BULLETIN:Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, the Idaho man accused in November of shooting at the White House, now has been formally indicted on charges of attempting to assassinate the President of the United States.
Ortega-Hernandez, 21, also was accused of assaulting three U.S. officers or employees with a deadly weapon.
Whether the officers or employees were agents of the U.S. Secret Service was not immediately clear. The Nov. 11 White House shooting allegedly occurred after dark. Federal employees work at the facility around the clock.
All in all, Ortega-Hernandez faces 17 charges in the indictment, including damaging U.S. property and firearms offenses. The FBI found “several confirmed bullet impact points on the south side of the building on or above the second story residence area,” the office of U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. said.
“Several bullets and fragments also were collected in the area near the impact points,” Machen’s office said.
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer of the District of Columbia.
Collyer, whose name has appeared on the PP Blog many times, is the judge overseeing the AdSurfDaily Ponzi cases.
Ortega-Hernandez potentially faces life in prison. He has been jailed since his Nov. 16 arrest in Pennsylvania.
UPDATE: “Dave,” the purported “admin” of an increasingly bizarre HYIP known as JSS Tripler 2 (T2), has blocked public access to the T2 forum.
T2, which purportedly was born after a meeting of Ponzi-forum minds, is using payment processors notoriously friendly to Ponzi and fraud schemes. The “program” is trading on the name of a different Ponzi scheme even as it preemptively denies that T2 itself is a Ponzi scheme and advertises a return of 2 percent a day on top of referral commissions.
But payouts can’t be made because an AlertPay account in the name of “Chris,” an apparent one-time business partner of “Dave,” was frozen, “Dave” has asserted.
The action blocking the public from the forum was taken because naysayers were copying information from the forum and using it to make critical posts elsewhere, according to “Dave.”
Forum closures, post deletions, traffic blockages and leeching off the name recognition of other “programs” often are signatures of scams-in-progress. (See July 2009 story on the roller-coaster ride of the AdViewGlobal (AVG) forum, which rose from the carcass of the alleged AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme and was accompanied by threats that AVG critics would be banned, sued or lose their Internet connections.) Similar claims have accompanied events at T2.
Purported ‘Scan’ Of MoneyMakerGroup
And “Dave,” posting on the T2 forum as “foradmin,” also claims he has performed “a scan over on [MoneyMakerGroup”] to “see who is turning against us and promoting T2 as a scam.”
“Dave” did not say precisely what his “scan” entailed or how he intended to hold naysayers accountable for their off-site posting activities. Nor did he explain how scanning MoneyMakerGroup for T2 traitors could help T2 solve its core problem: the apparent blockage of the “Chris” AlertPay account that was used to launch T2 in the fall of 2011.
Although “Dave” and “Chris” purportedly are battling electronically across continents, “Dave” purportedly is telling T2 members there is reason to be hopeful that onetime T2 business partner “Chris” will stop being a wretch long enough to get the “program” restarted, according to forum posts.
But even the amount purportedly trapped in the AlertPay account when the freeze ensued and things purportedly turned sour between “Dave” and “Chris” is in dispute. “Dave,” according to forum posts, has claimed at least two separate sums: $200,000 and $160,000.
The reporting disparity only leads to more questions about T2. “Dave,” according to forum posts, is advocating for T2 members not to file AlertPay disputes. T2 says it sells “dream positions” (DPs) for $10 each and something called “dream matrices” (DMs) for $20. T2 bills itself as the place “WHERE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE.”
With a representation of a sparking-silver crescent moon encasing the phrase “2%” in glowing gold — and against a backdrop of twinkling stars in multiple sizes — T2 goes about the business of impressing website prospects.
Among the veteran hucksters in its ranks is Ponzi-forum legend “Ken Russo.”
OINKER ALERT: ‘Ken Russo’ Assesses Criminality Of ‘Chris’
“Ken Russo” — a man whose fraud bona fides only grow as he leads participants into one train wreck after another and habitually posts his “earnings” in forums listed in federal court filings as places from which Ponzi schemes are promoted — claims to have communicated with “Chris” and decided that the lack of follow-up communications from “Chris” suggests that “Chris has “committed a serious crime” and that he “should cooperate fully at this time.”
Whether “Ken Russo” called police on “Chris” is unclear. Also unclear is how any police investigation would proceed once officers determined that “Ken Russo,” too, was promoting a “program” whose advertised annualized return was on the order of 730 percent — with recruitment commissions on top of that — while simultaneously insisting it was not a Ponzi scheme after having been born on a Ponzi forum listed in federal court files and claiming to be trying to rebirth itself from Thailand.
The word “MoneyMakerGroup” is spelled out by a fraud victim in longhand in a 2008 evidence exhibit in the Legisi HYIP scheme, which triggered both civil (SEC) and criminal investigations (U.S. Secret Service) and charges. Legisi, another Ponzi forum darling, allegedly gathered more than $72 million and sparked an undercover probe by the Secret Service, which assigned an agent to pose as an interested investor.
Mazu.com operator and forum huckster Matthew J. Gagnon was charged both criminally and civilly in the Legisi case, with the SEC describing Gagnon as “a danger to the investing public.” Civil judgments totaling more than $2.5 million have piled up against Gagnon. The evidence exhibit filed in the case (referenced above and partially displayed on the right) shows “Money Maker Group.com” in longhand, along with Gagnon’s name and phone number in longhand.
“Dave” asserted last week that “Chris” would be arrested — and then “Dave” purportedly left England for Thailand, apparently with the expectation that an unidentified police agency would mop up on “Chris” after “Dave” boarded a plane for the Indochina Peninsula.
Thailand now has emerged as the purported venue from which “Dave” now claims he is back in communication with “Chris,” after “Chris” purportedly had ducked him in England when both men were in the country simultaneously.
After being subjected to arrest threats, “Chris,” according to Dave, is starting to understand that he is in an impossible legal thicket and is displaying a willingness to solve the purported AlertPay problem.
“Chris,” according to “Dave,” apparently also recognizes that T2 members who live in England might pose a localized threat to “Chris,” something that reportedly has made “Chris” more amenable to making sure money gets back in the hands of T2 members.
“Dave” did not say what police agency he purportedly called on “Chris.” Whether “Chris” will construe “Dave’s” purported actions and the prospect of local menacing by individual T2 members as extortion bids is unclear.
Despite preemptively denying T2 is a Ponzi scheme, “Dave,” appears not to recognize that prosecutors might construe at least one of his forum remarks as a virtual confession that T2 was selling unregistered securities as investment contracts and positioning the “program” as a passive investment opportunity.
“Dave,” according to “Dave,” worked his “ass” off and created a condition under which members “can sit and watch TV and make a fantastic return.” Meanwhile, the T2 website claims that “Dream Positions are perfect for the ‘passive type’ member.”
Faith Holds Forth
HYIP aficionado Faith Sloan has trained her sights on both “Dave” and “Ken Russo.”
Sloan, who published a “JSS Tripler2 (T2) Calculator” on her Blog and speculated that her “$1500 outlay of cash” compounded for 75 days would morph into an “account value of $6,623.75” of which “$5,123.75” would be profit, announced that “Dave” booted her off the T2 forum — apparently for making him look bad.
Events at T2, she now ventures, may be “borderline insane.” And “Dave” may be “EXTREMELY INCOMPETENT” or perhaps “just a little SCAMMER boy” — if not a “hybrid mix.”
In July 2010, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) ran a public-awareness campaign that warned about HYIP scams that spread on social-media sites. FINRA described the HYIP sphere as a “bizarre substratum of the Internet.”
Pathway To Prosperity generated more than $70 million and created 40,000 victims from 120 countries, according to court filings.
Whether Sloan acquainted herself with FINRA’s public-awareness campaign about HYIPs and documents by Professor James E. Byrne that explained the alleged fraud behind Pathway to Prosperity is unclear. Also unclear is whether Sloan is aware that the U.S. Department of Justice has spotlighted the Pathway To Prosperity case as an example of international mass-marketing fraud.
What is clear is that T2’s asserted payout rate is nearly as absurd as Pathway to Prosperity’s. It’s also clear Faith Sloan — despite her T2 calculator — is publicly challenging fellow HYIP purveyor “Ken Russo” to get real.
“Ken Russo,” Faith Sloan declares on her Blog, is “a crybaby!”
And “Ken Russo,” she asserts, made a bad call on a program known as “Dollar Monster” and has “NOT made any money with his $24000.00 in JSSTripler2 . . .”
“Oopsies,” she chides “Ken Russo.”
Whether “Ken Russo” actually has $24,000 riding in T2 is unclear.
UPDATED 6:31 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) A website collecting money through PayPal for the criminal defense of accused Ponzi schemer Andy Bowdoin of AdSurfDaily appears to have lost its ability to gather funds designated for an attorney’s “trust account.”
This message (next paragraph) appears if would-be Bowdoin sympathizers click on any of a number of payment buttons on the site, which is known as “Andy’s Fundraising Army.”
“This recipient is currently unable to receive money.”
The message originates on PayPal’s server.
Why the trust account lost the ability to collect money via PayPal is unclear. The office of U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. of the District of Columbia said this afternoon that it “typically does not comment on pending cases, and has no comment on this particular matter.”
Machen’s office is leading the Bowdoin prosecution.
Bowdoin, 77, is awaiting a September 2012 trial on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities. The U.S. Secret Service said the ASD patriarch was presiding over a Ponzi scheme involving at least $110 million and thousands of victims.
In September 2011, the Secret Service and federal prosecutors returned to members more than $55 million seized in 2008 in the civil portion of the case. The agency described ASD as a “criminal enterprise.”
Bowdoin began to solicit money through the fundraising website last summer, after repeated delays. Information published on the site suggests Bowdoin collected about $26,800, far short of this stated goal of $500,000. The site positioned Bowdoin as “David,” with the government as “Goliath.”
In recent months, Bowdoin has been pushing a mysterious scheme known as OneX, claiming God had delivered OneX to enable him to pay for his criminal defense.
ASD figure Kenneth Wayne Leaming, a purported “sovereign citizen,” was arrested by the FBI in November 2011. He is detained in a federal facility near Seattle on charged he filed fraudulent liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD Ponzi case.
Online huckster “Ken Russo,” also known as “DRdave,” appears once again to have backed an HYIP fraud scheme and recruited a downline into a Ponzi morass. This one is known as JSS Tripler 2 — T2 for shorthand — and the backstory is just plain bizarre.
Several cross-border crimes punishable by jail time already may have occurred, and there are reports that T2 somehow was operating through an AlertPay account that was not owned by T2 or T2’s purported operator, another person known as “Dave.”
Like virtually all HYIP schemes, details are fuzzy and ambiguous. But “Dave” apparently was operating T2 through an AlertPay account owned by “Chris,” and the Canada-based payment processor — according to Ponzi board posts — has frozen the account.
“Dave,” meanwhile, asserted that the account contained $200,000 and that “Chris” will “be in police custody by the end of the day,” according to Ponzi-board posts.
Although the “police” assertion appears to have been made earlier this month, there appears to be no corresponding information about what police agency “Dave” called to have “Chris” taken into custody. Nor has “Dave” explained why police should consider “Chris” a criminal at the exclusion of “Dave,” whose T2 program claims to pay members a return of 2 percent a day plus referral commissions.
The purported daily payout rate is double that claimed by AdSurfDaily, which the U.S. Secret Service said more than three years ago was operating a massive international Ponzi scheme on the Internet. Like T2, ASD also offered referral commissions on top of absurd daily returns.
Such a “confluence” of payment schemes and an apparent lack of outside revenue are markers of a pure or virtually pure Ponzi scheme — even though criminals on the Ponzi forums turn a blind eye to the fundamental mathematical reality and the virtual certainly that members are being paid from the funds of other members.
It is unclear if anything about T2 is real.
What is clear is that ASD President Andy Bowdoin was indicted on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities in December 2010. He faces up to 125 years in federal prison if convicted on all counts, a fact virtually ignored by T2 promoters. ASD also was promoted on Ponzi boards such as MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold.
At the same time T2’s “Dave” was claiming to have alerted police about “Chris,” “Dave” appears not to have explained what he intended to do if “Chris” called police on him.
Also apparently absent from the police claim is any sort of real-world explanation of how it apparently came to be that “Dave” had come to believe it somehow was appropriate for a program “admin” such as himself to run a scheme through a third-party’s AlertPay account, not an account in the name of T2.
“Dave” appears also to have asserted he had the power to exact “a lifetime ban from internet access” against “Chris” while further asserting that he somehow could authorize AlertPay to pay T2 members with money in the frozen account held by “Chris.”
Ponzi-forum posts from October assert T2’s server was located in Thailand, with “Dave” being “from the UK.” It appears now, however, that the server is in the United States. “I Got Paid” posts on the Ponzi boards suggest payments have come from a Gmail address that uses the name of “Chris” in its makeup, not an email address from the JSSTripler2 domain.
Such mechanics also were in place for JustBeenPaid and JSSTripler (see link below), “programs” that appear to have used multiple domains and addresses in multiple jurisdictions to funnel payouts to participants.
For his part, “Ken Russo” — who earlier introduced members to the Club Asteria disaster and any number of fraud schemes — is describing T2 members who are demanding real-world answers as individuals who should be “deleted.”
“The relatively few members who are demonstrating impatience along with their demand for a refund should be taken care of and deleted from the program and this forum,” “Ken Russo” ventured, according to RealScam.com, an antifraud site that concentrates on mass-marketing fraud. “Their continued presence here will only create more anxiety and frustration.”
T2 was almost impossibly bizarre from the moment it came out of the gate. The “program” apparently believed it prudent to adopt the name of an existing program in the fraud stable of JustBeenPaid: JSS Tripler. Ponzi-board supporters of the emerging T2 “program” asserted that, since JSS Tripler apparently had not trademarked its name, that using the name as the calling card of a new “program” was perfectly acceptable.
Why any legitimate entity would want to adopt the name of an obvious fraud scheme such as JSS Tripler was left to the imagination — as are so many things in the foundationally corrupt worlds of HYIPs.
In any event, “Dave” now claims that he’s traveling to Thailand to try to right the T2 ship because he was having trouble concentrating from his undisclosed earlier location, according to Ponzi forum posts. Some T2 cheerleaders appear to be urging T2 members not to file disputes with AlertPay, a common occurrence when HYIP Ponzi schemes begin to tank.
T2 apparently also has licensed itself to ban members and seize money (or the representations of money) in their accounts for speaking ill of the purported “program.”
UPDATE: “OneX,” the mysterious “program” AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin claimed in October would pay for his criminal defense and help former ASD members “earn $99,000 very quickly,” has been offline for days.
The reason for the extended outage, which coincided with the run-up to the holidays and now has extended beyond Christmas, is unclear. Messages viewed by visitors to the OneX site have varied. The most recent message claims the site “will be available in the next 24 hours.”
But the site has beamed that message for days. The message is signed, “OneX/Qlxchange Administration” — without naming the operators of OneX.
Bowdoin, 77, claimed in October that God had led him to his strategy of using OneX 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 a conference call. Bowdoin was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities in December 2010. His trial is scheduled for September 2012.
OneX, which uses a domain extension assigned to the European country of Montenegro and a webserver apparently positioned in the Irish Sea nation of Isle of Man, is described in MLM-style web promos as a 4X4 matrix feeder program for a Panamanian investment firm and commodities enterprise known as QLxchange.
Bowdoin has participated in multiple OneX pitchfests, using a presentation that appears to have been scripted heavily.
“Tonight we’ll be talking about a financial bailout program for the average person,” Bowdoin said during an October pitchfest.
ASD’s own site was chronically offline before the U.S. Secret Service brought Ponzi scheme allegations in 2008. When Bowdoin’s 10 personal bank accounts were seized on Aug. 1, 2008, the message on the ASD site was signed, “ASD Management.”
During the extended outage, the OneX site has been using this strange headline: “Under A Little Maintenance.”
A tagline below the logo for QLXchange on the site reads, “Investing To Achieve Your Dreams.”
Screen shot: The logo for Qlxchange is appearing in a maintenance message on the OneX site. The site has been inaccessible for days.
Screen shot from Dec. 14 evidence exhibit filed as part of an emergency motion in the Jeremy Johnson/IWorks fraud cause brought by the FTC. The site shown in the exhibit and described in the emergency motion by an attorney for the court-appointed receiver in the case is not the actual site of the receiver. Rather, it is an imposter site that uses the receiver’s name and is designed to intercept traffic and undermine the receivership estate, according to the emergency motion. The bogus site later was altered further and the words “Thieves,” “Lairs” (sic) and “Crooks” were placed near the top of the page, according to a separate evidence exhibit.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally was published Dec. 22, 2011, 10:41 a.m. It was updated at 8:11 a.m. on Dec. 23, 2011. The PP Blog temporarily “unpublished” the story on March 23, 2012. Explanation of why it was taken offline temporarily is here. On March 23, 2012, the PP Blog’s security software recorded a “mass injection attack” as the Blog visited a domain styled CollotGuerard.com while researching matters pertaining to Jeremy Johnson. Collot Guerard is an attorney for the FTC and an alleged subject of harassment by Johnson or people close to Johnson because of the FTC actions against Johnson. The PPBlog is not revisiting the CollotGuerard.com domain and believes it is imprudent for readers to visit the domain.
Our Dec, 22, 2011, story is republished below. The republication date is Jan. 15, 2013 . . .
UPDATED 8:11 A.M. ET (DEC. 23, U.S.A.) Robb Evans, the court-appointed receiver in the Jeremy Johnson/IWorks Internet Marketing fraud case filed by the FTC a year ago, first came to national prominence as a liquidator in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International case in the 1990s. If the bank’s name alone doesn’t spark your memory, think of the acronym by which it was known: BCCI.
If you’re, say, over 40, images of BCCI and the spectacle it created perhaps are seared in your memory. The bank’s criminality and 1991 collapse created a scandal royale on both sides of the Atlantic and all over the world, including the Middle East. BCCI, the Wall Street Journal (Europe) wrote on Aug. 3, 2001 — a little more than a month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks — was a “renegade bank” that had relied on secrecy and had been designed to be “offshore everywhere” to evade regulatory scrutiny. The stunning collapse amid allegations of international money-laundering and a disguised takeover of U.S. banks initially put customers on the hook for $9 billion in losses.
BCCI, which allegedly conducted business with the terrorist Abu Nidal (died 2002) and the now-dead or imprisoned dictators of Iraq and Panama (Saddam Hussein [died 2006] and Manuel Noriega) — and also could not say no to the Medellin Cartel and Colombian narcotics traffickers — went on to become perhaps the most infamous acronym in the history of banking. Evans has testified before Congress on the subject of offshore banking, corruption and the war on terrorism. His bona fides and expertise in unraveling the affairs of companies implicated in complex fraud schemes are firmly established in the courts.
U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green of the District of Columbia once described Evans’ efforts as “remarkable.” In 1998, noting that she had presided over elements of the multibillion-dollar BCCI case for eight years and calling it the “longest-running forfeiture proceeding in the history of federal racketeering law,” the judge thanked Evans and others publicly for helping preserve $1.2 billion in U.S. assets for distribution to defrauded BCCI customers.
Evans is the namesake of Robb Evans & Associates LLC. What does the company do?
“What we do in my organization is we trace money, and we try and recover it for the victims of fraud, and we do it mostly on behalf of the United States Government,” Evans told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in 2006.
Despite his bona fides — despite his record as a court-appointed receiver in numerous cases and his testimony before the U.S. Congress on critical matters of U.S. and international financial security — someone with a Google AdWords account and perhaps some knowledge about SEO planted the seed earlier this month that Evans was presiding over a fraudulent company, according to new federal court filings in the Johnson/IWorks case.
For a yet-to-be-determined period of time, the names of Evans and his company were pushed down in Google search results and replaced at the top of the rankings by a domain styled RobbEvansFraud.com — with a paid AdWords ad to the right of the No. 1 search result driving traffic to the faux Evans site, according to an evidence exhibit filed in federal court on Dec. 14.
The faux site planted the seed that Robb Evans & Associates consisted of “Thieves,” “Lairs” (sic) and “Crooks,” according to to an emergency motion filed by an attorney for Evans.
“Warning,” the first sentence on the faux site blared, “this website is dedicated to collecting information from victims of Robb Evans and Associates.”
In June, Johnson, 35, was arrested at the Phoenix airport at which federal agents allegedly found him in possession of $26,400 in cash and a one-way ticket to Costa Rica. He asserts his innocence to both the criminal and civil charges brought in the case. Johnson now is free on bond.
Stop The Madness
The FTC moved against Johnson, IWorks and other companies in December 2010, alleging an Internet-fueled fraud involving hundreds of millions of dollars. Evans was appointed receiver by a federal judge in Nevada, the venue from which the action was brought. The agency alleged that at least 51 shell companies were set up to dupe banks and to carry out the fraud, which resulted in “hundreds of thousands” of chargebacks and threats to consumers who filed chargebacks.
FBI Director Robert Mueller III warned Congress in March 2010 and again a month later about the dangers of shadowy banking practices, noting that that shell companies often play a role in disguising fraudulent proceeds.
“Money laundering allows criminals to infuse illegal money into the stream of commerce, thus manipulating financial institutions to facilitate the concealing of criminal proceeds; this provides the criminals with unwarranted economic power,” Mueller said.
IWorks operated out of an office at 249 E. Tabernacle St. in St. George, Utah. The street intersects with nearby South Main, home of the historic St. George Tabernacle. The Tabernacle opened in 1876. The city of St. George is famous for its geology, its climate and for its historic ties to Brigham Young and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The city, unfortunately, also is becoming increasingly known as the town from which Johnson allegedly carried out a fraud involving hundreds of millions of dollars, in part by manipulating the banking system through dozens of shell companies in Nevada and other states.
In the emergency motion, an attorney for Evans now says that Johnson and perhaps others are seeking to interfere with the courts and the receivership estate by using the Internet to slime Evans, the FTC and Collot Guerard, an attorney for the FTC. The FTC has filed its own emergency motion.
Despite Hunt’s order, Johnson sued Evans in Utah state court. On Dec. 7, Hunt ordered the Utah state action brought by Johnson dismissed.
Johnson also asked Hunt to order the FTC to pay the legal fees of corporate defendants. The judge refused.
Of all the troubling developments, perhaps the most troubling is the allegation that Johnson and perhaps others have weaponized the Internet to interfere with the administration of justice. The site that attacks Guerard — a career civil servant — clams she has been “accused of fraud and corruption.” The site was created on Oct. 7, 2011, months after Hunt issued the preliminary injunction and order not to interfere. The site appears to operate from servers in Utah, with the registration hidden behind a proxy.
“[W]e are collecting information related to any wrongdoing on her part,” the site informs visitors.
The attack on Guerard is just the latest in a string of attacks or veiled threats against law enforcement. AdSurfDaily figure Kenneth Wayne Leaming, for example, is jailed near Seattle on federal charges he filed bogus liens against public officials in the ASD Ponzi case, including a federal judge, three federal prosecutors and a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service.
Vincent McCrudden, meanwhile, was arrested and jailed in January 2011 amid allegations he threatened to kill 47 regulators and government officials while using a website and emails to terrorize public servants. Just last week, federal prosecutors in Virginia said that Roger Charles Day Jr., who endangered the U.S. military and others in an offshore scam and was sentenced to 105 years in federal prison, had “filed hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent default judgments against more than 100 people who Day claimed had prosecuted him unfairly.”
The Day procurement scheme involved at least 18 companies, prosecutors said. When the scheme was exposed, Day simply “directed his conspirators to discontinue bidding through those companies and instead form and use new companies,” the Justice Department said.
In the new filings by the attorney for Evans in the FTC’s case against Johnson and IWorks, is is alleged that Johnson had a role in the posting of “false and scurrilous” material on the Internet in a bid to hamstring the administration of the receivership estate.
Among other things, one of the websites tied to Johnson “makes false allegations concerning ‘mass fraud and corruption by Robb Evans and Associates,’” according to the attorney’s emergency motion to disable the site.
Gmail addresses using the names of Evans and Guerard were created and were designed to “impersonate and/or interfere” with the receiver and others associated with the case, according to the emergency motion.
Johnson and others created other websites — including EvilFTC, FTCTactics and a site in Guerard’s name — to further undermine the legal process, according to the receiver’s emergency filing. Two other sites in the names of other FTC attorneys also were created, according to the receiver’s emergency motion.
Those sites, according to records, both were created on Dec. 1. Like the site in Guerard’s name, the servers appear to be based in Utah.
When the receiver’s attorney contacted Johnson to demand the site targeted at Evans be taken offline, Johnson claimed he did not own, host or control the site while insisting that “the domain has not been used for anything deceptive.”
“It is a constitutional right to be able to speak freely even if your client does not like it,” Johnson informed the receiver’s attorney in an email, according to an exhibit attached to the receiver’s emergency motion.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Any number of ventures have tied themselves to claims of remarkable returns made possible by purchasing “advertising” products and services or agreeing to watch or receive “advertisements” in a closed environment. Longtime readers will recall that AdViewGlobal (AVG) came out of the gate in late 2008 and early 2009 by claiming what it did was the equivalent of what the NBC television network does. The claim was pure hogwash.
Here is a story about more pure hogwash involving a purported “advertising” opportunity . . .
An investment scheme involving claims about outsized returns from a purported “advertising” business gathered $6.2 million and has resulted in the guilty plea of its operator, federal prosecutors in Maryland said.
Edward J. Lawson, 67, of Silver Spring, Md., pleaded guilty last week to wire fraud after an investigation by the FBI and IRS uncovered evidence that Lawson was running a scam through companies known as Automated Revenue Creation LLC and Guaranteed Results Advertising LLC (GRA), prosecutors said.
Lawson and the firms purported to be in the business of beaming “Narrow Cast television commercials” to LCD television monitors at gas stations and convenience stores. The scheme operated at least between May 2006 and September 2008, prosecutors said.
“Edward J. Lawson’s promises of ‘automatic revenue’ and ‘guaranteed results’ were entirely fraudulent,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein of the District of Maryland.
“In financial fraud schemes the promoter eventually runs out of other people’s money and the scheme collapses like a house of cards,” added Jeannine Hammett, acting special agent in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit in Washington, D.C.
Lawson positioned himself as an entrepreneur with 30 years’ experience, encouraged GRA investors to roll over their purported earnings amid assertions the screens were generating “so much revenue” and explained checks had bounced “due to conditions beyond [his] control,” prosecutors said.
At least 60 investors plowed money into the scheme, initially lured by claims that a screen purchased for $15,800 would lead to “a monthly return over a 10 year period that began at $3,000 and escalated to approximately $30,000 after 15 months,” prosecutors said.
As the scheme advanced, the price of the screens kept going up and the purported returns they’d fetch kept changing, prosecutors said.
“Later in the scheme,” prosecutors said, “an investor who purchased a screen for $23,800 was guaranteed a monthly return of $3,000 and escalated to approximately $15,000 after 12 months. In GRA’s final phase, an investor who purchased a screen for $89,800 was guaranteed a monthly return of $13,950 over a five or 10 year period.”
Lawson pitched the scheme from metro Washington hotels and at GRA’s office in Rockville, Md., prosecutors said.
U.S. District Judge Roger W. Titus scheduled sentencing for April 6 , 2012.
Various investment schemes involving “advertising” have been on the radar screens of federal investigators.
Andy Bowdoin, 77, the president of Florida-based AdSurfDaily, was arrested by the U.S. Secret Service a year ago this month and is awaiting trial. Prosecutors said Bowdoin positioned himself as a successful entrepreneur and was at the helm of an “autosurf” advertising fraud that had gathered at least $110 million by operating as a Ponzi scheme and dangling suggestions of huge returns.
ASD and AVG had promoters and members in common, according to online promos. Among the bizarre claims associated with AVG was that members who advertised in AVG’s closed system with about 20,000 members would achieve a conversion rate of 37 percent of their sales copy didn’t “totally suck.”
Based on the claim, a member who advertised a doughnut for free and a doughnut priced at $10,000 each would achieve the same conversion rate of 37 percent, an utterly preposterous assertion.
The rate would be achieved within the same closed universe of prospects, according to the claim.
UPDATE: On Dec. 1, 2010, AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin was arrested on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities. Sixteen days later — on Dec. 17, 2010 — federal prosecutors filed a forfeiture complaint against certain ASD-related bank accounts, including an account in Bowdoin’s name and accounts allegedly controlled by ASD members Erma Seabaugh of Missouri and Robyn Lynne Stevenson of Florida.
In the December 2010 forfeiture case, Bowdoin filed a claim for nearly $500,000 in assets he allegedly controlled. But Seabaugh and Stevenson did not, and federal prosecutors in the District of Columbia filed motions for default judgments in August 2011, according to court records.
The motions for default against more than $153,000 allegedly controlled by Seabaugh and more than $96,000 allegedly controlled by Stevenson are pending.
Seabaugh, Florida-based ASD’s purported “Web Room Lady,” is listed in Oregon records as the operator of a purported Missouri-based “religious” nonprofit firm known as Carpe Diem.
Stevenson operated a company known as Robyn Lynn LLC, according to court filings.
Bowdoin, 77, is free on bail. His criminal trial is scheduled for September 2012.
Separately, ASD figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming remains jailed near Seattle. The FBI accused him last month of filing false liens against five public officials involved in the ASD case, including U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer.
Collyer is presiding over the forfeiture case against money in the bank accounts allegedly controlled by Seabaugh and Stevenson. Collyer also is presiding over Bowdoin’s criminal trial and two related forfeiture cases involving ASD assets. Those cases were filed in August 2008 and December 2008.
The portion of the December 2010 forfeiture case involving assets allegedly controlled by Bowdoin has been placed on hold because of the criminal trial, but the cases against the assets allegedly controlled by Seabaugh and Stevenson are active.
Prosecutors have scored a clean sweep in ASD forfeiture-related litigation, with Bowdoin losing appeals to funds seized in the August 2008 and December 2008 cases. The U.S. Secret Service brought all of the ASD-related forfeiture cases.
The December 2010 case involving Bowdoin, Seabaugh and Stevenson traces its roots to February 2009, when Bowdoin — who’d initially submitted to the August 2008 forfeiture a month earlier — sought to undo his forfeiture decision and reenter the case as a pro se litigant. The AdViewGlobal (AVG) autosurf, which came to life after the August 2008 and December 2009 forfeiture cases were filed and after Bowdoin was sued by members amid allegations he had engaged in racketeering, was morphing into a so-called “private association” as Bowdoin was morphing into a pro se litigant, according to records.
AVG, which members said had close ASD ties, purportedly operated from Uruguay. Members positioned it as an offshore, safe alternative to the post-seizure ASD, but AVG appears to have gone belly-up in June 2009, less than a year after the first sound of seizures began in the ASD case.
BULLETIN: Three Romanian nationals have been arrested in the aftermath of a successful hacking bid that compromised the computer systems of Subway sandwich restaurants and 50 other retailers, the Justice Department, federal prosecutors in New Hampshire and the U.S. Secret Service said.
One Romanian national remains at large. Authorities said credit-card data from tens of thousands of customers was compromised and that “millions of dollars of unauthorized purchases have been made using the compromised data.”
Arrested were Adrian-Tiberiu Oprea, 27, of Constanta, Romania; Iulian Dolan, 27, of Craiova, Romania; and Cezar Iulian Butu, 26, of Ploiesti, Romania.
Florin Radu, 23, of Rimnicu Vilcea, Romania, remains at large, U.S. officials said. The scam operated “from approximately 2008 until May 2011” and involved “U.S.-based merchants’ point-of-sale . . . or ‘checkout’ computer systems.’”
Although the officials said the breach affected about 150 Subway outlets — less than 1 percent of the chain’s restaurants — the data theft from Subway and the other retailers affected more than 80,000 customers.
Subway is a well-known international franchise based in Milford, Conn. The 46-year-old company is famous for its sandwiches — and also its television commercials featuring Jared Fogle. Fogle became famous in his own right after his weight ballooned to 425 pounds as a college freshman and he became trim again after losing nearly 250 pounds by eating healthy food from Subway.
Subway is an internationally famous franchise that calls its service staff "Sandwich Artists." One of the firm's "Sandwich Artists" is Sara Manchipp, the reigning Miss Wales.
All four of the suspects have been charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, wire fraud and access device fraud.
Oprea was arrested last week in Romania and is detained there, prosecutors said.
“Dolan and Butu were arrested upon their entry into the United States on Aug. 13 and Aug. 14, 2011,” prosecutors said.
Details on why Dolan and Butu were arrested upon entry were not immediately clear. The hacking was performed “remotely,” officials said.
URGENT >> BULLETIN >> MOVING: Matthew J. Gagnon, an alleged online pitchman for the Legisi HYIP Ponzi scheme, has been named in a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Secret Service.
Gagnon, 42, of Portland Ore., and Weslaco, Texas, was accused civilly by the SEC in 2010 of being “a danger to the investing public,” amid allegations he promoted multiple fraud schemes — including Legisi — on his Mazu.com website.
He is accused in a Secret Service affidavit filed Nov. 28 in the Eastern District of Michigan of not disclosing $1.7 million in payments from Legisi while he was touting it to “the investing public” between January 2006 and May 2007.
Legisi, the Secret Service said in the affidavit, was a “massive Ponzi scheme” that gathered about $72 million from more than 3,000 investors before the fraud was exposed.
Among the allegations against Gagnon is that he promoted Legisi’s unregistered offering as exempt from registration requirements and “literally the greatest” program he had “ever seen. ” (The complaint includes several specific allegations about how Gagnon promoted Legisi. One promo attributed to Gagnon by the Secret Service shows that Gagnon used six exclamation points in a single paragraph consisting of about 66 words.)
Like Florida-based AdSurfDaily, Legisi has been linked to E-Bullion, the shuttered California payment processor operated by James Fayed. Fayed, 48, was formally sentenced to the death penalty last month for arranging the brutal contract slaying of Pamela Fayed, his estranged wife and a potential witness against him before she was slashed 13 times in a greater Los Angeles parking garage in July 2008.
Legisi also was promoted on Ponzi boards such as TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup. The Legisi Terms of Service, according to federal court filings, included language that made members avow they were not an “informant, nor associated with any informant” of the IRS, FBI, CIA and the SEC, among others.
Seven firearms were found last week at the scene of the arrest of Kenneth Wayne Leaming in Spanaway, Wash., the office of U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan of the Western District of Washington said last night.
Durkan’s office said it could not discuss whether the government was contemplating taking the firearms matter before a grand jury. Leaming, a purported “sovereign citizen,” was arrested by the FBI last week on charges that he filed bogus liens against five public officials involved in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case.
The FBI filed the false-liens charges via a 17-page criminal complaint. Information about the alleged presence of firearms came out during testimony at a detention hearing for Leaming last week, Durkan’s office said.
Prosecutors argued in court filings last week that Leaming was a “serious” flight risk who posed a risk to public safety, and a judge found after hearing testimony from two government witnesses that Leaming lacked an “appropriate residence.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Richard Creatura ordered Leaming detained, finding that “no condition or combination of conditions which defendant can meet will reasonably assure the appearance of the defendant as required and/or the safety of any other person and the community.”
Creatura specifically found that Leaming’s history included a “failure to comply with Court orders and terms of supervision” that evolved from a previous case and that Leaming lacked an “appropriate residence.”
Leaming, 55, pleaded guilty in March 2005 to a federal felony of piloting an aircraft without a valid airman’s certificate, according to records. He spent 31 days in jail, and was formally sentenced in August 2005 to time served. Leaming also was placed on probation for a year. On at least two occasions after his guilty plea and sentencing, Leaming was brought up on charges of violating the conditions of his probation, according to federal records.
On one of the occasions in which he violated his probation, Leaming claimed he had “diplomatic status or immunity.” On another occasion, he filed a “vexatious lawsuit lien or retaliatory complaint,” according to the FBI
Leaming has been detained at the Sea Tac Federal Detention Center near Seattle since his arrest eight days ago.
Nearly three years after Leaming pleaded guilty to having no pilot’s license while flying a Cessna aircraft repeatedly between 2002 and 2004, he filed a document styled in part as “NOTARY PRESENTMENT OF: BONDED REPORT OF FRAUDULENT SECURITIES” in a bid to overturn his conviction in the aircraft-piloting case, according to court filings.
The document, dated June 3, 2008, and placed in the court record six days later, named the judge who sentenced Leaming in the case a “3rd Party Respondent.” Five other individuals also were named “3rd Party Respondent[s].”
“COMES NOW the man, Kenneth Wayne, of the family LEAMING, to provide the above titled ‘court’ (BANK) and its named officers a BONDED REPORT OF FRAUDULENT SECURITIES, and to provide said officers an opportunity to SUA SPONTE vacate the entire record of ‘prosecution,’ ‘conviction’ and ‘sentence’ upon which the fraudulent securities were issued,” the document began.
It went on to accuse the judge and others of “BARRATRY” and to argue that the court in the Western District of Washington through which his conviction was recorded was “actually a bank” and a “commercial” enterprise.
A plea bargain that had led to Leaming’s guilty plea three years earlier was forced on him under “THREAT OF DEATH,” Leaming argued unsuccessfully.
The June 2008 document was notarized by Tina M. Hall, according to the stamp. In January 2010 and February 2010 — approaching two years after Hall’s name appeared in Leaming’s pleadings in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington — her name appeared on the court docket of U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer in the civil portion of the ASD Ponzi case in the District of Columbia. Those filings, which were rejected, were styled “Claim by Notary Presentment.”
Collyer is presiding over both the criminal and the civil aspects of the ASD Ponzi case. ASD President Andy Bowdoin, 77, was arrested by the U.S. Secret Service in December 2010. Bowdoin is scheduled to go on trial on charges of mail fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities in September 2012.
Leaming now is accused of filing a bogus lien against Collyer in Pierce County, Wash., nearly 3,000 miles from the District of Columbia. The state of Washington revoked Hall’s notary license last year, according to records.
Leaming also is accused of filing bogus liens against the federal prosecutors and the Secret Service agent involved in the ASD case.
Among the allegations against Leaming is that he sent an email in May 2011 to David Carroll Stephenson, a former business partner and a federal prisoner. That email referenced the “kids” of U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts and their “school,” according to the complaint against Leaming.
“In this email,” the FBI agent who sought Leaming’s arrest in the false-liens case wrote, “I believe that LEAMING is offering to file documents on Stephenson’s behalf, including sending them to the Chief Justice, via his minor children.”
