notice that the new alert from the FBI, FS-ISAC and IC3 cites the type of scam-talk frequently seen on the huckster forums.

    An outtake from the alert (emphasis added):

    “The excuse is typically based on an illness or death in the family which prevents the account holder from conducting business as usual.”

  • President Raises Piracy Issue In State Of The Union Address Just Days After Justice Department Brings Megaupload Copyright-Infringement Case; Overall Fraud Battle Will Expand, Obama Tells Nation

    President Obama raised the issue of international piracy in last night's State of The Union address to the U.S. Congress.

    Speaking to the nation in his State of the Union address to Congress, President Obama last night referenced U.S. efforts to combat piracy. Although the remarks were in the context of battling knock-off goods that infringe trademarks and affect American manufacturing jobs, Obama delivered the message just days after the Justice Department brought racketeering and copyright-conspiracy charges in the Megaupload international piracy case — and the hacker’s group “Anonymous” retaliated by bringing DDoS attacks against government and other sites.

    Megaupload principal Kim Dotcom yesterday was denied bail in New Zealand, the country in which he was arrested on U.S. charges that Megauplaod had amassed at least $175 million through international web piracy.

    Obama referred to neither the Megaupload case nor the follow-up DDoS attacks. But the President did signal that the United States would not stand by idly and submit to the whims of pirates who seek to hide behind international borders and gorge themselves on profits derived from U.S. ingenuity.

    “It’s not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated,” the President said.

    Megaupload and related entities operated websites that caused at least $500 million in economic harm to U.S. companies by unlawfully reproducing and distributing “infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies – often before their theatrical release – music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale,” the Justice Department said last week.

    “The conspirators’ content hosting site, Megaupload.com, is advertised as having more than one billion visits to the site, more than 150 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors and accounting for four percent of the total traffic on the Internet,” the Justice Department said.

    Law enforcement last week executed 20 search warrants in eight countries, including the United States. At least $50 million in assets and 18 domain names were seized, and servers in Canada, the Netherlands and the United States were targeted by investigators to freeze the fraud in its tracks, the Justice Department said.

    Obama also signaled that his administration’s overall fraud crackdown will continue and the the United States would dial up efforts to bring financial criminals to justice. Congress, he said, should stiffen fraud penalties.

    “We’ll also establish a Financial Crimes Unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale fraud and protect people’s investments,” Obama said.  “Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender.  That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing.  So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count.

    “And tonight, I’m asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorney[s] general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis,” the President continued. “This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

    The word “fraud” appeared four times in a White House transcript of Obama’s speech. It did not appear at all in the Republican response, which was delivered by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and questioned where the United States would get the money to pay for programs in an era of runaway budget deficits.

    The government does too much meddling in business and engages in unrestrained spending, Daniels suggested.

    “In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. And yet the president has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead,” Daniels said, according to a CNN transcript.

    “In word and deed, the president and his allies tell us that we just cannot handle ourselves in this complex, perilous world without their benevolent protection,” Daniels said. “Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb.

    “A second view, which I’ll admit some Republicans also seem to hold, is that we Americans are no longer up to the job of self-government. We can’t do the simple math that proves the unaffordability of today’s safety net programs, or all the government we now have. We will fall for the con job that says we can just plow ahead and someone else will pick up the tab. We will allow ourselves to be pitted one against the other, blaming our neighbor for troubles worldwide trends or our own government has caused.”

    A highlight of last night’s State of the Union address was an emotional appearance by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the House Chamber. Giffords was shot in an assassination attempt a year ago. Still in the process of recovering from her wounds at the hands of a deranged man with a gun, she is leaving the Congress.

    U.S. District Judge John Roll was killed in the same attack, as were a nine-year-old girl, three senior citizens in their seventies and a 30-year-old Congressional aide engaged to be married.

    Both sides agree that Giffords, who is married to an astronaut, is an American hero whose courage has set an example for all. Both sides also agree that politics in the United States has become polarizing

    What neither side appears to agree on is how best to address polarization, kickstart the economy, regulate the U.S. markets and equip agencies to meet modern challenges, including the unique challenges of the Internet age.

  • PP BLOG POST NO. 1,500: ‘Anonymous’ Data Cannons, The Conscription Of The Unwitting Public To Wage An Electronic War On Law Enforcement — And Google And The ‘C’ Word

    Dear Readers,

    This PP Blog post is No. 1,500 since we switched to the WordPress platform in December 2008. Two years later, in December 2010, we commemorated our 1,000th post in this letter to readers, which rued the lionization of fools and hucksters on the Internet and questioned whether criminals and anarchists hold the upper hand.

    God help us if they do.

    Our concern that they might only was heightened last week with the DDoS attacks in which electronic data cannons were aimed at the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, other U.S. government agencies and well-known recording-business entities after an indictment was unsealed in the Megaupload racketeering and copyright conspiracy case. There now are reports that a government site in Brazil was targeted, as well as the site of a Brazilian entertainer and other U.S. sites.

    Yes, electronic cannons — specifically Low Orbit Ion Cannons that had been fired from secret bedroom and home-office bunkers in a contemptible display of criminality that had been trained on sites paid for by taxpayers and legitimate business entities and designed to knock them offline.

    There are reports that Anonymous, the hacker’s collective that took credit for firing the electronic cannons, duped people who did not want to fire cannons at sites paid for by taxpayers and consumers into firing those cannons. Otherwise law-abiding folks reportedly were drafted into a conspiracy to attack government property, also known as taxpayer property, by computer code placed by Anonymous that turned their machines into information-killing weapons.

    Putting it another way, Anonymous reportedly orchestrated an attack on U.S. government servers and conscripted unwitting participants to fire electronic weapons at websites operated by agencies whose mission is to keep the public safe from criminals: alleged would-be presidential assassins such as Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho; Ponzi schemers and six-time felons such as Anthony Ray of Georgia; securities schemers such as Jenifer Devine of New Jersey; scammers who target seniors internationally such as Dennis Bolze of Tennessee; alleged con men such as Andy Bowdoin of Florida; purported “sovereign citizens” such as Kenneth Wayne Leaming of Washington state.

    Read more about Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom in the DailyMail. Anonymous apparently is putting him forth as a role model.

    The attacks in which unwitting participants reportedly found themselves unwillingly married to committed anarchists occurred within hours of Wednesday’s civil protests of the SOPA and PIPA antipiracy bills by Google, Wikipedia and others.

    ‘Anonymous’ Rains On Google’s Civics Parade

    Neither Google nor Wikipedia got much of a chance to take a victory lap and marvel in their abilities to enlist the public to cow lawmakers and stop legislation in its tracks. That’s because the Justice Department announced the Megaupload copyright prosecutions under existing law on Thursday, a day after Google used the “c” word (censor) and Wikipedia staged its blackout. The Anonymous cannon attacks on public and private websites soon began, and the attacks quickly darkened and short-circuited the afterglow and PR bonanzas Google and Wikipedia had enjoyed during the 24 hours in which their presumptively utopian protests unfolded.

    After being shown by Google and Wikipedia that Internet users practicing viral civics can freeze politicians during a U.S. Presidential election year in which 33 Senate seats and all 435 House seats also will be up for grabs, some lawmakers did manage to scrape up enough courage to allow that something specific needed to be done about online piracy.

    But whatever needed to be done could be done later, the cowed politicians ventured, apparently after even more jobs, wealth and creativity get stolen by pirates who know that law enforcement’s battle against piracy is constrained by budgets, Congressional disputes, international borders, masked IPs and unthinking or downright criminal consumers who buy stolen property from pirates whose sympathizers include the anarchists who wield Low Orbit Ion Cannons.

    Although Google and Wikipedia were hardly alone in their negative views about the proposed legislation, the opportunistic cannon attack by Anonymous that followed provided a stark reminder that extremists can hijack a presumptively well-meaning online civics lesson in a heartbeat and turn it into an international-security drama.

    And because Anonymous is a loose coalition, the opportunity for “lone wolves” with their own destructive agendas to emerge from within the ranks of Anonymous is high. If someone in Anonymous decides he or she is opposed to, say, Sunday church picnics, then any church that hosts such an event and promotes it on the Internet could have its website targeted by Low Orbit Icon Cannons.

    The PP Blog is feeling less free today on the Internet, the purported last bastion of freedom of expression. Although this Blog champions the First Amendment, its does not champion instances in which criminals hide behind the First Amendment to cover up or rationalize their crimes as a lawful expression of protected speech.

    We wonder if our advocacy for law enforcement and content creators could invite Low Orbit Cannon-firers to train their sights anew on us, thus subjecting us to the mercies of a mob that empowers itself to silence our voice while it champions its own with the conscription of a viral mob. At the same time, we wonder if our publication of certain court documents could cause cannons to be trained on judges and prosecutors and investigators and crime victims, thus delaying or derailing prosecutions and putting the government and individual officers on the defense against criminals.

    What happens, say, if an autosurf or HYIP with 500,000 members who purport to be Christians spreading the word that Jesus wants them to be rich decides the best way to derail a prosecution is to share a Low Orbit Ion Cannon among all members of the enterprise — or to create tens of thousands of websites designed to obscure or bury government and consumer-reporter warnings about international mass-marketing fraud?

    And what happens of Congress decides to author specific legislation against HYIPs and autosurfs after learning that the largest sports stadiums may not be big enough to accommodate all the victims of a single scam — and an army of Bible-toting scammers start crashing servers or waging a disingenuous PR war against public servants and calling it free speech or an exercise in civics or civil disobedience?

    This is not the America we knew in the first 20 years of our journalism career. Something has gone horribly wrong in the past four or five years — and much of what has gone horribly wrong is attributable to viral criminals and their disingenuous cheerleaders and abettors on the Internet.

    A PP Blog companion site that featured news about Ponzi schemes was destroyed by pirates hiding behind servers on the other side of the world. The site’s content was scraped 100 percent and monetized. The thieves used us as their free labor force. It killed our site and our desire to keep it online.

    The PP Blog itself has survived DDoS attacks and has received a claim of responsibility — not from Anonymous, but from a purported advocate for HYIPs and online money schemes. It’s hard to count all the threats or bids to chill us that we’ve received, and we long ago reached the point that only a machine can count the bids to spam the Blog with offers for obvious scams or solicitations to visit piracy sites.

    For each published post, the Blog — on average — has received 100.09 spam communications. Looking at it another way, 100 scammers (or perhaps a smaller number with the ability to create the impression of scale) try to take advantage of the Blog’s work and ride its bandwidth and brand for every post we publish. Their business model is to flood antiscam sites with advertisements for individual scams.

    At the moment, the scammers appear to be concentrating on PP Blog stories involving the emerging OneX scheme.

    We are doing our best to keep you informed and are trying to out-think the scammers and criminals. Please help keep us around for Post 2,000.

     

  • SPECIAL REPORT: OWOW, Phil Piccolo-Associated Firm That Pumped Text Cash Network, Purportedly Cited ‘Financial Trouble’ Last Summer And Sought ‘Brand New People’ To ‘Pay Off All Of The Past Commissions And Money Owed To Suppliers’

    From YouTube: Mr. P. prowls the stage for OWOW in 2010.

    UPDATED 5:05 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) Did One World One Website Inc. (OWOW) — the Phil Piccolo-associated company that appears to have been given some of the top positions in Text Cash Network (TCN) and recruited a huge downline with the knowledge of TCN management — try to fix its own problems last year by hatching a Ponzi plan in which money sent in by new members would be used to pay commissions owed to original members?

    A bizarre OWOW promo dated July 30, 2011, on Dealslinker.com suggests so. The promo, which claimed that “O.W.O.W. Management left town a long time ago” and “gave up for many reasons,”  further claimed OWOW was implementing a restoration plan and suggested that the company was being run by “leaders.” The “leaders” were not identified.

    Incongruously, the promo claimed that “[i]t is actually not the current O.W.O.W. that is in Financial Trouble. It is the baggage from 10/10/2010 to 3/10/2011 that has brought us down. And is a Ball and Chain around the current O.W.O.W. Team.”

    “WE NEED YOUR HELP ‘OR’ THE HELP OF BRAND NEW PEOPLE…” the promo urged. “THE SOLUTION IS ‘FOUNDER OWNERSHIP’ YES… FOUNDERS…”

    With those words in July, OWOW introduced a scheme by which “FOUNDER PACKAGES” would be created in four tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum) and sold online to right the OWOW ship. The purported packages were priced between $500 and $5,000, and purchasers who bought in at the $5,000 level were promised they would get “20 shares in a (sic) 5% of The Sales Profit Pool from 8/8/11 to 12/12/12 of The O.W.O.W. Program…”

    The claim leads to questions about whether OWOW was offering unregistered securities as investment contracts and effectively creating an investment pool while using unregistered broker-dealers to sell the offer.

    Purchasers who bought in at the lower-priced tiers were promised a smaller number of shares, according to the promo. Members at the $500 level would get one share; members at $1,000 and $2,500 levels would get three shares and 10 shares, respectively.

    Despite the claim that OWOW’s profits would be shared among certain members through Dec. 12, 2012, the business registration in Wyoming of One World One Website Inc. is listed as “Inactive – Administratively Dissolved (Tax).”

    OWOW and at least one releated entity also appear to have lost the ability to gather money via PayPal.

    Whether OWOW sold any of the purported packages referenced in the July 2011 promo is unclear. But about three months later — during the opening days of November 2011 and while OWOW apparently was still reeling — OWOW appears to have been given a 10-day head start to sell TCN.

    Some TCN members now say that TCN has delayed commission payments to members for a fourth time and that members have been encouraged to send money via Western Union and money orders to both the company and individuals associated with the firm.

    A pulldown menu on TCN’s website says money can be sent via Western Union to three individuals: Tyler Johnson, Brett Hudson or Jane Johnson. TCN purports to have hundreds of thousands of members globally.

    Brett Hudson is listed on TCN’s website as the firm’s president. TCN purports to operate from Boca Raton, Fla. OWOW and another Piccolo-associated entity know as Data Network Affiliates (DNA) also purported to operate from Boca Raton and environs.  The Better Business Bureau issued an alert about DNA in 2010.

    Why TCN is asking members to send funds to individuals via Western Union is unclear.

    TCN purportedly is owned by “The Johnson Group,” although descriptions about that company have been vague and ambiguous.

    Here is what TCN says about itself:

    “Text Cash Network Inc is a USA Corporation and is own (sic) 100% by a five year old communication company which is another USA Corporation owned by The Johnson Group. We have not disclosed the communication’s company name or contact information in fear that THOUSANDS OF AGENTS may or should we say would call them for information prior to our official launch of 12/12/2011.”

    The date TCN advertised as its launch date — Dec. 12, 2011 — was precisely one year ahead of the date through which OWOW promised to pay tiered members who purchased shares in a pooling arrangement: Dec. 12, 2012.

    Curiously, TCN promoters associated with OWOW added an ampersand and extra proper noun to the name of TCN’s purported ownership group, describing TCN’s owners as the “Johnson & Johnson Group.”

    Whether the addition of the ampersand and extra proper noun was a bid to trade on the name of Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey-based Dow and S&P 500 component, is unclear. TCN came out of the gate trading on the name of Groupon, but a Groupon logo that once appeared on the site has been removed.

    Returning to the subject of OWOW, money from the purported OWOW “FOUNDER PACKAGES” would be used in part to “pay off all of the past commissions and money owed to suppliers,” according to the bizarre OWOW promo, which was attributed to “Mister P.”

    “Mister P” is an alias used by Phil Piccolo. Strangely, though, the OWOW promo was positioned as a “personal letter from J.P. aka Mister P.” Why the initials “J.P.” were used is unclear.

    Other Oddities

    The July 2011 OWOW promo referenced in this post appears to be a bid to sell both OWOW and a program known as ThatFreeThing. Indeed, the headline on the promo reads, “OWOW Wholesale Direct and MyFreething – ThatFreeThing.”

    Despite the headline reference to That Free Thing, the promo does not contain a link to the That Free Thing program.

    That Free Thing uses an address in Westminster, Colo., and publishes a picture of an office building with the name of the company affixed in large letters to the side of the building.

    TCN promos have featured images of a building in Boca Raton with the company’s name affixed in large letters near the crown of the building. The Boca Raton Police Department said on Dec. 14 that TCN’s name was not affixed to the building — despite what promoters led recruits to believe.

    “Mister P,” meanwhile, also is referenced in a promo for something called “MY FREE EVERYTHING,” which appears to be operating through a domain styled “TheDebtFreeCard.com.”

    Visitors to that site are told about a “100% PASSIVE!” program through which they can earn through the sale of “$50,000 to $250,000 JVP FOUNDER LOAN PACKAGES.” Like the OWOW promo, the My Free Everything promo raises questions about whether the purported firm is selling unregistered securities as investment contracts and whether promoters are serving as unregistered broker-dealers.

    Amid confusing claims on the site, visitors are told this: “If you are within 10 Levels of This Sale you will EARN IMMEDIATE MONEY… $500 to $2500… or If you personally sell one $5000 to $25,000… However THE BIG PICTURE will be THE RESIDUAL INCOME because THE SALE was made in YOUR DOWNLINE… There are many DOCTORS and OTHER PROFESSIONALS looking for PASSIVE INCOMES… All you do is FIND THEM and The Leadership SELL THEM… ”

    Separately, promos for OWOW on LinkedIn are asking viewers to visit a YouTube site to “see [an] Oprah” video on OWOW.

    When a link in the LinkedIn promo for OWOW is clicked, however, visitors are taken to a video that has nothing to do with Oprah Winfrey, the entertainment icon and business titan whose name often is appropriated by MLM hucksters and affiliates unwise to their ways.

    Instead, the video is about a product known as PhoneGuard, an app that purportedly keeps teens and children safe by shutting off a cell phone’s texting capacity while they’re in automobiles.

    See this story about DNA, another Piccolo-associated program that used Winfrey’s name. DNA purported to have ties to Anthony Sasso, who was described as DNA’s data expert and a “special board consultant.”

    Sasso, who reportedly once had a role in PhoneGuard, is a convicted felon who was charged in a South Florida racketeering case. DNA, the Piccolo-associated entity, hyped him as “The King Of Data For Dollars” and Sasso was said to be the “owner of the largest database of text numbers in the world.”

    TCN purports to be a text-advertising company.

     

  • T2’s ‘Dave’ Suggests Police Stood ‘Idly By’ As Trouble Engulfed His ‘Program’ That Advertises Daily Return Of 2 Percent; MoneyMakerGroup Suspends T2 Naysayers After Poster Claims Mod Pitched Dozens Of ‘Programs’ Now In Scams Folder

    EDITOR’S NOTE: Our first reference to JSS Tripler 2 (T2), which is trading on the name of an obvious fraud scheme known as JSS Tripler, is here. JSS Tripler is part of a larger fraud scheme known as JustBeenPaid, which was pushed by members of the alleged AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme and any number of Ponzi-forum scammers. ASD President Andy Bowdoin was indicted 13 months ago for wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities. He faces a maximum term of 125 years in federal prison, if convicted on all counts of a seven-count indictment.

    We published a T2 follow-up here, and an update to the follow-up here. We also published a story on a decision last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that upheld the 27-year prison sentence of Tennessee-based Ponzi schemer Dennis Bolze, whose operation recruited senior citizens and resulted in a two-level “vulnerable victim” sentencing enhancement for Bolze.

    Online Ponzi purveyors and forum fraudsters may be particularly susceptible to the vulnerable-victim enhancement. Indeed, their “programs” cast with a wide net, gain a head of steam through willful blindness and practiced, serial disingenuousness on Ponzi boards and within the purveyor and promotional ranks — and often mushroom to involve thousands of participants, thus increasing the odds they’ll recruit vulnerable members of society into their schemes  . . .

    “Dave,” the purported operator of an increasingly bizarre HYIP that advertises a daily payout rate that projects to an annualized return of 730 percent, appears now to be blaming an unidentified law-enforcement agency for standing “idly by” as trouble engulfed his “program” after a onetime business partner’s AlertPay account was frozen.

    Oddly, though, “Dave” now appears to be grateful his business partner was not arrested on “Dave’s” word, asserting that the partner “is working with us to put this situation back on track.”

    At the same time, “Dave” asserts T2 is implementing a restructuring plan amid reality-bending claims it is “NOT in a weak position” despite a “month of no withdrawals” caused by “Chris,” the onetime business partner whose AlertPay account apparently was used to gather funds for T2 and now cannot be accessed.

    T2 members have been left in the lurch for weeks.

    The T2 “program” purportedly will restart on Feb. 1 with a new “algorithm” and a new name: T2MoneyKlub. The name change, according to a T2 members’ update, will occur because the program “no longer wish[ed] to be confused with Justbeenpaid.com.”

    Claims about “algorithms” and other mathematical magic frequently accompany fraud schemes. So do name changes at mid-stream. AdSurfDaily, for example, allegedly changed its name to ASD Cash Generator after a Ponzi collapse and did not inform incoming members that their funds were being used to pay back investors scammed when the original iteration collapsed.

    Ponzi collapses can be brought on by theft, account closures or seizures by banks and payment processors or by actions by law-enforcement to freeze accounts to stop a scheme from mushrooming. Details surrounding AlertPay’s apparent decision to freeze the account of “Chris” are unclear.

    “Dave’s” move to change the program’s name is in stark contrast to earlier, mind-bending claims that trading on the name of JustBeenPaid’s JSS Tripler arm somehow was appropriate. The T2MoneyKlub domain was registered Jan. 12 — as T2 members were publicly fretting about not getting paid.  The new domain is being powered by servers that use JSS Tripler 2’s name, according to records.

    Existing T2 Members May Face New Risk

    Even now, according to “Dave’s” members’ update, the program is taking advantage of an “SEO” strategy to expand its audience. If true, the program could be expanding its own risk of attracting vulnerable investors.

    “We will be setting up a quantity of forums and blogs, and each one will need to receive page views from the members, also there will be blog commenting tasks and forum posting tasks,” “Dave” asserts.

    “This is to build up a high alexa rank with a massive amount of original content and high pageview count which sets a great foundation for SEO and advertising revenue etc,” he continues in the members’ update. “We will give attention to each website for approx one month for forums and 2 weeks per blog.”

    Separately posting on the MoneyMakerGroup Ponzi forum as “Peakr8,” “Dave” painted himself a man of considerable business experience who’d been condemned unduly by the media and left twisting in the wind by an unidentified “police” agency.

    ‘Police Standing Idly By’

    “Yes we have had a few problems both technical and the [AlertPay] problem,” “Dave” conceded as “Peakr8” in a post yesterday on MoneyMakerGroup. “[T]his is not unlike any business offline or online, apart from it’s like trying to run your business with a mob walking up and down outside your business premises waving banners screaming ‘scam, scam, scam’ and also the newspapers saying you are a liar and a cheat with absolutely no evidence to back up their claims… when you have done nothing wrong and the police standing idly by saying that they are allowed to do it.”

    “Dave” has not identified the police agency to which he allegedly complained about “Chris” and apparently now is complaining about. He earlier asserted that his complaint would result in the arrest of “Chris.”

    “Dave’s” public complaint on MoneyMakerGroup followed on the heels of his apparent decision to block the public from the T2 forum and a separate claim by “Dave” that he would “viciously” oppose a T2 member who declared the program a “SCAM,” encouraged fellow members to file an AlertPay dispute and said he’d try to get his money back from SolidTrustPay, another payment processor used by T2.

    Whether the member “Dave” claimed he’d oppose “viciously” for trying to get back his money and complaining about the program planned to file a consumer complaint with any of the world’s law-enforcement agencies is unclear.

    What is clear is that it is common for fraud purveyors and their forum shills to discourage members from filing payment disputes amid claims that such complaints harm a “program” and its members.

    MoneyMakerGroup Doles Out Suspensions To Naysayers

    Separately, MoneyMakerGroup announced it had suspended some members who’d raised questions about T2. Those suspensions were attributed to “mmgcjm,” a “Global Moderator.”

    “Dave,” who purports to be posting from Thailand after jetting from England several days ago while T2 members were clamoring for their cash, appears to have approved of the suspensions.

    “Isn’t it nice here[?],” he crowed. “Should have been done months ago and they also ought to get a life ban for their dreadful behaviour.”

    T2 sells “dream positions” and “dream matrices” amid claims that even “passive” members can earn returns of 2 percent a day over the course of 75 days. The “program” has asserted it has “multiple income streams,” and “Dave” has preemptively denied T2 was operating a cross-border Ponzi scheme. T2 says its has 8,838 members, a claim that leads to troubling questions about whether vulnerable victims were reeled in by T2’s wide net on the web.

    “Chris,” a onetime business partner of “Dave,” is responsible for the “program’s” troubles, according to “Dave,” who earlier asserted that “Chris” would be arrested.

    If a police investigation actually ensues, it almost certainly would lead to questions about the extent of T2’s purported income streams, whether those purported ventures were profitable enough to sustain themselves — let alone T2’s (precompunding) annualized return of 730 percent on top of referral commissions — and whether Dave’s public pleas for members not to file AlertPay disputes were designed to keep a Ponzi scheme intact.

    Another possible area of inquiry is whether “Dave” — who appears to have closed the T2 forum to public viewing even as he suggests on MoneyMakerGroup that people who file disputes with SolidTrustPay will be opposed “viciously” — is trying to chill his own members.

    The MoneyMakerGroup suspensions of T2 doubters attributed to “mmgcjm” appear to involve at least three members and were carried out after a poster asserted that “[a]lmost 3 dozen opportunities” that mmgcjm “promoted as being “good”, “Great”, “Fantastic” and so on in 2011″ are now in the SCAM/CLOSED folder.”

    “mmgcjm” justified the suspensions by asserting that, under the guidelines of the MoneyMakerGroup forum, “programs” in the folder were not necessarily scams.

    As an advertisment on the right side of the T2 thread at MoneyMakerGroup lured readers with a suggestion that another program known as “Moon Fund” paid 8,850 percent “After 24 Hours,” “mmgcjm” claimed that the T2 critic was posting “false information.”

    The suspensions followed a short time later, with a prompt from “mmgcjm” for the T2 naysayers to “Enjoy your vacations!”

     

  • BULLETIN: Federal Judge Orders Jeremy Johnson And Others Acting On His Behalf To Disable Website That Used Court-Appointed Receiver’s Name And Described Firm As Workplace Of ‘Thieves’ And ‘Crooks’

    EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally was published Jan. 9, 2012, 3:01 p.m. It was updated at 5:01 p.m. on the same date. The PP Blog temporarily “unpublished” the story on March 23, 2012. Explanation of why it was taken offline temporarily is here. On March 23, 2012, the PP Blog’s security software recorded a “mass injection attack” as the Blog visited a domain styled CollotGuerard.com while researching matters pertaining to Jeremy Johnson. Collot Guerard is an attorney for the FTC and an alleged subject of harassment by Johnson or people close to Johnson because of the FTC actions against Johnson. The PPBlog is not revisiting the CollotGuerard.com domain and believes it is imprudent for readers to visit the domain.

    Our Jan. 9, 2012, story was republished below on Jan. 15, 2013 . . .

     

    A federal judge in Nevada has ordered Jeremy Johnson and others acting on his behalf to disable a website that used the name of a court-appointed receiver in its domain root and painted the receiver and his firm as “Thieves,” “Lairs” (sic) and “Crooks.”

    An attorney for Robb Evans, the receiver in the Johnson/IWorks fraud case brought by the FTC in 2010 and the namesake of California-based Robb Evans & Associates, petitioned Chief Judge Roger L. Hunt in a Dec. 14 emergency motion to order the site taken offline. Hunt issued the order to disable the site on Friday, according to the docket of the case. The domain was styled “RobbEvansFraud.com.”

    The order also applies to sites that use “any variation of the receiver’s name,” according to the docket. Through his attorney, Evans claimed that Johnson and others were violating a court order, confusing the public and undermining the receivership estate by registering a domain name in the receiver’s name.

    Evans and his firm are fiduciaries in numerous cases and have well-established bona fides. Evans himself rose to national prominence as one of the liquidators in the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) case in the 1990s, earning plaudits from U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green for his efforts to recover funds for victims of BCCI’s massive international fraud.

    Hunt also ordered Johnson to “cease and desist”  from using email addresses that used the name of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC claimed last month that Johnson, accused alongside IWorks Inc. and scores of defendants in December 2010 in an alleged fraud scheme involving hundreds of millions of dollars, had registered numerous domain names that used the FTC’s name.

    The domain names allegedly were purchased in the fall of 2011, approaching a year after the FTC brought the Johnson/IWorks case.

    Johnson and others also registered domain names in the names of individual FTC attorneys involved in the Johnson/IWorks case, according to the FTC. Although Hunt did not ban such domain registrations that used the name of the FTC or its attorneys, he warned both Johnson and the FTC that contempt was a remedy if there was no “good faith” effort to resolve the domain-name issue, according to the court docket.

    The FTC last week declined to comment on the domain-name dispute. In court filings, it has argued that the domain registrations and email addresses could confuse the public and cause harm.

    In court filings, the FTC claimed that at least one of the domains was used to harass Collot Guerard, a longtime FTC attorney and member of the District of Columbia Bar since 1973. A site that used her name now appears to have been taken offline. Although the domain continues to resolve to a server, content the FTC deemed harassing in nature appears to have vanished.

    Guerard and Evans also were derided in ads someone placed on Google, according to last month’s emergency motions. Those ads appear to have been removed. The identity of the person or company that placed them is unclear.

    Recent developments in the FTC’s action against Johnson and other IWorks defendants have led to questions about where free speech ends and harassment begins. The developments also have led to questions about whether government employees at any level could become the subjects of attacks and harassment campaigns through instances in which defendants “fight back” by buying up domain names in the names of their accusers and placing ads that describe their accusers as criminals.

    Other than self-restraint, there appear to be few obstacles to prevent a defendant from registering a domain name in the name of his or her prosecutor or accuser and perhaps even driving traffic to the sites by purchasing ads that use highly suggestive language or make an outright claim that the public employee is a crook.

    An ad that appeared on Google described Guerard as “corrupt.” A separate ad described Evans, the receiver, as a fraudster. Both Guerard and Evans have had roles in the Johnson/IWorks case.

    Johnson has denied wrongdoing.

     

  • JSS Tripler 2 (T2) Creates Another Bizarre Ponzi-Land Spectacle; Purported Operator Purportedly Takes Off For Thailand After Threatening Purported One-Time Business Partner In Wake Of Purported AlertPay Freeze

    Online huckster “Ken Russo,” also known as “DRdave,” appears once again to have backed an HYIP fraud scheme and recruited a downline into a Ponzi morass. This one is known as JSS Tripler 2 — T2 for shorthand — and the backstory is just plain bizarre.

    Several cross-border crimes punishable by jail time already may have occurred, and there are reports that T2 somehow was operating through an AlertPay account that was not owned by T2 or T2’s purported operator, another person known as “Dave.”

    Like virtually all HYIP schemes, details are fuzzy and ambiguous. But “Dave” apparently was operating T2 through an AlertPay account owned by “Chris,” and the Canada-based payment processor — according to Ponzi board posts — has frozen the account.

    “Dave,” meanwhile, asserted that the account contained $200,000 and that “Chris” will “be in police custody by the end of the day,” according to Ponzi-board posts.

    Although the “police” assertion appears to have been made earlier this month, there appears to be no corresponding information about what police agency “Dave” called to have “Chris” taken into custody. Nor has “Dave” explained why police should consider “Chris” a criminal at the exclusion of “Dave,” whose T2 program claims to pay members a return of 2 percent a day plus referral commissions.

    The purported daily payout rate is double that claimed by AdSurfDaily, which the U.S. Secret Service said more than three years ago was operating a massive international Ponzi scheme on the Internet. Like T2, ASD also offered referral commissions on top of absurd daily returns.

    Such a “confluence” of payment schemes and an apparent lack of outside revenue are markers of a pure or virtually pure Ponzi scheme — even though criminals on the Ponzi forums turn a blind eye to the fundamental mathematical reality and the virtual certainly that members are being paid from the funds of other members.

    It is unclear if anything about T2 is real.

    What is clear is that ASD President Andy Bowdoin was indicted on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities in December 2010. He faces up to 125 years in federal prison if convicted on all counts, a fact virtually ignored by T2 promoters. ASD also was promoted on Ponzi boards such as MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold.

    At the same time T2’s “Dave” was claiming to have alerted police about “Chris,” “Dave” appears not to have explained what he intended to do if “Chris” called police on him.

    Also apparently absent from the police claim is any sort of real-world explanation of how it apparently came to be that “Dave” had come to believe it somehow was appropriate for a program “admin” such as himself to run a scheme through a third-party’s AlertPay account, not an account in the name of T2.

    “Dave” appears also to have asserted he had the power to exact “a lifetime ban from internet access” against “Chris” while further asserting that he somehow could authorize AlertPay to pay T2 members with money in the frozen account held by “Chris.”

    Ponzi-forum posts from October assert T2’s server was located in Thailand, with “Dave” being “from the UK.” It appears now, however, that the server is in the United States. “I Got Paid” posts on the Ponzi boards suggest payments have come from a Gmail address that uses the name of “Chris” in its makeup, not an email address from the JSSTripler2 domain.

    Such mechanics also were in place for JustBeenPaid and JSSTripler (see link below), “programs” that appear to have used multiple domains and addresses in multiple jurisdictions to funnel payouts to participants.

    For his part, “Ken Russo” — who earlier introduced members to the Club Asteria disaster and any number of fraud schemes — is describing T2 members who are demanding real-world answers as individuals who should be “deleted.”

    “The relatively few members who are demonstrating impatience along with their demand for a refund should be taken care of and deleted from the program and this forum,” “Ken Russo” ventured, according to RealScam.com, an antifraud site that concentrates on mass-marketing fraud. “Their continued presence here will only create more anxiety and frustration.”

    T2 was almost impossibly bizarre from the moment it came out of the gate. The “program” apparently believed it prudent to adopt the name of an existing program in the fraud stable of JustBeenPaid: JSS Tripler. Ponzi-board supporters of the emerging T2 “program” asserted that, since JSS Tripler apparently had not trademarked its name, that using the name as the calling card of a new “program” was perfectly acceptable.

    Why any legitimate entity would want to adopt the name of an obvious fraud scheme such as JSS Tripler was left to the imagination — as are so many things in the foundationally corrupt worlds of HYIPs.

    In any event, “Dave” now claims that he’s traveling to Thailand to try to right the T2 ship because he was having trouble concentrating from his undisclosed earlier location, according to Ponzi forum posts. Some T2 cheerleaders appear to be urging T2 members not to file disputes with AlertPay, a common occurrence when HYIP Ponzi schemes begin to tank.

    T2 apparently also has licensed itself to ban members and seize money (or the representations of money) in their accounts for speaking ill of the purported “program.”

  • RECOMMENDED READING: Fortune Magazine On The Manipulations Of Recidivist Con Man Barry Minkow — And Deseret News On The Sentencing Of Utah Ponzi Schemer Travis Wright In Front Of A ‘Couple Of Rows Of Eagle Scouts’

    EDITOR’S NOTE: This post contains links to recommended reading on Barry Minkow and Travis Wright — the former a classic narcissist and con man doing his second stint in federal prison after having played the redemption circuit for years, the latter a man who used other people’s money to ensconce himself in the lap of luxury, surround himself  with gaudy taxidermy such as a full-body African lion — and once reportedly paid $150,000 to have a swimming pool at his tony digs moved eight feet to make his life more perfect.

    The stories on Minkow in Fortune magazine and Travis Wright in Deseret News are intriguing and, we believe, socially significant. Both provide plenty of fodder for rumination as America continues to confront an epidemic of white-collar fraud . . .

    Barry Minkow first rose to national infamy as a con man who’d managed to dupe investors and Wall Street before he was old enough to sip a cocktail legally in many jurisdictions. The spectacular rise and fall of his ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning business became one of the great cautionary tales of the 1980s.

    Minkow was sentenced to federal prison for the ZZZZ Best caper, but reportedly embraced Christianity while jailed and later was freed. He became a pastor who doubled as a fraud analyst and television commentator.

    But Minkow, now 45, is back in prison. Fortune magazine explains why in its Jan. 16 issue — and also reports that Minkow appears to have let it slip during the filming of a movie on his life that he was up to no good again. Here is an outtake:

    “Finally, one day in September 2009, recounts Meyers, he was in the production booth with headphones on when Minkow and James Caan were schmoozing between takes. Perhaps forgetting about the open mike in his lapel, Minkow leaned over to Caan and whispered, “I financed this movie by clipping companies,” Minkow said.

    “Clipping,” of course, is a slang word for “swindling.” Minkow says the incident “never happened.” “Not ever,” he wrote Fortune in an e-mail in September. “And have him produce the tape.”

    Fortune reports that the tape was produced and that “Minkow said it.”

    And Fortune reports plenty of other things, including an assertion that some people working on the film were getting paid in strange ways.

    Read the Fortune story.

    Separately, Deseret News is reporting that Utah Ponzi schemer Travis Wright has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

    Here is an outtake from the story in the Deseret News:

    “A couple of rows of Eagle Scouts in court to support a former Scoutmaster-turned-criminal might have backfired against a convicted Ponzi scheme operator Friday.”

    Going to court to observe proceedings as part of a civics lesson is one thing. But should Eagle Scouts assemble in court to show “support” for a man facing sentencing for one of the largest frauds in Utah history?

    In Ponzi schemes — as longtime observers and victims know all too well — the visuals often are incongruous. In the AdSurfDaily case, for instance, some members who openly described themselves as people of faith looked on and said nothing as ASD President Andy Bowdoin claimed the prosecution was the work of “Satan” and compared the U.S. Secret Service to the 9/11 terrorists.

    It’s our hope that the scouts were present at Wright’s sentencing to receive an education on how Ponzis alter lives and futures, not as stage props for Wright. And we also hope that Wright, post-release, shows the scouts that redemption is not just a religious or penal theory and that he doesn’t backslide like Minkow and become a slave to self-absorption.

    Read the full story on Wright’s sentencing in the Deseret News, which notes that “several” victims were crying in the courtroom.

    NOTE ON ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDED READING: “The Salon of Famous Babies,” a classic poem by Irving Feldman, is not about Ponzi schemes. But if a Ponzi schemer or narcissist’s “daydream of glory” has sucked the joy from your life, you very well might find that the poem gives voice to your feelings of anger and provides a measure of comfort.

    Visit the Virginia Quarterly Review to read “The Salon of Famous Babies.”

    “As well teach ducks to drown as teach him not to take it all as owed the world’s own son and heir.” — From “The Salon of Famous Babies” by Irving Feldman, American poet