PatrickPretty.com

Tag: Bogdan Fiedur

  • AdLandPro, Site Whose HYIP Shills Touted AdSurfDaily, Finanzas Forex And JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid, Renews Attack Against RealScam.com — As ALP Swaps In Images Of Its Own Members Alongside Ad For ‘Escort’ Service

    This ad for a purported Thailand escort service appears today in the United States on AdLandPro, a site whose operator is threatening a class-action lawsuit against RealScam.com, an antiscam forum. The PP Blog captured this screen shot today and edited it to remove the images of EIGHT AdLandPro members whose photographs were displayed in the left sidebar and created the appearance that the AdLandPro members also were members of (or approved of) the escort service. When the Blog reloaded the ad, the page displayed the images of EIGHT other AdLandPro members. A third reload served up an image of an entire family, including three young children who appear to reside in the South Central United States.

    In November 2011, the PP Blog reported that Bogdan Fiedur of AdLandPro had threatened antiscam site RealScam.com with litigation. The bid to chill RealScam in the age of international mass-marketing fraud featured the registration of a domain styled RealScamClassActionSuit.com.

    With Fiedur trolling for suckers and hoping to make his intellectual dishonesty go viral, RealScam did not buckle at his obvious bid to chill it.

    Good for you, RealScam!

    It’s hard to condense all the AdLandPro absurdities that followed over the next several weeks, but we’ll summarize them as such: A sampling of Stepfordian shills and mindless apologists stepped up to the plate for Fiedur, “fake” law students purportedly from a major American university entered the fray to add to the bid to chill — and the matter devolved into Threatre of the Absurd in that Internet-only sort of way.

    By the end of December, the chill bid appeared to end: Content on the purported class-action site went missing, and the site began to resolve to an AdLandPro page.

    We would be remiss if we did not point out that, in addition to being solicited to register for HYIP scams such as AdSurfDaily, Finanzas Forex and JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid (730 percent a year) by purported “Christians” on AdLandPro over the past few years, American visitors (and others) also were solicited for cross-border sales of pharmaceuticals.

    If drugs weren’t on their purchase list, AdLandPro visitors were told how to find used underwear and arrange — umm, how should we put this? — the temporary services of scantily clad women in various nations from India eastward after demonstrating a way to pay?

    At least some of the risqué ads have gone missing, but their URLs remain. When they’re clicked, they resolve to pages that show the faces of AdLandPro members who had nothing to do with the placing of the ads. Did we mention that AdLandPro purports to be a great guardian of privacy and the interest of its members?

    And did we mention that not all of the risqué ads have gone missing — and that, when they’re clicked, they load images of AdLandPro members who had nothing to do with placing the ads and that AdLandPro wants members to believe it was a sort of Facebook before Facebook became the craze?

    “The most exclusive, classic and attractive companions in Bangkok are here waiting to join you, at your hotel, apartment, or villa,” one ad on AdLandPro reads today. “All our princesses are hand picked by our management for their beauty, demeanour and friendly attitude.”

    The ad is on the “community” subdomain of the AdLandPro.domain. When the PP Blog viewed the ad earlier today, the photographs of EIGHT AdLandPro members showed up in a sidebar only inches to the left. The headline above the sidebar read, “Our Members.” Less than an inch away, a photo of a presumptive “escort” wearing a pink-lace bra and a pink-lace wrap over her genital area appeared. The photo appeared to display two red telephones, with the woman posing seductively on what appeared to be a bed or mat.

    When the PP Blog reloaded the page, the images of eight different AdLandPro members were displayed. A third reload resulted in the display of images of an AdLandPro family whose matriarch identified herself in her AdLandPro profile as a mother and grandmother from the South Central United States.

    Two adults in the photo were holding young children, one of whom appeared to be an infant. A third child also appeared in the photo. Below that photo, the full-face image of a lone AdLandPro member — a woman — appeared. Below the woman’s photo, an ad for “OneX” appeared.

    OneX is a program accused Ponzi schemer Andy Bowdoin of AdSurfDaily said he was using to raise funds to pay for his criminal defense.

    “I believe that God has brought us OneX to provide the necessary funds to win this case,” Bowdoin said in an October 2011 pitch.

    So, if you’re an AdLandPro member and had nothing whatsoever to do with the placement of the escort ad and do not endorse Thailand “princesses” purportedly “hand picked by . . . management,” say, because you oppose human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of women, AdLandPro is making it appear as though you’re on board the Thailand escort train.

    A link prompt below the photos of the eight AdLandPro members reads, “See All 185753 Members.” The URL points to the AdLandPro membership directory.

    By coincidence, the U.S. Department of Justice announced today that Marcus Choice Williams, 36, of Fort Worth, Texas, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison followed by 30 years of supervised release for various felony offenses related to a conspiracy to traffic women for prostitution.

    “The court’s sentence clearly reflects the seriousness of these awful sex trafficking crimes,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.  “The victims suffered physical assaults, sexual abuse and daily degradation all because of this defendant’s greed and callous disregard for them as individuals.  We are committed to prosecuting sex traffickers and vindicating victims’ rights, as they were vindicated today.”

    Williams, prosecutors said, operated “adult escort web sites” as part of a human-trafficking scheme that also included money-laundering.

    He “recruited vulnerable women, specifically single mothers from troubled backgrounds, and, in some cases used a combination of deception, fraud, coercion, threats and physical violence to compel the women to engage in prostitution, requiring each young woman to secure a daily quota of money, and if operating out of town, to wire the funds to him,” prosecutors said.

    Crazier By The Moment

    Just when one began to believe that AdLandPro had abandoned its absurd litigation threat against RealScam, guess what’s back? (You’d be right if you guessed the class-action site.)

    And if ads on AdLandPro from “Christian” HYIP peddlers and purveyors of used underwear and illegal, cross-border pharmaceutical sales (after Google had agreed in August 2011 to pay the United States $500 million to settle claims of illegal cross-border solicitations for pharmaceuticals) were not enough, Fiedur’s purported class-action site is quoting a notorious YouTube cyberstalker and raunchy Internet gadfly, positioning him as an authoritative critic of RealScam.com.

    It’s enough to make decent people from all corners of the world cringe as they contemplate whether intellectual corruption as practiced on the web has gained the upper hand.

  • ‘MoneyMakingBrain,’ Advocate For JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid, Emails Threats To PP Blog; ‘That’s Not A Threat, It’s A Promise,’ First Email Claims; Second Suggests He’ll Create Banking Trouble For Blog Poster And Defend JSS Tripler Operator ‘So Help Me God’

    “Either we talk about here, or I talk about somewhere else (that’s not a threat, it’s a promise :)” — ‘MoneyMakingBrain (MMB), in email threat to PP Blog, Feb. 29, 2012, 7:52 a.m. ET

    UPDATED 4:22 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) It has happened again: The PP Blog has received yet another threat via email for its reporting on the HYIP sphere, which FINRA described in a 2010 Alert as a “bizarre substratum of the Internet.”

    Today’s threat came from “MoneyMakingBrain” (MMB) in apparent “defense” of JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid, an HYIP “program” purportedly operated by self-described former AdSurfDaily and Ad-Ventures4U pitchman Frederick Mann. JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid claims it pays a return of 2 percent per day.

    ASD operator Andy Bowdoin, 77, is an accused Ponzi schemer under indictment for wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities. The ASD scheme, which was based in Florida,  gathered at least $110 million and created thousands of victims, federal prosecutors have said. Bowdoin’s Ponzi trial has been scheduled for September 2012. JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid purports to pay a daily return twice that of ASD.

    Among other things, Bowdoin has compared the August 2008 U.S. Secret Service raid on ASD’s headquarters to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and described it as the work of “Satan.”

    MMB’s initial email threat was received at 7:52 a.m. ET. It was followed by another email threat at 11:14 a.m. in which MMB suggested he’d seek to cause banking troubles for a specific PP Blog poster and defend Mann “so help me God.”

    “You could be the nicest guy in the world, doing a real public service, but on the matter of Frederick Mann, you’ve made a gross error, and you crossed the line, Mr.,” the second threat read in part. “I am not a passive by-stander Patrick, I am one of those who will come and help an old man from being beaten up by a bully, so help me God.”

    The second email also claimed that, “If anything, you’ve brought all this upon yourself.”

    On Feb. 27, the PP Blog reported that a site registered to Mann in South Africa at the same street address of JustBeenPaid had at least 11 links to videos featuring Francis Schaeffer Cox. Cox, 27,  is a purported “sovereign citizen.” He is accused in Alaska of a “militia” murder plot against public officials.

    Federal prosecutors known to be investigating the ASD scheme in the District of Columbia declined to comment on the Blog’s story, which was published Monday. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors known to be investigating the “sovereign citizen” movement in the Pacific Northwest did not respond to a request for comment on the report.

    Today’s disturbing developments began with the Blog’s receipt of the initial threatening email at 7:52 a.m. The initial threat implied that, if the PP Blog did publish a comment submitted by MMB during the overnight hours and respond to the email, MMB would seek to cause harm to the Blog. The PP Blog did not reply to the initial email. Nor did it reply to the follow-up threat.

    MMB’s comment already had been published by the PP Blog by the time the initial email threat was received. The comment was submitted at 1:12 a.m. today and approved by the PP Blog at approximately 7:30 a.m., after being temporarily sequestered in a holding queue because of the menacing nature of previous comments submitted by MMB.

    An anonymous proxy in Europe was used to send the comment, and a Gmail address was entered on the PP Blog’s Comments form. For the past two days, MMB has been submitting comments that imply he has the power to harm the Blog if the Blog does not submit to his threats. His comments were sent from IPs in the United States and Europe. Today’s email communications from MMB were the first received from MMB.

    Because the Blog believes it is important to publish comments that showcase the bizarre and sometimes menacing nature of the HYIP sphere, it has published several comments from MMB since Monday. But because today’s email threats introduced a new form of electronic menacing and implied a PP Blog reader would be subjected to a hectoring campaign,  the Blog no longer will publish any additional comments from MMB.

    The PP Blog engages in the marketplace of ideas, not the marketplace of threats.

    These are among MMB’s menacing assertions yesterday:

    • “I know you’re reading everything I write and you are scared.”
    • ” But, continue to annoy the MoneyMakingBrain and deviate him from his monitoring duties, and you’ll be the ones to be in the hot water. “
    • “no one is invisible to the MoneyMakingBrain and you need to stop doing what you’re doing against this man immediately. Because if you don’t, I am going to make a formal complain (sic) to the very authorities you purport are coming after scam sites and send all the evidence I’ve gathered so far from posting on your site and the realscam site. I don’t like witch hunts and I am sure Fred Mann can whip your ass in court for your highly suggestive, provocative, highly contentious and flat-out defamatory commentaries against his character on your sites.”
    • “You can delete my comments as much as you like, but take what I said to the bank. In the end, you are going to look like a fool.”
    • “Maybe it’s a good idea that you stop your charade once and for all and finally cease and desist attacking Mr. Fred Mann, who is innocent until proven guilty. Not going to be repeating myself again.”
    • “Needless to say that you’ll be needing to look for another ISP because you won’t have internet access at home or your office, wherever. Needless to say that your server host will also shut down your sites down for violation of terms and conditions.”

    MMB also advanced a number of conspiracy theories, including one in which he asserts that two different people who post on RealScam.com and the PP Blog are one and the same. RealScam is a forum that concerns itself with mass-marketing fraud.

    In November 2011, RealScam  was subjected to a bid to chill from Bogdan Fiedur, the operator of AdLandPro, a website whose members routinely promote HYIP schemes and other highly dubious pursuits. JSS Tripler/JustBeenPaid is one of the “programs” promoted on AdLandPro, which also has a presence on Ponzi forums such as TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup.

    Conspiracy theories are part and parcel to the HYIP landscape, as are threats — direct and veiled. Today”s second MMB email threat also raised the specter of fear.

    ” . . . it’s clear that you are too scared of me by now,” the second email read in part.

    In November 2011, an FBI Terrorism Task Force arrested ASD figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming on charges he filed false liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD Ponzi case. Two months later, a superseding indictment was returned against Leaming that accused him of participating in a scheme to file false liens against two U.S. prison officials, uttering a false “Bonded Promissory Note” for $1 million and being a convicted felon in possession of firearms.

    So-called “sovereign citizens” have been linked to various forms of securities fraud and tax fraud. Because they believe prosecutors and judges have no authority over them, “sovereigns” have been known to target state, local and national officials in plots to file bogus liens and destroy the credit of members of the law-enforcement community and litigation opponents.

    Their harassment methods, which feature the use of both postal mail and email and often include direct or veiled threats, have become known as “paper terrorism.”

    When arrested, Leaming, the ASD figure and purported “sovereign,”  was found with two federal fugitives from Arkansas who’d been indicted on charges of duping participants in a home-business scheme of more than $2 million. Those fugitives also have been linked to the “sovereign citizen” movement and filed a series of bizarre pleadings in Arkansas after their arrests with Leaming, who is jailed near Seattle. Both fugitives now are detained at federal facilities in Texas, according to prison records.

    After MMB sent today’s initial email threat, he sent another comment to the Blog that included a threat:

    “Stop abusing your forum as Lynn does, or I am going to conclude that there is a business relationship between the two of you, and that would be bad a thing (I am afraid to say anything else as you may call it another ‘threat’).

    “And yes, this is not a threat: you’re better off having me talking here than somewhere else. I know too much already about both you and Lynn, and I still want to believe that the two of you are men of good (although the tactics of one indicate the otherwise).”

    “Lynn” is a reference to Lynn Edgington, the chairman of Eagle Research Associates Inc., a 501(c)3 Public Benefit Charitable Corporation based in Mission Viejo, Calif.

    The second email implied that MMB would seek to interfere with an Eagle Research banking relationship.

    See related story and Comments thread.