UPDATED 11:51 A.M. EDT U.S.A. Zeek Rewards’ receiver Kenneth D. Bell had no comment this morning on reports that some Zeek clawback defendants also were participants in Traffic Monsoon, alleged last week by the SEC to have been a Ponzi scheme that had gathered at least $207 million.
The reports appeared on RealScam.com.
In March 2015, Bell sued Adrian Hibbert of the United Kingdom, alleging he had received more than $82,000 in Ponzi proceeds from Zeek. Zeek was charged with fraud by the SEC in August 2012.
“Winnings” from MLM or direct-sales fraud schemes may be subject to return through clawback litigation.
Both Zeek and Traffic Monsoon were purported “revenue sharing” programs. Paul Burks, the operator of Zeek Rewards, potentially faces a long prison term after his conviction earlier this month on multiple fraud counts.
On July 26, the SEC civilly charged alleged Traffic Monsoon operator Charles Scoville of Utah with fraud. He has not been charged criminally and is believed to be residing overseas.
Peggy Hunt of the Salt Lake City office of the Dorsey & Whitney law firm has been appointed receiver over Traffic Monsoon. Neither she nor the firm responded immediately this morning to a request for comment on the issue of common promoters between Traffic Monsoon and Zeek.
The law firm confirmed to the PP Blog last week that there would be a receivership website for Traffic Monsoon, but the site was not yet live. The URL has not been released.
Some Zeek clawback defendants also were participants in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme. ASD was a “program” similar to Traffic Monsoon broken up by the U.S. Secret Service in 2008 in a highly publicized action.
In U.S. domestic clawback litigation and in cases filed against non-U.S. residents, Bell has sued thousands of alleged Zeek winners for return of their gains and interest.
TelexFree and Zeek may be the two largest combined Ponzi- and pyramid schemes in history, generating on the order of $4 billion in illicit, cross-border business and affecting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.
The MAPS’ page attributed to Hibbert claims that MAPs operator Mike Deese “has been in the trenches with Zeek, ASD, Banners Broker, Ad Hit Profits, and many other advertising revenue sharing companies some of which continue to thrive and some that are not.”
AdHitProfits also was a Scoville scheme. BannersBroker was a cross-border fraud that led to arrests in Canada.
Separately, the Zeek page attributed to Hibbert claims, “If you want to make money and get paid everyday, you have to look at Zeek Rewards and understand how it works.”
The SEC and federal prosecutors in the Western District of North Carolina said Zeek worked as a Ponzi scheme.
News came early this morning that the SEC had moved against Traffic Monsoon, calling it a Ponzi scheme. Both the “program” and alleged operator Charles Scoville were charged civilly yesterday in Utah federal court with securities fraud and selling unregistered securities to unaccredited investors.
Scoville also was the braintrust behind AdHitProfits, a Ponzi-board “program” in part targeted at people who also were targeted in the egregious 2013 Profitable Sunrise cross-border scam in which millions of dollars appear to have vanished overseas.
As the PP Blog reported on June 2, 2013 (italics added):
A spammer hit a Profitable Sunrise Facebook site yesterday with five drive-by offers for “AdHitProfits.” All five of the machine-gunned theft bids claimed the same thing: “make money every half an hour…100% commission let your money grow for you at high speed.”
The AHP “program” also is being pitched on the Ponzi boards, with the thread-starter at MoneyMakerGroup bragging that “Payza, []STP & Liberty Reserve Accepted !!”
LibertyReserve was described last week by federal prosecutors in New York as a criminal enterprise that had laundered more than $6 billion for Ponzi schemers, credit-card fraudsters, identity thieves, investment fraudsters, computer hackers, child pornographers and narcotics traffickers.
In its complaint against Traffic Monsoon and Scoville, the SEC says PayPal restricted Traffic Monsoon during the winter, in January 2016.
Our research shows that Scoville then turned to Payza for the heavy lifting and that Payza attended a Traffic Monsoon event in May 2016, during the spring and while funds in PayPal had been frozen by PayPal.
From the SEC complaint (italics added):
After the PayPal freeze, Scoville began using other payment processors more extensively: Solid Trust Pay, headquartered in Ontario, and Payza, headquartered in London with offices in New York. He has also used an account at JPMorgan Chase to receive investor funds.
Zeek used both SolidTrustPay and Payza, as did the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme before it.
Traffic Monsoon’s haul appears to have exceeded $200 million, potentially making it one of the largest advertising “revshare” schemes of all time. As things stand, it is larger than other well-known revshare frauds such as AdSurfDaily ($119 million) and Banners Broker ($156 million). Some of the Banners Broker cash reportedly ended up in KulClub, yet another Ponzi-board MLM scheme.
Ponzi-board schemes are eviscerating wealth globally. It is not unusual for such schemes to use multiple payment processors and to target vulnerable population groups. Agencies from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have been involved in a number of major investigations of Ponzi-board “programs.”
It is unclear if DHS or other U.S. agencies with the power of arrest are involved in a Traffic Monsoon probe. History has shown, however, that when the SEC brings a civil case, other agencies sometimes carry out criminal investigations on a parallel track.
2ND UPDATE 2:25 P.M. EDT U.S.A. More horrible PR for the MLM trade: Banners Broker international pitchman and pyramid-scheme figure Kuldip Josun embezzled at least $3.6 million from affiliates, according to a receiver’s report.
The money was deposited into a Swiss bank account held by an entity known as World Web Media Inc. and appears to have been used to start an “MLM program” known as “KulClub,” the receiver advised a court in Canada.
Like the alleged $156 million Banners Broker scheme, KulClub had a presence on the MoneyMakerGroup forum, records show. U.S. authorities have alleged MoneyMakerGroup is a place from which fraud schemes are promoted.
KulClub purports to be a “unique revenue sharing program in which KulClub shares the majority of its revenue with all its members. No other club can match it!”
But msi Spergel inc., the Toronto-based Banners Broker receiver, said KulClub likely was started with stolen Banners Broker funds that never were recovered from the Swiss account.
“The Receiver believes that Josun has since used the Swiss bank account funds for personal purposes, including the launching of his own MLM program called ‘KulClub,'” Spergel alleged. The receiver is seeking a sweeping order preventing the dissipation of assets.
How did Josun end up with affiliate funds? After becoming the “main representative among international affiliates” of Banners Broker, the huckster allegedly hosted web events, flew to events in Europe, gathered money from hopefuls and kept it for himself.
From the receiver (italics added/light editing performed):
In that role, Josun would travel to meet with international affiliates, or potential affiliates, and conduct conference calls and seminars via videoconferencing. His day-to-day occupation with Banners Broker was to maximize Affiliate investment into the program, as well as to establish an international network Banners Broker Network. That is, he was responsible for encouraging the development of overseas affiliates into `super-affiliates’ (or “Resellers”), who would establish their own networks of affiliates.
In his role as Banners Broker’s international representative, Josun would frequently fly to overseas locations with a significant amount of company funds. Those funds were used to advertise a lifestyle of success and luxury to potential affiliates. Josun spent existing affiliate funds lavishly in maintaining this facade, as he carried out a campaign to woo wealthy new affiliates to the Banners Broker enterprise.
Josun’s spending in his role as Banners Broker’s international spokesperson lacked any effective oversight. No budgets were set for Josun’s business trips on behalf of Banners Broker, nor was there any control over his expenses.
The Receiver asserts that Josun would regularly receive funds from affiliates meant to be spent on Banners Broker products. Rather than remit these funds to the company, Josun would redirect the funds to his own personal accounts in offshore jurisdictions, intending to place them beyond the reach of creditors.
Similar allegations of cherry-picking have surfaced in the TelexFree Ponzi- and pyramid case. Like Banners Broker and KulClub, TelexFree had a presence on the Ponzi boards.
Josun was hardly alone in misappropriating Banners Broker funds, the receiver alleged.
Rajiv Dixit, a Banners Broker principal charged criminally, “purchased six watches from Weir & Sons in Dublin, Ireland: three Rolexes and three Breitfings,” the receiver alleged. “Two of the watches were women’s watches.”
The receiver’s allegations against Josun appear to be yet-another example of a scammer within a purported revshare “program” scamming both the “opportunity” itself and incoming participants. Although Banners Broker allegedly terminated Josun, it made little difference because the “program” itself was a scam.
IntellaShares, a collapsed “program” with a presence on the Ponzi boards and purportedly prepping for “relaunch,” now is under scrutiny by Save the Children.
Jeremy Soulliere, a spokesman for Save the Children USA, confirmed the inquiry to the PP Blog this morning. Save the Children USA is an arm of Save the Children Federation Inc., the internationally prominent charity.
“We are going to look into this matter further,” Soulliere wrote.
The PP Blog reported yesterday that IntellaShares was publishing a graphic of a check on its website that implied a donation of $478 had been made or will be made to “Save The Children Foundation.” The memo line of the check reads, “Charity Spotlight – Feb/2015.”
Text accompanying the check reads, “The Following Amount Will Be Donated For the Period Feb. 17-28/2015. Thank You To All Members For Making This Possible!”
Another page on the IntellaShares website claims that the “program” donates “20% of Total Collected Membership Fees to THE FEATURED CHARITY.”
This potentially means that Save the Children will not be the sole nonprofit whose name gets dangled by IntellaShares. The site suggests that the Global Music Project was the featured charity last month.
Precisely who controls the purported blacklist wasn’t specified by IntellaShares. The language, however, was menacing.
“So be careful what you do now it could result in loss of ability to become a member of any program in short order,” IntellaShares advised members, according to BehindMLM.
A post on the MoneyMakerGroup Ponzi forum today includes content attributed to IntellaShares. It declares “[t]oday is a beautiful day in the internet world” because “INTELLASHARES WILL BE OPEN FOR NEW SIGN UPS AND FUNDING TODAY!”
This hashtag was attributed to IntellaShares: “#TOOBADABOUT30PEOPLEWEREBLACKLISTED.”
At least one Ponzi-board poster was not amused.
“They think that threatening people can suppress peoples opinion, that doesn’t sound like people that are for the people,” the poster ventured. “Sounds like facism to me. What a joke.”
Scams trading on the Ponzi boards and on social-media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are infamous for trying to enforce rigid thinking and mute criticism — sometimes by threat. At the same time, it is not unusual for such schemes to use the names of a famous charity or famous for-profit business as part of a bid to create a veneer of legitimacy.
IntellaShares, which plants the seed “program” participants will receive $3.25 for every $2.50 they send in, appears to have collapsed shortly after launch earlier this year.
Thuggery is not unusual in the HYIP sphere of MLM or network marketing.
In early 2014, a “program” known as Banners Brokers threatened to lock the accounts of members “found to be contributing to the negativity on the Internet.” Participants further were threatened with a forfeiture of earnings and encouraged to report doubters to management.
Banners Broker tried to sugarcoat its thuggery by calling it an effort to implement a “Community Watch” program.
By October 2014, documents filed by the the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in July 2014 surfaced. These documents described Banners Broker as a “pyramid scheme that over time evolved into a straight Ponzi scheme in which new victims were recruited to stave off requests for withdrawals and complaints from older ones.”
Investigative documents in Canada describe Banners Broker as a “criminal enterprise.” The U.S. Secret Service used the same phrase when describing the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme.
Like Banners Broker and ASD, IntellaShares purports to be an “advertising” program.
IntellaShares may be trying to skirt securities laws by claiming on its website that “REVENUE SHARING IS NOT GUARANTEED.”
ASD, which once purported to have gifted 100,000 “ad packs” to a charitable venture, made a similar claim in 2008 . So did the Zeek Rewards scheme in 2012.
Both ASD and Zeek collapsed after interventions by law enforcement.
The SEC yesterday declined to comment on IntellaShares.
“Affiliates found to be contributing to the negativity on the Internet will have their accounts locked, they will be banned from participating in the Banners Broker system and they will forfeit all of their inventory and revenue.” — Banners Broker threat to members, February 2014
“It is the position of investigators that this business was a pyramid scheme that over time evolved into a straight Ponzi scheme in which new victims were recruited to stave off requests for withdrawals and complaints from older ones.” — Royal Canadian Mounted Police, July 17, 2014: Source: Affidavit that shows the RCMP, the Toronto Strategic Partnership and the Toronto Police Services Financial Crime Unit are involved in a criminal probe of Banners Broker.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The double-your-money Banners Broker “program” posed as an online “advertising” company. It appears to have gathered tens of millions of dollars using a series of conduits and employing entities or business identities in money-laundering havens. At least for now, the total sum stolen from participants is unclear. As alleged, funds were “diverted by the suspects and their associated corporations to various offshore and other bank accounts controlled by them.”
** _________________________**
How to begin the brainwashing process: Screen shot from page of court exhibit in Canada.
As an interview subject allegedly told the Competition Bureau of Canada on April 9, 2013, it was all so simple to Banners Broker operator Christopher George “Chris” Smith:
Indeed, Canadian authorities now have alleged, when the subject “met with Smith [in 2010,] he asked Smith why people lost money in these programs and Smith said it was what the programs were designed for, they bring people in, make some money and then they shut down and people move on to the next one.”
What was Smith allegedly discussing at the meeting in Toronto? His desire to come up with a “copycat” of Travel Ventures International, a purported “opportunity” also known as TVI Express and described as a scam on multiple continents. (See K. Chang’s MLM Skeptic Blog for a report on how TVI Express spread around the world.)
This, friends, is whack-a-mole — in the style of MLM huckster Chris Smith. It’s also racketeering MLM-style, whether formally prosecuted as such or not. And so it comes as no surprise that the term “criminal enterprise” to describe Banners Broker and its associated corporations now appears in court filings in Canada. (See links and credits at bottom of this story.)
Members of the TelexFree MLM “program” allege that racketeering occurred within that enterprise, described by U.S. regulators earlier this year as a billion-dollar, cross-border pyramid- and Ponzi scheme. The Zeek Rewards MLM “program,” alleged to have gathered on the order of $850 million before is August 2012 collapse, launched after the 2008 collapse of ASD. There can be no doubt that TelexFree, Zeek, ASD and Banners Broker had promoters in common.
There also can be no doubt that “see no evil” MLM cottage industries sprouted up around these foundationally corrupt “programs” and offered services such as “lead” provision and “ad” placement. Victims have piled up in such numbers that, in the TelexFree scam alone, 20,000 Greyhound buses with a 50-seat capacity each would be required to accommodate the fleeced masses.
But where would they all go to observe events and be acknowledged at once?
No courtroom can accommodate 1 million victims. Even if Mass-Participation Court existed and were gaveled into session on an unbooked Saturday in Pasadena’s famous Rose Bowl with onetime Tournament of Roses Parade Grand Marshal and U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor coming out of retirement to preside, the huge stadium’s seating capacity of 92,542 still would be far too small to accommodate the injured parties.
Despite the best efforts of the courts, victims are being lost as a result of these insidious MLM schemes. Some will be re-victimized in a whack-a-mole reload scam pitched by an MLM predator with a smile on his or her face and a Bible verse at the ready.
There also can be no doubt that certain members of the “programs” are members of a criminal combine that, whether loosely or closely associated, pushes one racketeering scam after another on the consuming public. It is willful blindness on a global scale. It is so dangerous, so calculating and methodical, so gruesomely injurious to persons and property, that it almost defies description.
Next time someone tries to recruit you into an HYIP “program” by telling you the “leaders” are already on board, here’s what to think: The racketeers are either running things or influencing events (again). They’re going to harm me (again). They’re going to harm my community, my country (again). They’re going to say they have been vetted by “attorneys” (again).
And then, as Chris Smith allegedly said, they’re going to shut down and “move on to the next one.”
Again.
Reclaim Your Brain — Right Now!
Like predecessor scams such as AdSurfDaily and AdViewGlobal and Zeek, the hypnotized and robotic Stepfordians in Banners Broker who’d been brainwashed by cult tactics rose up to “defend” the “program,” including some individuals who continued to champion the scam even after it effectively extorted them into paying more fees to keep their positions intact and to retain any chance of receiving a payout.
While trying to chill members who remained in control of their gray matter and hadn’t slipped into an MLM trance, Banners Broker naturally counted on the Stepfordians whose brains it had reduced to slush to wage efforts to chill Blogs and websites that report on scams.
“If you know of a site with content that is negative towards Banners Broker, we ask that you report it to the Community Watch,” the “program” instructed in February 2014.
On Jan. 17, 2013, the PP Blog reported it was receiving menacing communications about Banners Broker.
For additional background on bids to chill reporters or program members who publish information about scams and highly questionable “opportunities,” see this Dec. 27, 2012, PP Blog post: Our Choice For The Most Important PP Blog Post Of 2012. (It’s about an effort to chill K. Chang over his reporting on Zeek Rewards.)
UPDATED 12:21 P.M. EDT (MARCH 28, U.S.A.) Whack-A-Mole. Here’s the latest disturbing incarnation: On March 20, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) published a warning on a gold “program” known as Karatbars International GmbH. BehindMLM.com spotlighted the warning yesterday.
From the AMF warning (bolding added): “With the company’s ‘Affiliates’ program, investors can make Internet-based purchases through Karatbars plans and they are encouraged to recruit two other Affiliates. These Affiliates are in turn encouraged to recruit two other Affiliates each, and so on. Affiliates are lured by the possibility of earning large payouts, in particular through a percentage of amounts collected from the Karatbars plans and gold products purchased by referrals.”
These things apparently meant little to former Zeek Rewards’ pitchman Lloyd Merrifield, who “defended” Karatbars International on BehindMLM. Zeek was an international Ponzi scheme that gathered at least $850 million, according to court records.
AdViewGlobal was an international Ponzi scheme that gathered an unknown sum before vanishing mysteriously in 2009. U.S. federal prosecutors linked it to ASD in April 2012.
Merrifield also was a pitchman for Ad-Ventures4u (ADV4U), an ASD-like HYIP scam tied to shiny-object scam known as “TradingGold4Cash.” And why not Tazoodle, a search-engine “program” whose “board” consisted of former ASD members who had the big idea they were going to unseat Google? Yep. Merrifield was there, too.
Along with ADV4U and Tazoodle, Merrifield pitched something called “20Clicks” as part of an overall package known as “The Golden Eggs.” (In 2009, the 20 Clicks website said it was “Powered by USHBB.com.” USHBB later was associated with the Zeek Rewards Ponzi scheme and is listed as a “winner” in a document assembled by the court-appointed receiver in the Zeek Ponzi/pyramid case.)
At least one HYIP pitchfest site that describes Merrifield as a “featured speaker” for Karatbars International has led cheers for “programs” such as AdHitProfits and MyFunLife and BannersBroker — and an emerging darling known as FlexKom. The site also has pushed “ProfitClicking,” one of the JSSTripler/JustBeenPaid reload scams linked to former ASD pitchman Frederick Mann.
Mann, among other things, may have ties to the “sovereign citizens” movement.
Merrifield, perhaps ignoring this 2010 FINRA warning on HYIP schemes and social media, pitches Karatbars International on YouTube and coaches viewers to line up recruits via craigslist.
Source: YouTube
On BehindMLM, Merrifield says he’s been “in the Investment Banking industry for over 35 years.”
As always, HYIP “programs” and similar ventures that may lack licensing in individual jurisdictions across the world raise the prospect that banks and payment processors are coming into possession of funds tainted by fraud. In some cases, those funds have circulated between and among various schemes.
A quick Google search shows that some pitchmen are promoting Karatbars International alongside TelexFree, a “program” under investigation in North America, South America and Africa. TelexFree also has been promoted in concert with the WCM777 MLM scam.
From a video pitch that simultaneously pushes Karatbars International and TelexFree.
Banners Broker members who log into their accounts are seeing this pop-up message: Source: Graphic published at RealScam.com
Whoever is pulling the linguistic strings at the Banners Broker HYIP cult operating globally online now is channeling Zeek Rewards, AdSurfDaily and AdViewGlobal in their final days.
Zeek, an $850 million Ponzi- and pyramid fraud that once suggested participants should change their toilet-paper dispensing habits if instructed to do so, threatened to ban members who didn’t stick to the company’s insidious, Stepfordian chant. It also planted the seed that it would use the courts to gag doubting voices and sue credit unions that dared to speak ill about its “program” that averaged a payout of 1.5 percent a day. And through proxies, Zeek made sure that other MLM companies and executives who’d dare question its outrageous claims knew that the Zeek eye in the sky was watching them.
AdSurfDaily, a $119 million Ponzi scheme that promised to pay 1 percent a day, announced that it had filled a pot with $750,000 in cash and would sue critics for tens of millions of dollars. (The U.S. Feds were so moved by the claim that they made sure it was included in an evidence exhibit used to seize more than $80 million in ASD cash.) Prior to the seizure, ASD’s Stepfordian wing made sure that doubters knew their doubts would be reported by right-thinking loyalists to “ASD legal.” After the seizure, some of the ASDers planted the seed that any fellow member who filed a remissions claim through the U.S. Department of Justice would get sued by their fellow members.
In 2009, after forming itself from the carcass of ASD’s MLM fraud scheme and on the brink of collapse itself, AdViewGlobal threatened to sue critics for purported copyright infringement. (Zeek, through purported “consultant” Robert Craddock, later would work the “infringement” gambit into its arsenal while planting the seed one or more Zeek lawyers would go after critics.)
To cement its thuggery, AVG, a Zeek- and ASD-like 1-percent-a day “program” that gathered millions of dollars, said it was watching what members said about it online and planted the seed it would seek to have the Internet connections of in-house critics shut down. AVG bizarrely (and incongruously) did these things while purporting to have “protectors” in its ranks and while purporting to enjoy U.S. and Florida Constitutional speech and commerce protections from its purported base of operations in Uruguay.
Now comes word that Banners Broker, an almost indescribably bizarre “program” whose online steroidal puppeteers have been stringing people along and picking pockets since at least 2012, has accidentally announced that it, too, has become a factory from which MLM thuggery is manufactured. Not only is Banners Broker watching members, the “program” says, its members also are watching members. The news first appeared on the RealScam.com antiscam forum.
Banners Broker, of course, wants members of its cyberspace cult to remain in their Stepfordian trances and not to notice they’re being manipulated like robots, so it has given its strong-arm bid an innocuous (if not wholesome-sounding) name: “Community Watch.”
Ready to projectile vomit?
Given the monitoring policy, individual members who’ve posted negative content should remove it, the “program” instructs. And members who observe other members posting negative content should contact the doubters and provide a copy of the “program’s” policy that bans negativity and threatens management-led account seizures.
On Feb. 12, Banners Broker will begin to take “a firmer stance against people that are speaking badly against Banners Broker,” the “program” bizarrely bleats.
“Affiliates found to be contributing to the negativity on the Internet will have their accounts locked,” the “program” threatens. “[T]hey will be banned from participating in the Banners Broker system and they will forfeit all of their inventory and revenue.”
Banners Broker appears also to be trying to chill nonmember critics.
“If you know of a site with content that is negative towards Banners Broker, we ask that you report it to the Community Watch,” the “program” instructs.
In June 2012, the PP Blog reported that a website selling “customers” to Zeek recruiters also was directing traffic to double-your-money Banners Broker and the 2-percent-a-day (precompounding) JSSTripler/JustBeenPaid HYIP scam purportedly operated by Frederick Mann.
On Jan. 17, 2013, the PP Blog reported it was receiving menacing communications about Banners Broker.
For additional background on bids to chill reporters or program members who publish information about scams and highly questionable “opportunities,” see this Dec. 27, 2012, PP Blog post: Our Choice For The Most Important PP Blog Post Of 2012.
UPDATED 7:36 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) Let’s say you’re out there feverishly flogging the TelexFree MLM even as the pyramid-scheme probe moves forward in Brazil, a judge and prosecutor have been threatened with death and TelexFree executive Carlos Costa is pulling an Andy Bowdoin and telling the world that God used him to bring the purported opportunity to the flock.
There’s always risk associated with HYIP schemes. Now, however, it seems those risks are becoming even greater.
Here is a key fact: The sender used an IP based in France that has been associated by Project Honeypot with comment-spamming — pitches for porn sites and sites that purport to give you a good price on designer goods in advance of a predicted “downturn,” for example. (Basic message: You can look wealthy even if you’re not, even after the economy tanks. Buy your knockoffs now and look good when the sky is falling on your life.)
The sender, now adding HYIP schemes to the porn and designer-good mix from that specific IP, used a handle that incorporated the word “Silver” within its overall handle and sought to plant a URL at the PP Blog to a Panamanian venture that advertises a custody service for precious metals. The PP Blog is declining to publish the URL and the name of the enterprise which, among other things, reproduces on its website the logos of an internationally famous insurer based in London and an internationally famous accounting firm based in Chicago. The site also publishes various contact phone numbers in the United States, Panama, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. Although there is a chance that the service is legitimate, the PP Blog questions why someone or some thing is spamming links to the precious-metals site and loading them up further with links to “positive” coverage of seemingly unrelated HYIPs.
For the purposes of this PP Blog post, the Panamanian venture is a sidebar tidbit. Far more interesting was the body content of the spam, which appears to be a compendium of gushing affiliate pitches for TelexFree that appear on the net. The spam appears to have been cobbled together by a human scraper or scraping device of some sort that had visited one or more TelexFree-related websites. Links embedded in the spam are the “real story” in the context of this PP Blog post.
So, for starters, TelexFree’s name is being used as part of a bid to drive traffic to a precious-metals website on which visitors curiously are told they must provide 15 days’ notice if they wish to visit the office in Panama City. The PP Blog likely was targeted by the spammer simply because the word “TelexFree” appears here many times in reports about TelexFree-related events in Brazil and the United States.
The spammer — be it bot or human — appears to have made the calculation that TelexFree members might be the perfect customers for the precious-metals venture. Contained within the spam were three links: One to a site styled TelexFreeUnitedStates and two to a URL-shortening service that redirected visitors to Photobucket, the popular image-hosting and story-sharing website.
Here’s where the story really begins . . .
One of the picture stories told at at the Photobucket site was told inside a subfolder of a folder labeled “aaronsharazeek.” (Emphasis added.) The subfolder was slugged “First Zeek Red Carpet Event April 18th 2012.” Zeek conducted a Red Carpet event on that date.
The SEC moved against Zeek on Aug. 17, 2012. On the same date, the Secret Service said it also was investigating Zeek. Court records suggest the SEC began the Zeek probe at least by April 17, 2012, one day before the April 18 Zeek Red Carpet event highlighted within the “aaronsharazeek” folder on Photobucket.
On April 17, 2012, according to court filings, the SEC tasked an IT specialist to “conduct Website/video capture” of ZeekRewards.com.
Paul Burks appears to have been in deep thought on April 18, 2012, one day after the SEC tasked an IT specialist to capture content from Zeek Rewards.com. This is a slice of a photo from a larger photo that appears on Photobucket in a folder labeled “First Zeek Red Carpet Event April 18 2012.”
Precisely when Zeek operator Paul R. Burks found out about the SEC probe remains unclear. But photos inside the “First Zeek Red Carpet Event April 18th 2012” subfolder at the Photobucket site show a Burks who appears to be in deep thought. One can only wonder what 66-year-old Burks was thinking about on that date. His health? His wife’s stress level, given the noise Zeek was creating in the small town of Lexington, N.C.? His ability to keep Zeek going? The prospect that investigators were closing in?
There are 18 other photos in the Red Carpet event subfolder, some showing Zeek luminaries such as former SEC defendant Keith Laggos, former Zeek COO Dawn Wright-Olivares, former Zeek videographer OH Brown (looking happy), former Zeek trainer Peter Mingils (identified in one photo as the “V.P. of the Association of Network Marketing Professionals”). Other photos of Zeek personalities/staffers appear in the folder, as do photos showing attendees.
Absent the “Silver”/TelexFree spammer, the PP Blog likely never would have seen these photos.
Also within the “aaronsharazeek” folder at Photobucket is a subfolder slugged “Zeek Trip,” and subfolders slugged “Banners Broker” and “telexfree.” The “Zeek Trip” folder appears to contain four photos of Zeek-related real estate in Lexington, N.C. (In the ASD Ponzi case, affiliates suggested that ASD couldn’t possibly be illegitimate because ASD had an office. The same thing has been asserted by TelexFree promoters.)
Meanwhile, the “Banners Brokers” folder contains a video of a sales pitch, and the “telexfree” folder contains images of government documents from the state of Massachusetts and the country of Brazil that appear to have been designed to plant the seed that TelexFree couldn’t possibly be a scam.
Taken as a whole, the various folders and photos demonstrate the interconnectivity of MLM HYIP schemes, regardless of who actually controls the Photobucket site. It is known from other sources that some Zeekers also were in the JSSTripler/JustBeenPaid scam and the exceptionally murky Profitable Sunrise scam shut down by the SEC and various state regulators earlier this year.
Banners Broker is an uber-bizarre Ponzi-board program. On July 2, 2013, the PP Blog reported that MLM attorney Kevin Thompson said that the name of his law firm had been used by scammers in a bid to dupe members of Banners Broker and Profit Clicking, the JSS/JBP-associated “program” linked to Frederick Mann that may have ties to the extremist “sovereign citizens” movement. The July 2 PP Blog post was titled, “Law Firm’s Name Used In Bid To Dupe Members Of Banners Broker, Profit Clicking, MLM Attorney Says.”
Within the July 2 post, the PP Blog reported that it had received menacing messages in apparent “defense” of Banners Broker. As the Blog reported at the time (italics added):
WARNING: The next paragraph includes quoted material from one of the Jan. 18, 2013, spams, and the PP Blog is reproducing it to illustrate the bizarre and often menacing nature of the HYIP sphere. Indeed, the apparent Banner’s Broker supporter wrote (italics added):
” . . . I am Big Bob’s cock meat sandwich. Your mom ate me and made me do press ups until I threw up . . . I am gonna report you. When you make false accusations, you can get done. Maybe you will be seen in court soon . . .”
It is as ugly today as it was on the January date the PP Blog received the communication.
Why “programs” such as TelexFree, Zeek Rewards, BannersBroker and ProfitClicking become popular with people of faith is one of the head-scratching mysteries of current times. Gold fever, of course, is nothing new; it’s been around for centuries. What’s at least relatively new in the Internet Age is that the gold- and silver-sellers appear to be piggybacking off HYIP pitchmen, apparently hoping to rope in customers for shiny-object schemes.
This “comment” sent to the PP Blog on Nov. 22 sought to drive traffic to a precious-metals site by planting a link to the site and also planting links related to TelexFree.
On Oct. 25, the PP Blog reported that an alleged shiny-object scheme had taken root in Zeek’s back yard in North Carolina. On June 19, the PP Blog reported that the receiver in the Legisi HYIP Ponzi case was going after assets linked to E-Bullion, a collapsed payment processor with shiny-object woo. James Fayed, E-Bullion’s operator, is sitting on death row in California after a jury found him guilty of arranging the brutal contract slaying of his own wife.
The Legisi scheme was targeted at Christians, and E-Bullion’s cheerleaders included the Canadian clergyman Brian David Anderson, who was sent to U.S. federal prison in 2010 for the Frontier Assets Ponzi scheme. Anderson also was linked to the Flat Electronic Data Interchange (FEDI) HYIP scheme that put Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, also known as “Michael Mixon,” in federal prison after his September 2009 convictions for financing terrorism and fleecing FEDI investors.
Yes, financing terrorism.
Alishtari traded on his purported ties to prominent politicians, just like ASD’s Andy Bowdoin. At least one of the schemes linked to Alishtari and Anderson used the term “rebates,” just like ASD. The narrative surrounding FEDI read like impossibly outrageous fiction, a mind-bending example of a shiny-object scheme. Ten members of purported “Royal families” in the Middle East were said to have set aside “50 Billion in Gold” ($5 billion each) to advance the scheme. Another entity in the Middle East was said to have supplied a “total of 100 Billion in Gold.” Still another entity was said to have put up “500 Million dollars in liquid gold assets.”
FEDI marks were solicited to purchase what effectively were trading desks that somehow would enable them to profit on the coattails of Middle East royals interested in escrowing huge sums to fund worldwide construction projects, with money purportedly flowing to the “labor” force. If that weren’t enough, the scheme purportedly was married to a venture that purportedly would put vending machines in at least 50,000 locations. The vending machines purportedly would sell debit cards, and were purportedly backed by $150 billion in gold and an insurance policy in Canada.
In March 2012, the PP Blog reported on FTC allegations that three Florida companies and a Florida man had roped customers into a shiny-object scam, a precious-metals boondoogle allegedly carried out by telemarketers.
Imagine what would happen if a scamming telemarketing firm had the customer lists for TelexFree, Zeek, Banners Broker, Profit Clicking, AdSurfDaily, Legisi and others.
If the MLM industry seeks to win favor on Main Street and stop being the brunt of jokes, it needs to act forcefully to eradicate these schemes. MLM attorneys need to stop permitting schemes to trade on their names, thus potentially setting the stage for prospects to believe that no scam could be occurring because no lawyer would permit his name to be used in this fashion.
But even today, what does one get when one visits the website of TelexFree? A pitch in which the alleged TelexFree pyramid scheme announces its pride at having MLM lawyer Gerald Nehra on board.
Zeek traded on the name of MLM attorney Kevin Grimes, who comes off in Red Carpet Day shots as a Zeek crowd prop, and also the name of Nehra. Bidify traded on Kevin Thompson’s name. The lawyers should not permit this to happen. And they should stop making personal appearances at “opportunity” events and start questioning why so many of these “programs” are targeted at people of faith and promise or suggest the likelihood of absurd returns.
Profitable Sunrise — perhaps recognizing that an MLM scheme can be made to appear legitimate if affiliates simply are provided the name of a purported lawyer — appears to have conjured up an attorney’s name out of thin air. It then allegedly proceeded to run off with millions and millions of dollars. When ASD’s Bowdoin switched from the two scams that eventually put him in prison (ASD and AdViewGlobal) and began pitching the alleged OneX pyramid scheme, one of the first things he did was assure the former ASD members he was pitching in a webinar that OneX had an “attorney,” adding that the venture was a great fit for college students. Bowdoin, mixing in God talk during the October 2011 webinar, never identified the purported lawyer by name. Neither did a former ASD pitchwoman pitching the OneX scheme alongside Bowdoin.
In the absence of self-imposed, self-regulatory restraints in the MLM industry — lawyers restraining themselves from becoming accidental or purposeful stage props and sanitizers of “programs,” for example — MLM prospects may be well-advised to view any MLM “program” with the highest degree of skepticism, regardless of the programs’ wares.
Every single one of the “programs” referenced in this story has ridden on the coattails of a deity and lawyers. It did not matter whether the lawyers were real or imagined.
And it did not matter that the Gods of many faiths were observing it all, perhaps mournfully wondering how the precious Children of the Earth had come to view MLM money as the maximum deity.
UPDATED 11:39 A.M. EDT (MARCH 21, U.S.A.) RealScam.com reports that the DDoS attack is continuing, but that measures have been taken to restore accessibility. The site is back online. Here, below, our earlier story . . .
RealScam.com, a site that concerns itself with international mass-marketing fraud, is experiencing a DDoS attack, a source told the PP Blog this afternoon.
“We’re seeing what we can do about it,” the source said.
On the plus side, the source noted, the DDoS attack suggests RealScam is meeting its mission of informing the public about scams.
The attack is occurring against the backdrop of government actions against the Profitable Sunrise HYIP “program.” RealScam posters have been following Profitable Sunrise developments closely. Forum posters also are monitoring developments concerning “Banners Broker,” another mysterious online “program.”
Precisely why RealScam.com has been targeted is unclear. At least one purported member of Profitable Sunrise — writing on another site on Saturday — said he wished the hacker’s group “Anonymous” was paying attention to negative coverage of Profitable Sunrise on the web. The poster did not reference RealScam.com in his apparent call for a DDoS attack. Instead, he referenced another site carrying negative news about Profitable Sunrise.
The attack against RealScam.com also occurs against the backdrop of remarks in Washington today by Michael J. Bresnick, executive director of President Obama’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. In an address to the Exchequer Club of Washington, D.C., Bresnick referenced mass-marketing fraud.
“. . . the Consumer Protection Working Group has prioritized the role of financial institutions in mass marketing fraud schemes — including deceptive payday loans, false offers of debt relief, fraudulent health care discount cards, and phony government grants, among other things — that cause billions of dollars in consumer losses and financially destroy some of our most vulnerable citizens,” Bresnick said. “The Working Group also is investigating the businesses that process payments on behalf of the fraudulent merchants — financial intermediaries referred to as third-party payment processors.”
Both Profitable Sunrise and Banners Broker — like many purported “opportunites” before them — have relied on banks and payment processors to keep cash flowing to the schemes. Bresnick did not mention either company in his remarks.
“The reason that we are focused on financial institutions and payment processors is because they are the so-called bottlenecks, or choke-points, in the fraud committed by so many merchants that victimize consumers and launder their illegal proceeds,” Bresnick said. “For example, third-party payment processors are frequently the means by which fraudulent merchants are able to get paid. They provide the scammers with access to the national banking system and facilitate the movement of money from the victim of the fraud to the scam artist. And financial institutions through which these fraudulent proceeds flow, we have seen, are not always blind to the fraud. In fact, we have observed that some financial institutions actually have been complicit in these schemes, ignoring their BSA/AML obligations, and either know about — or are willfully blind to — the fraudulent proceeds flowing through their institutions.”
Despite the absurd payout advertised by Profitable Sunrise (and claims that Banners Broker doubles money), some Profitable Sunrise members have complained on forums about credit unions in North Carolina and Alberta that have raised serious questions about Profitable Sunrise, a “program” that advertised a “Long Haul” plan purported to pay 2.7 percent interest a day.
Zeek Rewards, which the SEC described in August 2012 as a $600 million Ponzi and pyramd scheme operating online, complained on its own Blog about credit unions raising questions about the Zeek “program.”
The SEC later said that Zeek scammed hundreds of thousands of people by duping participants into believing that the “program’s” payout of about 1.5 percent a day came from legitimate means.
UPDATED AT 10:40 A.M. ET (U.S.A.) A member of the “Banners Broker” program tells The Bristol Post that he used a prepaid Banners Broker MasterCard at a NatWest ATM to withdraw £600 and that a counterfeit £20 note was in the stack of cash dispensed by the machine.
The plan, Paul Scoplin reportedly told the paper, was to withdraw the cash at NatWest and then to deposit it into an HSBC account — but the plan didn’t go swimmingly.
“I took the cash over to HSBC straight away and they flagged up one of the notes,” he reportedly told the paper.
NatWest is investigating the note, according to The Post.
Banners Broker is a “program” that gained a head of steam in part from ceaseless promotions on Ponzi-scheme boards such as TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup. Members are complaining about not getting paid and suggesting that Banners Broker is making selective payouts to sustain a fraud scheme.
Whether Scoplin’s reported claim that counterfeit currency somehow made its way into a NatWest machine would result in additional scrutiny of the Banners Broker “program” was not immediately clear.
In June 2012, the PP Blog reported that a site purportedly selling “customers” to members of the Zeek Rewards “program” also was pushing traffic to Banners Broker and JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid, the bizarre, 730-percent-a-year “program” purportedly operated by Frederick Mann.
JSS/JBP may have ties to the “sovereign citizens” movement.
In August 2012, the SEC described Zeek as a $600 million Ponzi- and pyramid scheme operating online. JSS/JBP then morphed into a “program” known as “ProfitClicking,” amid reports of the sudden retirement of Mann. But now Mann, a former pitchman for the AdSurfDaily online Ponzi scheme, is back — this time as a pitchman for a “program” known as “ClickPaid.”
When Mann spoke during a recent ClickPaid conference call, the VOX identifier displayed the name “J. J. Ulrich” when Mann was speaking. Ulrich was associated with ProfitClicking, which has led to questions about whether Mann and Ulrich simply were extending an online fraud that started with JSS/JBP.
The presence of the various “programs” on forums linked to Ponzi schemes has led to questions about whether banks and payment processors are coming into possession of funds tainted by fraud. The “programs” are known to have promoters in common.
UPDATED 7:06 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) The PP Blog today began to receive bizarre spam related to the purported BannersBroker “program,” a Ponzi-forum darling.
Senders from separate IPs who deemed themselves “Banners Broker” transmitted spam at 5:27 p.m. (ET) and 5:29 p.m. today. (UPDATE: 7:06 P.M. Actually, the 5:27 spammer deemed himself/herself “Banners Broker” and the 5:29 spammer deemed himself/herself “Banners Brokers.”)
One of the spams appeared to make the assertion that the PP Blog was created specifically in response to the Banners Broker “program” and that the Blog is in cahoots with at least two other sites to make Banners Broker look bad. The same would-be spam, which appeared to originate in the United Kingdom, also appeared to advance an argument that individuals should not question the Banners Broker “program.”
An earlier spam — one that appeared to originate in Poland with a different email address but largely the same user name and same URL to a website that appears to sell purported Banners Broker sales aids — took a potshot at a Blogger named Finch. (The later spam described in the paragraph above also took a potshot at Rod Cook, the “MLM Watchdog.“)
The PP Blog’s first reference to Banners Broker was published on June 17, 2012, when the Blog reported that a site that claimed it sold “customers” to Zeek Rewards members also was pushing traffic to Banners Broker and JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid, the bizarre, 730-percent-a-year “program” purportedly operated by Frederick Mann.
Mann also was a pitchman for the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme. JSS/JBP, which later morphed into a “program” known as ProfitClicking, may have ties to the sovereign-citizens movement.
In August 2012, the SEC called Zeek Rewards a $600 million Ponzi- and pyramid fraud. Zeek, JSS/JBP, ProfitClicking and Banners Broker all were promoted from the Ponzi boards and had members in common, which leads to questions about whether the schemes and their financial vendors came into possession of funds tainted by multiple fraud schemes.
The commonality of the “programs” also leads to questions about whether satellite companies are developing “leads” programs and purported sales aids to benefit from securities-fraud schemes before they are detected.
The spammer at 5:27 p.m. today asserted that he (or she) was sure companies such as Banners Broker “will fight back through the legal system and get [Blogs critical of such programs] shut down.”
In July, less than a month before the collapse of Zeek, Zeek figure Robert Craddock sought to shut down the website of Zeek critic K. Chang. It became the “Most Important” story of the year on the PP Blog.
Banners Broker uses at least two of the payment processors used by Zeek: Payza and SolidTrustPay.
UPDATED 11:51 A.M. EDT U.S.A. Zeek Rewards’ receiver Kenneth D. Bell had no comment this morning on reports that some Zeek clawback defendants also were participants in Traffic Monsoon, alleged last week by the SEC to have been a Ponzi scheme that had gathered at least $207 million.
News came 
2ND UPDATE 2:25 P.M. EDT U.S.A. More horrible PR for the MLM trade: Banners Broker international pitchman and pyramid-scheme figure Kuldip Josun embezzled at least $3.6 million from affiliates, according to a receiver’s report.
