AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming has pleaded not guilty to all six felony counts contained in a grand-jury indictment returned Jan. 26.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen L. Strombom presided over Leaming’s arraignment at 1:30 p.m. PT in Tacoma, Wash.
Leaming, 56, of Spanaway, Wash., remained in federal custody after the proceeding. His trial date on three counts of Retaliating Against a Federal Judge or Law Enforcement Office by False Claim and single counts of Concealing a Person from Arrest , Felon in Possession of a Firearm and False and Fictitious Instruments was set for March 20.
Leaming has been detained near Seattle since his initial arrest in November 2011. Prosecutors said he was found with two federal fugitives from Arkansas and at least six weapons. The fugitives — Timothy Shawn Donavan, 63, and Sharon Jeannette Henningsen, 67 — now are listed as federal inmates at facilities in Texas.
Donavan and Henningsen initially were freed on bond several days after their arrests with Leaming in Washingston state. After returning to Arkansas, trouble soon followed, and they were ordered back into federal custody for violating bond conditions.
Leaming, who has a 2005 felony conviction for piloting an aircraft without a valid pilot’s certificate, is accused of filing false liens against several public officials, including at least five officials involved in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case.
He initially was detained in November on the false-liens charges. A grand jury later added the firearms charge, the concealment charge related to Donavan and Henningsen and the charge of false and fictitious instruments. That charge stemmed from the alleged issuance by Leaming of a bogus “bonded promissory note” with a purported face value of $1 million, according to the indictment.
UPDATED 1:33 P.M. ET WITH LINK TO INDICTMENT: AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming is facing new federal-felony charges.
Leaming, 56, originally was arrested in November 2011 by an FBI terrorism task force on charges of filing false liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD Ponzi scheme case.
Prosecutors now say he faces charges in addition to the ones originally filed and will be arraigned on the charges tomorrow in Tacoma, Wash.
Among the new charges are concealing a person from arrest, being a felon in possession of a firearm and using a false and fictitious instrument, the office of U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan of the Western District of Washington said.
Leaming is among at least six purported “sovereign citizens” recently charged or convicted of crimes in the western section of the state.
Timothy Garrison, 60, of Mount Vernon, Wash., was sentenced yesterday to 42 months in federal prison for a tax scam that cost the U.S. government more than $2.5 million.
Like Leaming, Garrison’s activities included filing false liens. He also made “threats to ‘arrest’ law enforcement officers,” prosecutors said.
“No one is above the law,” Durkan said. “[Garrison’s] scheme now creates a hardship for those who put their trust in Mr. Garrison – they have big tax bills to pay. His further abuse of the legal system with fraudulent liens and so-called ‘arrest warrants,’ is a dangerous mix for our law enforcement officers who are trying to keep our communities safe.”
A convicted felon prior to the charges for which he was sentenced yesterday, Garrison assisted in the filing of more than 50 returns with false or fraudulent information, prosecutors said.
When Leaming was arrested in November, he was found with two federal fugitives from Arkansas, along with firearms, prosecutors said.
UPDATE AT 1:33 P.M. ET. Here is a link to the indictment, which also names alleged Leaming associate David Carroll Stephenson in a count of retaliating against a federal judge or federal law-enforcement officer. Stephenson currently is serving time in an Arizona federal prison in an earlier case, and prosecutors said he’ll be brought to Washington state on the new retaliation charge against him. He is referenced in this November 2010 PP Blog story on a Leaming email sent to ASD members. Stephenson also is referenced in this November 2011 Leaming story about certain communications allegedly directed at U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts at the behest of Stephenson.
The indictment describes the weapons allegedly found with Leaming and describes the fugitives by their initials. The PP Blog previously confirmed that the fugitives were Timothy Shawn Donavan and Sharon Jeannette Henningsen, who were wanted in an alleged mail-fraud caper involving envelope stuffing in Arkansas.
“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.
BULLETIN:Timothy Shawn Donavan, one of two federal fugitives from Arkansas found in Washington state Nov. 22 with AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming, is back in jail.
Separately, records show that Leaming’s Washington state firm was the registered agent for two defunct companies linked to the alleged Donavan mail-fraud scheme and that Leaming himself — using the name “Kenneth Wayne” and dropping his surname — was an officer in the companies.
U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes III revoked Donavan’s bond after Donavan, 63, refused to be sworn at a court proceeding in Arkansas earlier this month in violation of a bond condition that required him to cooperate at pretrial hearings in the mail-fraud case filed against Donavan in February 2011.
Meanwhile, Donavan’s co-defendant in the mail-fraud case, Sharon Jeannette Henningsen, also is listed as back in federal custody. The circumstances surrounding her renewed detention were not immediately clear.
Henningsen, 67, also was found with Leaming in the Pacific Northwest, federal prosecutors said in November. Donavan and Henningsen were participants in an Arkansas-based fraud involving envelope-stuffing, according to an indictment filed in February 2011.
Donavan and Henningsen were freed on conditional bond several days after their arrests in Washington state. They returned to Arkansas, and trouble begun anew in very short order, according to court records.
In the order revoking Donavan’s bond, Holmes said that Donavan “continues to insist, as he has in past proceedings, on repeating incomprehensible legal jargon in response to any question the Court posits, instead of cooperating with Court proceedings and responding appropriately to questions asked. Donavan ultimately refused to either swear or affirm to tell the truth during the proceedings.”
The judge warned Donavan that he’d be taken into custody by U.S. Marshals if he refused to cooperate, according to the order revoking bond.
On Jan. 23, Holmes ordered Donavan to be transported to a Bureau of Prisons medical facility in Texas, according to records.
On Dec. 28, Donavan and Henningsen filed a strange pleading styled “NOTICE of Tender for Setoff and a Request Regarding a Statement of Account by Sharon Jeannette Henningsen and Timothy Shawn Donavan.”
The Dec. 28 pleading was filed on the heels of other strange pleadings, including one styled,”Notice: Forgive Me Request; Constructive Notice of Conditional Acceptance and Request to Continue Public Proceedings.”
Although Donavan and Henningsen had been scheduled to go on trial Jan. 19, the trial date has been canceled — and prosecutors have filed a superseding indictment against both defendants that adds at least four mail-fraud-related counts to the 15 originally filed 11 months ago.
In the new allegations, federal prosecutors referenced two defunct Washington state companies — 1st Incentive Co. and Trail Head Options Inc. — allegedly tied to the Arkansas fraud of Donavan and Henningsen.
Both firms, according to records in Washington state, listed Leaming’s firm — American International Business Law Inc. — as their registered agent. Leaming, who sometimes drops his surname and uses simply “Kenneth Wayne,” is listed as an officer of both companies.
Prosecutors said the Donavan/Henningsen mail-fraud scheme netted more than $2.2 million.
Leaming, 56, of Spanaway, Wash., was arrested in November on charges of filing bogus liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD case. The U.S. Secret Service said ASD was a Florida-based Ponzi scheme that gathered at least $110 million.
ASD President Andy Bowdoin, 77, was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities in 2010.
Some ASD members reportedly relied on Leaming for legal advice, even though he is not an attorney. Whether Dovavan and Henningsen did the same thing is unclear. Also unclear is whether they were ASD members.
Leaming is jailed near Seattle. He is not named a defendant in the Arkansas case, but the indictment refers to at least one “unindicted co-conspirator.”
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.
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.
Veteran Ponzi-board huckster “strosdegoz,” also known as “manolo,” now is flogging a new “program” known as “Huge Yield.” There already is an unconfirmed report that HugeYield has suffered a DDoS attack.
“strosdegoz” emerged last year as a regular shill for Club Asteria, the purported Virginia-based program that became a Ponzi-forum darling and later announced its PayPal account had been suspended. Claims about ClubAsteria came under investigation by CONSOB, the Italian securities regulator, and the American Red Cross later clashed with the purported “program,” which traded on the name of the relief agency.
As time moved on, “strosdegoz” later joined accused Ponzi schemer Andy Bowdoin of AdSurfDaily in flogging a mysterious “program” known as “OneX.” There is a report today that Bowdoin either canceled or postponed his latest OneX pitch because a fellow pitchman identified as “Alan” has “pneumonia and is not able to do anything right now.”
The pneumonia announcement was attributed to an email sent by Bowdoin, who is accused of orchestrating an international Ponzi scheme involving at least $110 million through ASD. His criminal trial is set for September 2012.
Huge Yield purports that $120 can turn into $1,000. The following HugeYield claims are verbatim:
“A Traditional SPICED UP follow your sponsor 2×2 that will surprise anyone online TODAY! HugeYield has changed the way marketing a tradition 2×2 is done. We have added a safety net to ensure that all members progress through the program and make their ultimate goal, The $1000.00 Payout!”
In the website’s FAQs section, a question about what payment processors HugeYield accepts is answered in this verbatim fashion:
“We accepts payments and pays all commissions through Alertpay,liberty reserve and solid trust pay,perfect Money and Okpay.”
Whether “”strosdegoz/manolo” is concerned about HugeYield’s apparent lack of grammar and usage skills is unclear.
“strosdegoz/manolo” is pitching HugeYield on MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold. In addition to ClubAsteria and OneX, he has pitched Centurion Wealth Circle and “The Tornado.”
Both MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold are identified in federal court filings as places from which international Ponzi schemes are promoted.
BULLETIN: A Florida jury found that TD Bank assisted now-disbarred and imprisoned attorney Scott Rothstein in his epic Ponzi scheme and has found the bank liable for $67 million in damages.
The victorious attorney in the civil case is David S. Mandel, who represented the plaintiffs against the bank.
If Mandel’s name seems familiar to PP Blog readers, it’s because he also is the court-appointed receiver in the Commodities Online LLC fraud case brought by the SEC last year.
Separately, a company known as SSH2 Acquisitions Inc. had sued Commodities Online figure James C. Howard III on Sept. 15, 2010, alleging that Howard and others were running a massive Ponzi scheme into which SSH2 had plowed $39 million.
Records in Nevada show that former AdSurfDaily member and “Surf’s Up” forum moderator Terralynn Hoy was a “director” of SSH2.
Hoy has not been accused of wrongdoing.
The private lawsuit against Howard and the others became notable because of the clashing images: Although SSH2 was complaining about the alleged Ponzi scheme directed at it by Howard and others, it was doing so in the months after Hoy had helped lead cheers on Surf’s Up for accused ASD Ponzi schemer Andy Bowdoin, who was implicated by the U.S. Secret Service in an alleged Ponzi scheme even larger than Howard’s alleged scheme. Hoy also was a moderator on a forum that supported AdViewGlobal, an autosurf that vanished mysteriously in June 2009.
Now defunct, Surf’s Up was known for unapologetic, unabashed cheerleading for Bowdoin, whom federal prosecutors said had swindled investors in Alabama in a previous securities caper during the 1990s and took in at least $110 million through ASD. Clarence Busby, an alleged business partner of Bowdoin and the operator of the Golden Panda Ad Builder autosurf, swindled investors in three prime-bank schemes in the 1990s, according to the SEC.
More than $14 million linked to Golden Panda was seized as part of the ASD case — and yet the cheerleading for autosurf schemes continued on Surf’s Up. The forum labeled ASD pro-se litigant Curtis Richmond a “hero” after he accused the judge and prosecutors of crimes in 2009.
On Nov. 22, 2011, AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming was arrested by the FBI in Washington state on charges he filed bogus liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD Ponzi case.
Some ASD members apparently have relied on Leaming for legal advice, even though he is not an attorney.
Leaming was found with two federal fugitives implicated in an Arkansas-based, home-business scheme involving envelope-stuffing, federal prosecutors said. Those fugitives — Timothy Shawn Donavan and Sharon Jeannette Henningsen — were indicted on mail-fraud charges in February 2011, according to federal records.
Whether Donavan and Henningsen were ASD members is unclear. Also unclear is whether they relied on Leaming for legal advice at any point in time. Their filings, however, appear to be consistent with filings in cases involving purported “sovereign citizens.”
Although Leaming remains jailed, Donavan, 63, and Henningsen, 67, were released on bond in Washington state several days after their arrests and kept a court date in Arkansas on Dec. 8. During their initial Arkansas appearance, both defendants suggested they’d defend themselves — while also ambiguously suggesting they might hire a lawyer, according to court filings.
They again were released on bond, with the judge ordering them as a bond condition “to report to the court within 10 days o[n] whether they had hired an attorney or intended to pursue representing themselves.”
They did not do so, according to federal court records. The judge then set a hearing date for Dec. 27 and required Donavan and Henningsen to formally explain whether they’d rely on attorneys or themselves to defend the case.
On Dec. 27 — the date of the hearing and nine days after the initial deadline to inform the court on how they intended to defend the case — Donavan and Henningsen filed a bizarre pleading styled, “Notice: Forgive Me Request; Constructive Notice of Conditional Acceptance and Request to Continue Public Proceedings.”
In the pleading, Donavan and Henningsen apparently argued that they needed “80” more days to make up their minds. Their trail date, however, already had been scheduled for Jan. 19, 2012. Both defendants were aware of the trial date, according to court records.
It got stranger yet.
“At the hearing and in their Notice the Defendants stated that they were appearing as ‘Authorized Representatives for the Secured Party Creditor having a security interest in the collateral belonging to the Debtor-Defendant, SHARON JEANNETTE HENNINGSEN AND TIMOTHY SHAWN DONAVAN, and also accommodation parties, hereinafter, ‘Offerees.’” according to an order issued by the judge.
“The Offerees,” the strange pleading continued, “are in receipt of INDICTMENT a copy attached hereto and incorporated herein as if full reproduced herein as ‘Exhibit 1’ dated February 24, 2011 in Case #2:11-CR-20008, hereinafter ‘offer’, (sic) from UNITED STATES OF AMERICA via M.W. FLEMING, Assistant United States Attorney, U.S. Attorney’s Office . . ., hereinafter `Offerer’”. (sic)
Donavan and Henningsen then apparently ventured that they’d accept appointed counsel if the appointed counsel would “hold them harmless” for anything they suffered.
The judge denied the motion for an 80-day continuance and appointed provisional counsel.
How the case will proceed was not immediately clear.
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!”
UPDATED 6:31 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) A website collecting money through PayPal for the criminal defense of accused Ponzi schemer Andy Bowdoin of AdSurfDaily appears to have lost its ability to gather funds designated for an attorney’s “trust account.”
This message (next paragraph) appears if would-be Bowdoin sympathizers click on any of a number of payment buttons on the site, which is known as “Andy’s Fundraising Army.”
“This recipient is currently unable to receive money.”
The message originates on PayPal’s server.
Why the trust account lost the ability to collect money via PayPal is unclear. The office of U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. of the District of Columbia said this afternoon that it “typically does not comment on pending cases, and has no comment on this particular matter.”
Machen’s office is leading the Bowdoin prosecution.
Bowdoin, 77, is awaiting a September 2012 trial on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities. The U.S. Secret Service said the ASD patriarch was presiding over a Ponzi scheme involving at least $110 million and thousands of victims.
In September 2011, the Secret Service and federal prosecutors returned to members more than $55 million seized in 2008 in the civil portion of the case. The agency described ASD as a “criminal enterprise.”
Bowdoin began to solicit money through the fundraising website last summer, after repeated delays. Information published on the site suggests Bowdoin collected about $26,800, far short of this stated goal of $500,000. The site positioned Bowdoin as “David,” with the government as “Goliath.”
In recent months, Bowdoin has been pushing a mysterious scheme known as OneX, claiming God had delivered OneX to enable him to pay for his criminal defense.
ASD figure Kenneth Wayne Leaming, a purported “sovereign citizen,” was arrested by the FBI in November 2011. He is detained in a federal facility near Seattle on charged he filed fraudulent liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD Ponzi case.
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.”
