UPDATED 5:14 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) The database being built by affiliates of Narc That Car (NTC) will not be used solely for the purpose of locating cars for seizure by the repo man, according to a recording of a March 11 conference call by the company.
The database, according to the recording, also is envisioned as a means of locating people, meaning it could be used to develop a data map that can plot the movement of citizens by tracking sightings of the license plates of their cars. The announcement of NTC’s plans may trigger even more concern about privacy and legal issues because citizens may not know their plate numbers are being recorded by a private business and entered in a database that tracks movement of cars.
NTC does not publish a list of data clients. The company says it is expanding internationally, which raises the possibility that overseas data clients could track the movement of U.S. citizens, as well as citizens of other countries. Meanwhile, NTC provides only threadbare details about its management team while collecting millions of dollars from participants.
Absent transparent controls, such a data tool conceivably could be used by spy agencies and secret clients, nationally and internationally, as a means of monitoring the behavioral patterns of individuals, including persons who hold sensitive jobs in government, science and industry, as well as the behavioral patterns of individuals such as politicians, candidates for offices, judges and their family members — and people of all stripes, regardless of occupation.
NTC does not describe how it screens data clients, and also has announced a new name change — the third name the company will use this year alone.
“What we want to become is the biggest company in the world for locating one individual item,” a speaker on the call said. It is believed the speaker was CEO William Forester.
“That could be a car, boat, person, child — anything you could possibly imagine,” the speaker said. “That’s what we’re building this database for.”
No Paid Clients From Law Enforcement
The speaker confirmed that NTC has no paying clients from law enforcement, saying the company would provide data to police agencies “for free” as a “service to the community.”
“We’re not charging local law enforcement; law enforcement — any law enforcement — is not a customer of ours,” the speaker said. The confirmation that NTC had no paid law-enforcement clients leads to questions about the company’s ability to attract clients outside of law enforcement in sufficient quantity to mute concerns about how it pays affiliates and whether the firm was using a pyramid or Ponzi model to pay participants who harvest license-plate data.
The confirmation also destroyed claims from individual NTC affiliates that the company had an existing stable of law enforcement clients such as the FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the military — and was part of the federally operated AMBER Alert program.
Such claims appeared in promoters’ ads for weeks, leading to questions about whether NTC had come into possession of money based on false, misleading or confusing claims by its army of promoters — and whether NTC’s own vague claims led to the dubious claims of its affiliates.
The speaker said NTC had “over 34,000” members, was expanding “very, very rapidly” and had paid out “over several million dollars” in bonuses and commissions. He added that the company was integrated with Code Amber.
Code Amber is an entity that publishes AMBER Alerts and makes available a website ticker for others to publicize alerts, but is not the AMBER Alert program itself. The AMBER Alert program is administered by the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, both of which said last month that they are not affiliated with NTC, despite the claims of promoters.
Read a Feb. 3 story on the Justice Department’s denial that AMBER Alert was affiliated with the NTC multilevel-marketing program.
Read a Feb. 4 story on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s denial that the secondary AMBER Alert program was affiliated with Narc That Car.
Read a Feb. 16 story about Narc That Car removing a reference to AMBER Alert in a video promotion after the denials by the Justice Department and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Read a Feb. 9 opinion by the mathematician “Entertained,” who said the NTC system actually might be harmful if employed in the context of AMBER Alert.
Name Change
An Ohio man who promotes NTC on a Blog known as Cash For Car Plates announced the name change on his Blog last week.
“Narc Technologies/Narc That Car is now Crowd Sourcing International,” wrote Ajamu Kafele.
No announcement of a name change appears on NTC’s website.
But an NTC audio (the source of the quotes above) is accessible from a website titled CrowdSourcingWealth.com operated by Kafele, who uses the nickname “Jah” to promote the company. The audio, which Kafele described as an excerpt of remarks by the “CEO,” suggests the name change is official and that NTC will begin to use the initials CSI.
Indeed, a speaker says in the call, “We’re gonna change our name to Crowd Sourcing International — that’s right, for short, CSI.”
The CrowdSourcingWealth.com domain was registered in Kafele’s name March 12, one day after the NTC conference call. A similar domain name that references NTC — CrowdSourcingPower.com — was registered in California Jan. 27. Like Kafele’s domain, the CrowdSourcingPower domain appears to be an NTC affiliate site that is a work-in-progress.
NTC appears to have arrived at the conclusion that tying the company’s brand to the catch phrase crowdsourcing — which describes a method of accomplishing a task using large numbers of people and is controversial as an economic and scientific approach because it may drive down wages and lead to flawed and uneven results — would resonate with NTC members.
“The main goal of NarcThatCar is to us (sic) the Power of CrowdSourcing to develop the largest database of it’s (sic) kind,” the CrowdSourcingPower.com site says. “Working together with Amber Alert and other organizations we can help to locate the known vehicles that may be involved in the abduction of children.”
“CSI” is an acronym used by law enforcement that stands for “Crime Scene Investigation.” It also is the title of a crime drama on the CBS television network. If the name change is official, Crowd Sourcing International will become the third name NTC and its corporate parent have operated under this year.
The use of the CSI name as an acronym also could set the stage for NTC affiliates again to leech off the brands of famous entities by tying NTC to companies or entities that have no affiliation with the firm.
NTC affiliates have demonstrated a desire to link the program to the names or the intellectual property of famous entities, including government entities. At least one NTC affiliate registered a domain titled AmberAlertHelp. org, using it as an affiliate site for NTC. Another affiliate used a takeoff of the ToysRUs brand to promote NTC.
Kafele has recorded check-waving videos to promote NTC and has said repping for the firm was like working for the U.S. Census Bureau.
The announcement about the name change, Kafele said, was based on a “company wide” announcement NTC made during a March 11 conference call. Why the announcement does not appear on the NTC website was not immediately clear.
Company VP To Explain Vision
Meanwhile, NTC has identified Rene Couch as its vice president of marketing. No biographical
information on Couch was provided on NTC’s website, which said Couch will “share his vision” of the company at a meeting March 23 in Oklahoma City. The audio accessible from Kafele’s website includes comments from a male speaker who used the name Rene.
A man by the same name with the middle initial of “L” was charged civilly by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) with selling unregistered securities and misappropriating investors’ funds in a complex case involving real-estate promissory notes.
It is unclear if NTC’s Rene Couch is the Rene L. Couch referenced in the ACC complaint.
A call to NTC by the PP Blog was answered by an auto-attendant. A message said the office was closed. There was not an option for a caller to leave a message. The Blog verified there was no option to leave a message by placing a second call to the number. As was the case with the first call, the auto-attendant simply hung up.
In 2005, after a finding that Rene L. Couch and entities he controlled had made “untrue statements or misleading omissions of material facts, and or . . . [engaged] in transactions, practices or courses of business which operate or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon investors,” ACC issued an order to cease and desist from unlawful conduct.
Rene L. Couch and the entities further were ordered to disgorge “$549,085 plus interest at the rate of 10% per annum” to investors. In filings in the case, Rene L. Couch was described as the owner of a “personal nutritional supplement business known as Infinity 2.” Rene L. Couch consented to the order, according to case filings.
Rene L. Couch was accused in the Arizona case of using investor funds in the real-estate venture for “various undisclosed purposes” and diverting investor funds to the Infinity 2 supplement business. Infinity 2 was described in documents external to the case as a multilevel-marketing company.
The filings in the ACC case are public records.
Other Arizona public records show that Rene L. Couch was a party in a Family Court dispute in Maricopa County over back child support and unreimbursed medical expenses between April 1, 2006 and May 31, 2009. Records published on an Arizona court site show that one of the parties was ordered to pay $65,895 in back support, plus an additional $8,472 in unreimbursed expenses.
Repayment terms in the support case were set at $550 a month, according to records. The party ordered to pay the back support was not clear from court filings, and the case still appears to be in litigation. The PP Blog was unable to contact NTC to clarify whether the Rene Couch referenced as its vice president was the Rene L. Couch referenced in the Arizona documents.
In February, NBC-5 of Dallas/Fort Worth reported it repeatedly was unable to reach NTC by telephone to answer questions for a story.
“Repeatedly, NBCDFW worked through a phone tree, only to reach a recording that said, ‘Sorry, this mailbox is full and cannot accept any more recordings. Thank you for using the voice mail system. Goodbye,” the station reported of its efforts to navigate NTC’s phone tree.
NBC-5 further reported that it sent a reporter to the company’s office, and was met by a man who identified himself as the operations manager.
“He said company phones are busy because Narc Technologies has more than 20,000 participants,” the station reported. “He declined to answer any other questions and said the company’s CEO would call us back, but we have received no return calls.”
Timing Of Name-Change Announcement
The timing of the name-change announcement coincides with a negative rating NTC received from the Better Business Bureau. The BBB branch in Dallas gave Narc That Car a rating of “F” on March 4. The “F” rating is the BBB’s lowest on a 14-point scale that begins with “A+” as the highest possible score. The announcement of the name change occurred March 11, a week after the BBB issued the company an “F.”
Three versions of domains using the phrase CrowdSourcingInternational — a .com version, a .net version and a .org version — were registered behind a proxy Feb. 4. All three domains resolve to a parked page that shows advertisements.
It was not immediately clear if the domains are connected to NarcThatCar. If they are, the domains were registered 17 days after the BBB opened an inquiry into Narc That Car amid pyramid concerns. On the previous day — Feb. 3 — the district attorney of Henderson County, Texas, also opened an inquiry. In a statement last month, the district attorney said he was consulting with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott in the case.
Less than a month earlier, on Jan. 12, a corporation named National Automotive Record Centre Inc. filed papers to incorporate in Nevada. Kafele produced a YouTube video March 1 that showed affiliate payments from National Automotive Record Centre Inc. for NTC earnings.
An earlier video by Kafele showed a payment coming from Narc Technologies Inc., another company associated with the NTC brand. Both videos were made private on YouTube after the PP Blog reported that Kafele claimed in the video that working for NTC was like working for the U.S. Census Bureau, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
NTC is not a government entity. Its affiliates are deemed “independent consultants” by the company. Regardless, advertisements by NTC promoters have implied or stated directly that NTC was associated with the government, including the federally operated AMBER Alert program and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Kafele was toiling with NTC critics on Scam.com a day after the name-change announcement. Among other things, he asserted that “Whip,” a poster on the PP Blog, and PP were one in the same.
The claim is false, but follows a general pattern of claims about the PP Blog, which frequently becomes the target of fanciful theories and criticism from supporters of companies the Blog is writing about.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that Kafele had engaged in the unauthorized practice of law in a banking and mortgage-foreclosure case involving a third party, and assessed him a $1,000 civil penalty. Kafele and others have made sweeping statements that license-plate numbers are “public information” available for the taking to be entered by affiliates in the NTC database.
Kafele produced a video of cars parked at a supermarket in Ohio, publishing the video on YouTube.
“This is how simple this business is, folks,†he said in the video, as a camera panned around the Giant Eagle parking lot and captured one car after another in video frames.
“I’m not even going to talk to anybody,†he said. He noted that “I’m just going to jot down some public information of the license plates. That’s the way this works.â€
At Scam.com, Kafele also suggested that the PP Blog “lied about our company not being affiliated with Code Amber, in an attempt to discredit us.”
That claim, too, is untrue. The PP Blog never asserted NTC had no relationship with Code Amber. The Blog reported that the U.S. Department of Justice denied that the federally managed AMBER Alert program, which NTC referenced in a promotional video, had any affiliation with NTC.
NTC removed the AMBER Alert reference from the video after the Justice Department’s denial.
Kafele also has defended NTC by attacking the credibility of the BBB and dismissing critics as “naysayers” and “haters.”
The PP Blog reads Scam.com, but does not post there — under any identity. The Blog even has been called a scam on Scam.com by a poster who was banned from the Blog for abusing its Comments function and, later, sending dozens of communications under multiple identities that were designed to harass the Blog and probe its software systems for vulnerabilities.
The poster, who was banned from Scam.com for posting under multiple identities, later threatened to sue the PP Blog.
