UPDATED 3:11 P.M. EDT U.S.A. A report dated today at ShanghaiDaily.com says an individual “surnamed Xu” and associated with “World Capital Market Inc.” is “now in custody” after a police action against a “pyramid scheme” in China.
The PP Blog has contacted the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to determine if the person reportedly under arrest in China is “Phil” Ming Xu of the World Capital Market/WCM777 scheme from 2014.
If the individual proves to be the Xu in the SEC case, it would mean that Xu left the United States sometime after being charged civilly by the SEC in March 2014 with a fraud alleged to have gathered tens of millions of dollars. It also potentially means the scheme, which allegedly operated under different names and resulted in the appointment of a receiver by a U.S. federal court, continued offshore after the U.S. action.
Phil Ming Xu resided in Temple City, Calif., the SEC said in 2014.
From Shanghai Daily (italics added):
Last June and August, police received alerts from the People’s Bank of China and the Guangdong branch of China Securities Regulatory Commission that the company and its owners were not qualified to conduct public financing, and a criminal investigation began.
A U.S. criminal probe into World Capital Market and related companies or figures also is believed to be under way.
The WCM777 story in the United States has been consistently bizarre. MLM hucksters, for example, pitched the “program” in churches and claimed the company had given loans for spectacular sums to some top American businesses.
There also was a claim a former CIA operative was involved, that the appearance of “blood moons” in the sky would provide investors guidance, that Ming Xu had acquired a company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” a film that has been described as anti-Islamic and denigrating to the prophet Muhammad, that Ming Xu was an educator at a purported university known as the Joseph Global Institute.
UPDATE 2:03 P.M. EDT MAY 17 U.S.A. The SEC said today that it didn’t have anything on whether the Xu reportedly under arrest in China is the Xu from the agency’s March 2014 case.