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Tag: AdSurfDaly

  • ASD: A Thimble, A Pinhead And A Quark Before Nothingness

    Andy Bowdoin.
    Andy Bowdoin.

    UPDATED 10:21 A.M. EST (U.S.A.) Tomorrow will mark an important anniversary in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case: the passage of two full months since prosecutors filed a second forfeiture complaint against assets tied to the firm.

    Neither ASD President Andy Bowdoin nor members of his family from whom property was seized has filed a claim. No attorney has entered an appearance notice. The lack of action is in stark contrast to what happened in August after the first seizure of ASD assets.

    Amid much fanfare — and amid a strangely jubilant atmosphere fueled by people who refused to disengage from their trances — Bowdoin moved quickly in August to stake a claim to tens of millions of dollars and other assets seized. Some Bowdoin zealots predicted a slam-dunk win for ASD, especially after it advised the court that it would be willing to operate under monitoring and supervision if some of the Great Man’s money was returned.

    What the ASD supporters didn’t see — what some of them refused to see — was that the money was seized as the assets of a criminal enterprise that had money on deposit in at least three countries and had been taking steps to get more and more money outside the United States. One of the countries — Antigua — is now front-and-center in a massive case of international financial fraud involving R. Allen Stanford and his companies.

    It will be well worth your time to click on the link above. Read the story, and read the entire SEC complaint from a link at the bottom of the story. Some of the allegations — the tortured explanations by Stanford and his companies — will remind you of elements of the ASD case.

    Also note that the money ASD had on deposit in Antigua was not in ASD’s name. Bowdoin, however, had control of the money and could have converted it to his own use at any moment in time. The amount was at least $1 million, according to court filings.

    Andy Bowdoin was at the helm of the ASD enterprise and, by implication in the forfeiture complaint, was a criminal. He took the 5th prior to the evidentiary hearing because he knew of the possible criminal repercussions of testifying. The ASD monitoring plan was a bid to short-circuit a possible criminal prosecution by getting the government to agree that only highly technical violations of the law had occurred. In other words, a possible $100 million Ponzi fraud using the financial systems of at least three countries was no big deal.

    Prosecutors never were going to accept a Bowdoin-provided remedy, especially one that attempted to sanitize criminality by treating wire fraud, money-laundering and a Ponzi scheme as minor offenses. An acceptance of such a deal would have sent a clear signal that the worst that could happen to a probable autosurf Ponzi scheme operator was court-supervised monitoring of the scheme — as it re-started with returned funds and attempted not to engage in wire fraud, money-laundering and the sale of unregistered securities.

    Such an outcome would have marked a chilly day for U.S. jurisprudence, the day America’s courts provided wink-nod cover for probable Ponzi-pushing felons — and even handed them back money and turned a blind eye to abuses that occurred before the good guys arrived.

    Investigators went on to discover that Bowdoin told insiders that $1 million had been stolen from ASD by “Russian hackers.” He didn’t even file a police report, but he did tell Judge Rosemary Collyer that ASD couldn’t operate and needed her to free up money to pay employees and bills. What Bowdoin didn’t tell the judge up front, as he asked her to release seized funds, was that ASD had more than $1 million on desposit in Antigua, under a name other than its own. And he also didn’t tell the judge about the earlier alleged theft of $1 million by “Russian hackers.”

    As a PR ploy, however, the offer to operate under supervision was a masterstroke. It kept members’ hope alive and enabled ASD supporters to paint the prosecutors and even the judge as unreasonable if they couldn’t see the beauty of the monitoring plan.

    At ASD’s request, an evidentiary hearing was held Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. ASD insisted it was not a Ponzi scheme, called an expert witness to knock down the government’s assertions, and summoned three other witnesses to help make its case. At the conclusion of the hearing, some members of the Pro-ASD Surf’s Up forum, drunk on fantasy, partied long into the night. They were certain that ASD had won and dismissed all reports that didn’t validate their delusions.

    In November, Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled that ASD had not demonstrated it was a legal business and not a Ponzi scheme at the evidentiary hearing. She found nothing of merit in the expert’s argument, pointing out holes through which one could drive a convoy of earth-moving machines. Some ASD members instantly claimed the fix was in. Such claims, of course, should be seen for what they are: self-validating drivel.

    With a fresh win, prosecutors filed a second forfeiture complaint on Dec. 19. It is the most important document so far, the one that dealt ASD a crushing blow and signaled a nuclear development to come.

    Prior to the December complaint, ASD could fit its remaining credibility in a thimble. Now it could fit it on the head of a pin. A quark, believed to be the smallest part of an atom, could accommodate ASD’s credibility at the conclusion of the case — with room to spare.

    This case will be marked by a complete absence of ASD credibility, one of the reasons some ASD supporters and Surf’s Up members are furiously trying to change the subject and get people to take their eyes off the ball.

    This case has a high probability of reducing the cheerleaders to emotional rubble and undermining the good works of their lives. Goodness exists in all people. A person can be stubborn and completely wrong-headed — and still be a good person. The line gets drawn, however, where wrong-headedness morphs into deliberate attempts to deceive and misinform.

    Some Surf’s up members now are promoting AdViewGlobal (AVG), a company that shares a common executive with ASD and a common customer-service employee operating from Florida — even though AVG claims to be registered in Uruguay and running things out of Panama. Yesterday, in the wake of the SEC’s allegations against Stanford, banking customers in Panama and other countries in Central America, South America and the Caribbean were lining up to get their money out of local banks.

    The ASD case is no more about the abuse of government power than it is the Easter Bunny. ASD is an international racketeering enterprise. If you’re carrying its water, you are a racketeer — and your quark awaits before nothingness finally settles in.

  • AdSurfDaily: Bowdoin The Envy Of Con Artists Worldwide

    andybowdoinbwASD President Andy Bowdoin demonstrated that any person with access to an autosurf script can put tens of millions of dollars on the table if he or she can meet two minimal conditions: the ability to recruit a few key MLM promoters, and the ability to be influenced by MLM promoters who know how to take the business to the next level by playing fast and loose with the truth.

    One of the reasons autosurfs continue to proliferate is because other con men can’t stand the thought that Bowdoin — himself a con man — relieved people of nearly $100 million in a matter of only weeks.

    “Con man envy” perhaps is Bowdoin’s greatest contribution to the autosurf trade. He is proof of the nefarious dream. Surfs have been popping up left and right since people learned Bowdoin had huge amounts of money stockpiled in banks (and in the form of uncashed checks) and had gone on a real-estate and vehicle-buying frenzy.

    Did you think they were popping up because the model was the product of genius and a utopian desire to let all people share in wealth created by a perfect machine?

    Bowdoin surrendered tens of millions of dollars to the government yesterday, demonstrating the machine is not perfect and no healthy ingenuity is involved. Bowdoin, for instance, spent $500,000 to place a deposit so ASD could process credit-card transactions from Antigua. He didn’t seek members’ approval; he simply did it, thus placing his enterprise in even greater danger of collapse. Members also paid for the properties, vehicles and toys he or insiders bought — each one of them weighting down the Ponzi even more.

    Andy, who deposited corporate funds into personal accounts over which he had sole signatory authority, had new houses and new cars, places to go and people to meet. He’d finally arrived at age 74, and some people even were happy to trade wages for the earning power of all those “ad packs,” which became a new form of currency in Quincy and elsewhere.

    And Bowdoin’s donation of 100,000 “ad packs” to a charity? That also weighted down the Ponzi, putting even more stress on members. The donation alone created a $365,000 liability for ASD at the advertised pay-out rates, even more over time with compounding.

    Any volunteer or employee who’d accept “ad packs” instead of cash was a friend to Bowdoin, who simply could transfer the responsibility to pay for the “ad packs” and their earning power to members.

    Still think ASD had a prayer of surviving?

    Bowdoin also was spending money like a sailor who’d been at sea for six months and suddenly, excitedly, unexpectedly found himself in possession of a big paycheck on shore in the Bright City.  Lots of sailors spend money not because they need to, but because they can. Andy had become a big man in Quincy: Realtors and auto dealers couldn’t wait to see him or members of his family.

    Some of the new surfs have ties to ASD, either directly or through sentiment. We know this because some of the people promoting the new enterprises traded on ASD’s pain to create buzz for the upstarts.

    Cynical does not even begin to describe it.

    A “Poor Andy” theme has been an early selling point in promotions. Part of it is because folks with big downlines don’t want to get sued by people they brought into the program, and they don’t want to have their “profits” disgorged by the government or a receiver it appoints. By casting Bowdoin as a victim of a foundationally corrupt government, promoters hope to keep the heat off themselves while launching new enterprises that essentially are ASD packaged with different words.

    ASD was a Ponzi; the new autosurfs soon will become Ponzis, if they’re not already Ponzis. “Rebates aren’t guaranteed” is a Ponzi signature, a disclaimer the companies use on the theory it will insulate them from claims. It didn’t work for ASD; it won’t work for the new companies.

    Why? Because it’s the equivalent of saying that bank-robbery laws don’t apply to you simply because you make a formal statement that bank-robbery laws don’t apply to you. To the Ponzi purveyor, however, the words themselves are self-validating. We aren’t a Ponzi because rebates aren’t guaranteed. They also serve the secondary purpose of sounding reasonable, putting the onus on you to recognize you’re granting the operator license to keep your money and become rich when the Ponzi math becomes too inconvenient.

    Virtually all Ponzis pay in the early stages; it’s what keeps money flowing into the system. But “rebates aren’t guaranteed” is the “out” — one that can be exercised at any point in time and for any reason, including “We just want to keep the money now.”

    Shame on prosecutors for not understanding “rebates aren’t guaranteed” are the magical words that make the enterprise wholesome, a business of which society can be proud  — even as family members are shunned and lose the esteem and respect of other family members for introducing them to such a wholesome pursuit.

    There’s a good chance your friendly autosurf promoter is in deep trouble with his or her own family for ASD and Golden Panda losses and the grief associated with a court battle –and that the promoter is selling the new autosurf in a bid to recover losses and get back in the good graces of people they love.

    And there also is a chance the promoter is trying to recover personal losses by selling yet another autosurf.

    The Bowdoin Roadmap

    By getting caught, Bowdoin accidentally provided a roadmap on how not to get caught — at least not right away. Few autosurf promoters these days would dare claim that Google endorsed the enterprise after entering into a “partnership.” Fewer yet would dare claim that the President of the United States had given the autosurf operator  his stamp of approval at a White House dinner.

    There is shorthand for this: President = Secret Service, and Secret Service = No Stone Unturned.  Thus — at least temporarily — ends the ridiculous notion that the President is on board the autosurf ship. It was nothing more than a lie that achieved virality. The Google lie also went viral.

    And the rallies, the ones at which faithful volunteers collected members’ money and paperwork on camera and laid it neatly in plastic baskets? Thanks to Bowdoin, new owners will put the lid on rallies and the collection of money by volunteers — customers, after all, might have trouble reconciling why a professional advertising company is using volunteers to round up the loot. (The irony of placing money in plastic baskets in a case what went on to become a money-laundering prosecution is almost too much to contemplate.)

    But don’t rest easy, even as you’re reverse-engineering Bowdoin’s mistakes to make sure your operation doesn’t repeat them and get on the Feds’ radar screens.

    Here’s how the new autosurf operators will get caught, despite what they’ve learned from Bowdoin’s experience and despite reportedly moving to “offshore” locations such as Panama and Uruguay:

    • The word “offshore” itself will signal investigators that the new enterprise studied the ASD case and determined one of ASD’s core “weaknesses” was its domestic location. Some people already are bragging about this. Early promoters of “offshore” surf sites have claimed the sites provide protection from the SEC, the IRS and state attorneys general. Some of these people are the same people who promoted Google “partnerships” and White House ties.
    • A hiccup by a payment processor or an international probe of payment processors could neuter autosurfs and leave tens of thousands of participants holding the bag. There is a distinct possibility that governments worldwide will crack down on processors that do business with autosurfs. In the post-Bernard Madoff Ponzi era — and with the global economy shedding jobs as wealth continues to evaporate — nations will take a closer look at the international wire business.
    • Credit-card issuers and banks will more closely monitor transactions. They’re tired of posting hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. Shareholders will demand additional controls and regulation.
    • Some autosurf promoters are trading so heavily on government resentment that it has become a signature of Ponzi fraud. Even at this moment, promoters are trying to build your resentment so you’ll give them more money. They’ll tell you that the government is antibusiness, anti-little guy, antiwealth, and they’ll point to the $700 billion U.S. corporate bailout and employ other populist rhetoric to make you believe that real patriots play the autosurf game. The loudness, coupled with the brazen conduct of promoters, will put them squarely in the sights of regulators and prosecutors.
    • The U.S. government is well aware that autosurfs exist, but agencies lack the money to police them individually. One possible approach is to work with domestic and international agencies to engineer a sting operation. Such an approach has political support because voters are tired of reading about Ponzi schemes and how wealth is being depleted by people with smiles on their faces and access to a computer. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the government will work proactively with a TV network to record the actual planning and final execution of the sting. The networks live for this kind of thing, and the public loves to see it. (One new autosurf already is using a reference to the NBC television network to sanitize the opportunity, an act as reckless as claiming the President is your buddy when he is not. The shorthand for the pitch is Autosurf = NBC, an utterly preposterous claim. NBC doesn’t pay viewers, and NBC doesn’t tell its advertisers that they’ll get back 125 percent of their ad spend for viewing ads on NBC for a few minutes a day.)
    • Bernard Madoff fallout is having a profound effect on individuals and the government. Madoff fallout alone is bad news for Ponzi operators. The word is positively nuclear. People now understand what a Ponzi scheme is and the dangers of such schemes because they can put a face to it.
    • Autosurf operators will not be able to control the behavior of the most unscrupulous promoters, an age-old song. Despite ASD headlines — despite Madoff headlines — the seamy underbelly of this underground business once again will emerge.

    The traditional autosurf pattern already is in play at the up-and-coming sites. Have you noticed roll-outs being called “Phase One” and the promises that more and more good things will follow?

    And, hey, no sense insulting you by referring to you as a plain member. Puff out your chest and proudly wear the new title of “account executive” or “VIP.” Feel good about yourself knowing your friendly promoter thinks so highly of you.

    Just be ready to feel the scorn of your family and friends — and perhaps even see yourself on TV — when the post-Bowdoin breed of autosurfs meets its inevitable fate.

    In any event, you’ll still have the “rebates aren’t guaranteed” defense” to make you feel better.