U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

UPDATED 12:20 P.M. ET U.S.A. Two websites associated with the “Achieve Community” — ReadyToAchieve.com and TheAchieveCommunity.com — are inaccessible this morning. Achieve Community is under investigation by the Colorado Division of Securities. The PP Blog asked the Division this morning if it was aware of the outage and whether the inaccessibility of the sites had […]

URGENT >> BULLETIN >> MOVING: (5th Update 5:35 p.m. ET U.S.A.) The “Achieve Community” money-cycling scheme is under investigation in Colorado. “We do have an open investigation,” said Lillian Alves, Colorado’s Deputy Securities Commissioner. It is the first official public confirmation that Achieve Community, a Ponzi-board program that claims to turn $50 into $400, is […]

DEVELOPING STORY: (Updated 8:43 p.m. ET U.S.A.) The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, Calif., is reporting that detectives in Napa County have linked the kidnapping and murder of 44-year-old Reynaldo Pacheco to the WCM777/Kingdom777 MLM scam and as many as four suspects. From the Press Democrat in a story dated Jan. 15 about the arrest […]

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission declined this morning to comment on a Jan. 9 YouTube pitch from an “Achieve Community” promoter who mixed nearly six minutes of footage from the SEC website into a pitch for Achieve and two other Ponzi-board “programs.” Rodney Blackburn implied in the 14:27 production that the SEC did not […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The screen shots below show that Rodney Blackburn ends his “Unison Wealth” promo at the 8:29 mark of a 14:27 video. At the 8:30 mark, the website of the SEC becomes the feature and remains so for nearly the next six minutes as Blackburn touts Achieve Community, Unison Wealth and Trinity Lines, Ponzi-board […]

It didn’t take long for MLM to get some bad press in 2015. The Reserve Bank of India, the nation’s central bank, cautioned the public “against Multi Level Marketing Activities” on the first day of the new year. RBI issued the statement less than a month after police in Bangalore arrested four individuals associated with […]

Don’t get fleeced by HYIP scammers and commission-based promoters who push such fraud schemes on the Internet, the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) says in a new warning. From the warning (italics added): Have you ever seen an ad on the Internet or a posting on a social media site promising too-good-to-be-true rates of […]

“We know of at least one victim who borrowed, I think, $50,000 from his mother and gave it all to [TelexFree]. And it was her entire retirement.” — Melissa Armstrong, assistant chief litigation counsel, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Oct. 29, 2014 UPDATED 12:19 P.M. EDT OCT. 30 U.S.A. Affinity fraud was one of the […]

UPDATED 8 A.M. EDT U.S.A. New England Public Radio has a minute-long audio report on TelexFree, iFreeX and Sann Rodrigues, including comments from Massachusetts Commonwealth Secretary William Galvin. An NEPR text report is available here. Look under the byline of Kari Njiiri for a link to the audio report. Rodrigues, accused in April 2014 by […]

URGENT >> BULLETIN >> MOVING: Massachusetts Commonwealth Secretary William Galvin has issued a warning on an emerging scheme known as “IFreeX.” Like TelexFree before it, IFreeX is being pitched by two-time SEC pyramid-scheme defendant Sann Rodrigues and is being targeted at the Brazilian community. Rodrigues also is known as Sanderley Rodrigues de Vasconcelos, and individuals […]

UPDATED 3:33 P.M. EDT SEPT. 22 U.S.A. A small subset of data from 95 self-identified “net losers” in the TelexFree MLM scheme shows that they lost a whopping average of $27,578 each, according to an analysis by the PP Blog of court filings in the TelexFree bankruptcy case. The average could be higher because investment […]