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Tag: U.S. Department of Justice

  • BULLETIN: Another ‘False Liens’ Case; Andrew Isaac Chance Charged With Filing $1.3 Billion Bogus Claim Against Federal Prosecutor In Maryland

    BULLETIN: A Maryland man has been indicted and arrested on charges of filing a false lien for more than $1.3 billion against a federal prosecutor who had successfully prosecuted him for filing a bogus income-tax return in 2007.

    Andrew Isaac Chance also has been charged with filing false tax returns for an entity known as “Andrew I. Chance Trust” in 2007, 2008 and 2009. He faces up to 25 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million if convicted on the new charges.

    In 2007, Chance was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for filing a false tax claim for an entity known as “ANDREW CHANCE TRUST.” Chance sought a refund of $306,753 in that case, and refunds of $300,000 for each of the three years cited in the new case, prosecutors said.

    He is currently on federal probation — and now faces the new charges.

    Prosecutors said he placed a false lien of “$1.313 billion against the property” of the federal prosecutor in the earlier case. The prosecutor was an assistant U.S. Attorney, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and the IRS.

    A federal grand jury in Greenbelt, Md., returned the new indictments, the Justice Department and the IRS said.

    Bizarre paperwork attacks against prosecutors and other federal employees have occurred elsewhere in the United States. In July, a California man was indicted in Nevada on charges of filing 22 false liens ranging from $25 million to $300 million against the officials, prosecutors said.

    Thanh Viet Jeremy Cao also sought $20 billion in fraudulent tax refunds, prosecutors charged.

    In June, Ronald James Davenport of Deer Park, Wash., was charged with filing false liens against federal officials in Washington state.

    Davenport, who described himself as a “sovereign” being, sought the spectacular sum of nearly $5.2 billion from each of the officials, including U.S. Attorney James McDevitt of the Eastern District of Washington, an assistant U.S. attorney, a court clerk and an IRS agent, according to court records.

    Prosecutors in the Chance case in Maryland described him as a “tax defier.”

    Members of the AdSurfDaily autosurf — an alleged Ponzi scheme — have been associated with schemes to file liens or threats to file liens against judges, prosecutors and members of law enforcement.

    Some ASD members have described themselves as “sovereign” beings. Elsewhere, the three principal figures in the “3 Hebrew Boys” Ponzi case in South Carolina also described themselves as sovereign.

    The sentences handed out to the “3 Hebrew Boys” defendants were the longest in any federal Ponzi scheme case in South Carolina history, prosecutors said earlier this week. The sentences totaled 84 years — 27 years each for two defendants, and 30 years for a third.

  • KABOOM! Feds Release Info On ‘Alpha Trade Group’ Forex Scheme With Ties To Mexico, Panama; Records Suggest Scheme Was Collapsing Even Prior To Promos On TalkGold, MoneyMakerGroup Forums

    Yet another HYIP scheme pushed on the TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup forums has been outlined by federal prosecutors — this time in Florida.

    The name of the scheme was Alpha Trade Group (ATG), and web records show that the scheme was pitched on TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup beginning on Oct. 7, 2009. Court records, meanwhile, show that ATG already was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security when the first posts to promote the scheme appeared on the forums.

    Just days earlier, on Sept. 25, 2009, a U.S. bank closed an account prosecutors later linked to the scheme, according to court records. Taken together, the court and web records strongly suggest that the ATG investment “opportunity” first was advertised on MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold when the scheme already was in a state of collapse because one of its key money conduits had been blocked.

    This screen shot shows the first post about Alpha Trade Group appeared at the MoneyMakerGroup Ponzi forum on Oct. 7, 2009 — days after a U.S. bank already had closed an account linked to the scheme amid fears it was being used to launder money.
    This screen shot, taken from Paragraph 23 of a federal affidavit in the ATG Ponzi case, shows that a U.S. bank closed an account later linked to the scheme at least 12 days prior to the ATG promo on the MoneyMakerGroup forum. Court records show the scheme already was under investigation by federal authorities before the sales posts were made on the MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold forums.

    It is possible that the scheme was in a state of collapse even earlier than September 2009. Court records show that at least one bank account tied to the business was closed on June 18, 2009 — nearly four months prior to the first posts promoting the scheme on MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold.

    One MoneyMakerGroup poster — apparently angry that the program was being advertised in public — scolded the poster who started the thread.

    “Please take down your posts,” the scolder wrote. “ATG asked all of the members not to advertise. Otherwise your account with the company will be closed. Go to recent e-mails from the company. This is serious. Please comply.”

    The post scolding the advertiser appeared on Oct. 29, more than three weeks after the original sales pitch appeared on the forum and more than a month after federal agents began their probe into ATG.

    By Feb. 22, 2010, federal prosecutors and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, were in federal court in Orlando filing a forfeiture complaint.

    The Feds sought the seizure of $316,418.50 in a bank account linked to the scheme, according to court records. The forfeiture complaint alleged a Forex Ponzi scheme, and prosecutors linked the fraud to ATG, a Florida company known as Online Market Solutions and at least four individuals: Jose Cecilio Martinez Beltran, Francisco Amaury Suero Matos, Yehodiz Padua Valentin and Welinton Bautista Castillo.

    Unnamed “others” also were referenced in the complaint.

    “Investment opportunities offered by Alpha Trade Group promised participants unusually high monetary returns on investments and for referring other persons to the programs,” prosecutors said, in a statement to victims. “In reality, the investment opportunity was little more than ‘Ponzi’ or ‘Pyramid’ scheme, in which if participants actually received funds, those funds were generated by investments made by other Alpha Trade Group investors.”

    A federal judge ordered the money forfeited on July 26, according to court records.

    The case was brought by the office of U.S. Attorney A. Brian Albritton of the Middle District of Florida. Albritton’s office is handing a number of highly complex financial-fraud schemes.

    Websites such as TalkGold, MoneyMakerGroup, ASAMonitor and MyCashForums have promoted one fraud scheme after another. TalkGold, MoneyMakerGroup and ASAMonitor are specifically referenced in court documents filed in the Pathway To Prosperity (P2P) fraud scheme.

    P2P’s Nicholas Smirnow was charged in May by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and federal prosecutors in Southern District of Illinois with operating a massive HYIP Ponzi scheme that affected investors across the world.

    MoneyMakerGroup also is referenced in court filings by the SEC in the alleged Legisi Ponzi scheme.

    Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the U.S. Secret Service had helped bring about the arrest in France of an alleged international thief in part by monitoring criminal forums.

    Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, 27, was arrested by French authorities in Nice. Court filings show that the Secret Service used undercover agents and “undercover communications” to develop the case.

    Federal records show that ATG purported to be registered in Panama and was using “various corporations and fictitious names registered in Florida” to pull off the scheme.

    Among the names used was “Orsa Investment Group LLC,” according to an affidavit filed in the case. The scheme began in April 2009, according to court filings.

    An ICE agent said in an affidavit that the Internet and “business opportunity meetings” in Central Florida were used to promote the scheme.

    Read the ATG forfeiture complaint, which paints a picture of a commission-based, multilevel-marketing (MLM)  scheme within a Forex fraud scheme — and other schemes within schemes.

  • Pathway To Prosperity Case A Subject Of Discussion In Washington’s Highest Power Corridors; Website Of U.S. Attorney General Includes Link To Case Info As Part Of ‘Mass-Marketing Fraud’ Educational Campaign

    From the June 2010 International Mass-Marketing Fraud Working Group report.

    In November 2009, President Obama formed the interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force (FFETF). By January, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who answers to Obama,  publicly warned fraudsters that “if you propagate an investment scheme, if you are complicit in an act of financial fraud, you are writing your ticket to jail.”

    It now turns out that the investigation into the business practices of Nicholas Smirnow and unnamed co-conspirators in an alleged $70 million, HYIP Ponzi scheme known as Pathway To Prosperity (P2P) was undertaken by elements of the FFETF.

    It further turns out the the U.S. Department of Justice — under Holder’s command — is using the P2P probe and the criminal charges it led to against Smirnow to educate the public on a global scale about “mass-marketing fraud.”

    The P2P case was mentioned prominently in a news release yesterday by the Justice Department to publicize international, cooperative efforts among seven governments to curb the proliferation of fraud that occurs on the Internet, over the telephone, through the mails, through group meetings and through other forms of mass communication.

    Last week, federal prosecutors thanked the Rotterdam-Rijnmond Regional Police in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Filipino authorities, and the Ontario Securities Commission in Canada for assisting in the P2P probe.

    Meanwhile, an entity known as the International Mass-Marketing Fraud Working Group (IMMFWG) has released a “threat assessment” to provide governments and the public with a current assessment of the nature and scope of the threat that mass-marketing fraud poses around the world.

    IMMFWG’s participating countries include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Nigeria and the United Kingdom, as well as Europol, the European police agency.

    “The IMMFWG seeks to facilitate the multinational exchange of information and intelligence, the coordination of cross-border operations to detect, disrupt, and apprehend mass-marketing fraud, and the enhancement of public-awareness and public-education measures concerning international mass-marketing fraud schemes,” the group said.

    In the Justice Department news release yesterday to publicize IMMFWG’s threat assessment, prosecutors pointedly referenced the P2P case.

    “Last week the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Illinois charged an individual for allegedly engaging in an international Ponzi scheme that was operated through a website,” the Justice Department said. “The scheme allegedly resulted in a total of $70 million in losses to more than 40,000 investors in more than 120 countries.”

    The news release included a link to information on the P2P case, and the letterhead in the document featured the logos of both the Justice Department and the Task Force Obama created in November.

    Despite very public warnings from Holder that the United States is serious about sending financial fraudsters to jail and a declaration in the complaint against P2P’s Smirnow that “[a] large percentage, if not all, HYIPs, are Ponzi schemes,” members of Ponzi-pushing forums such as ASA Monitor, MoneyMakerGroup, TalkGold and MyCashForums are still out in full force to push Ponzi schemes on the U.S. and world public.

    For its part, IMMFWG said in its threat assessment yesterday that “[t]here are strong indications that the order of magnitude of global mass-marketing fraud losses is in the tens of billions of dollars per year.”

    IMMFWG also said “[m]ass-marketing fraud has gradually transformed from a predominantly North American crime problem into a pervasive global criminal threat.”

    “For some victims,” IMMFWG said, “the risks extend well beyond loss of personal savings or funds to include physical threats or risks, loss of their homes, depression, and even contemplated, attempted, or actual suicide.”

    IMMFWG noted that “[l]arge-scale criminal mass-marketing fraud operations are present in multiple countries in most regions of the world” and that “similarities between such operations include targeting victims in other countries, foreign outsourcing of operations, and involvement of organized criminal enterprises.”

    Read the Justice Department news release that references P2P in the context of IMMFWG’s global effort to educate the public about mass-marketing fraud and the hideous economic and social consequences of such fraud.

    Read IMMFWG’s threat assessment as published by the interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force.