fake or holding addresses, many in foreign countries outside the normal laws, that opened and closed rapidly allowing consumers no come-back
illegal medical or wealth claims
offshore banking, now known following the recent banking scandals to be heavily centred around the City of London
We always recommended that consumers issue a credit card charge-backagainst PWW and Willms. This is the only way to stop the withdrawals and to counter the “businesses” operations at source. And it worked!
Under a settlement agreement with the FTC, the defendants are banned from selling products through “negative option” transactions, in which the seller interprets consumers’ silence or inaction as permission to charge them, and are also prohibited from making misleading or unsupported claims while marketing or selling any product or service. The settlement also required the defendants to surrender cash and other assets, and these are now being used by the FTC to refund consumers who bought the “Google Money Tree,” “Google Pro,” or “Google Treasure Chest” products.
They also include instructions for people who haven’t yet claimed – so if you were conned into getting rich with Google or similar, contact them now and get at least part of your money back! This is what they said,
The checks will be mailed by an administrator working for the FTC. Consumers who made purchases from “Google Money Tree,” “Google Pro,” or “Google Treasure Chest” will receive approximately $24.50. Consumers who have questions, or who have not yet filed a complaint with the FTC and wish to do so, should call the Redress Administrator, Gilardi & Co. LLC, toll free, at 1-877-226-2847. Consumers seeking general information about the FTC’s redress program may visit the FTC’s refunds website. The FTC never requires consumers to pay money or provide information before redress checks can be cashed.
Checks will be mailed on September 11, 2012, and must be cashed on or before November 12, 2012.
So get on in there folks!
Crime Pays, But Not Always – added on 18 Sep 2012
Here’s a reminder of how crime does not pay – the Pacific Webworks share price!
PWW 5yr share history
Since the successive hits on PWW following our and others’ investigations their share price has languished at around a penny for about half the past year! Their meteoric rise, right as the depression started to hit, was entirely due to conning vulnerable people in desperate times.
Then folks like me started shouting!
Then Google took note and sued them.
Then the FTC laid charges.
Then they were found to have funny-looking accounts and changed their accountants and management.
Now they’ve had to pay out to the very people who were conned.
Introduction I’ve done a fair bit of checking around the Google Treasure Chest/Money Kit scamming systems to try and alieviate some of the pain that a lot of people have been afflicted with. Now follows possibly the most extensive scam list and redirects that I’ve found. I class this post from workathometruth.com as a: Very...
Pacific Webworks / Quad Try and Dodge the Issue Back in 2009 I stumbled upon a negative option scam for which those involved were sued by Google (and folded with an out-of-court settlement) and were prosecuted by Uncle Sam, losing again. Initially, I was completely unaware of the depths of deception to which these people...
Embarrassment is not it though. The real reason is our discovery of Straw & Blair’s hypocritical dealings over wars and torture, kidnap and illegal detention without trial, things that Straw’s government, and now our own coalition one, seek to hide. That’s a deep guilt.
Was it guilt over the knowledge that as he was the head of an unaccountable web of spies, they were doing everything that any free democratic nation would naturally think abhorrent?
That’s the special relationship for ya! Straw brought in the US-UK one-sided extradition agreement in 2003. The following yearhe and Blair were found out to have started the war in Iraq on false pretences. There then followed the endless investigations that dragged on for so long that folks forgot what they were about.
A collusion between the military, the law and politics from the establishment, designed to legally obfuscate by the dreary analysis of the minutiae of the webs of illegality they’d hatched?
We now find out, in the same year, 2004, that Straw and Blair were (supposedly) in government, Fatima Bouchar and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj were captured, bound in gaffa tape (her eyelid bound open for 17 hours during this process), kidnapped and transported to a foreign power (Libya) where they were tortured and imprisoned for seven years.
Straw said he knew nothing, so what exactly was he paid for? Was he a stooge, a calm reassuring personae, quietly acquiescing to misdeeds on the grandest of scales in exchange for lifelong protection and a nice pension?
Abdel is now in the ruling government of Libya, having fought and beaten Gaddhafi, with The West’s help, let’s not forget….
Cover Up Illegal Government Work by Invoking Secret Trials, “in the national interest”!
Killer Drone Aircraft
It’s all true. Our own (and the US) secret services kidnapped and transported innocents from our own and foreign soils to foreign powers. This was all done without the intervention of a judge, without court orders and in many cases (those in Guantanamo Bay for instance), without any immediate or subsequent trial. They’re still doing it!
Bush, Cheney, Obama, Blair - their handiwork - it is estimated that >3ooo civilians have been killed by drones
The only difference between the recent actions of Jack Straw, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Blunket, Teresa May, Ken Clarke & David Cameron, and the historical actions of Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao and Adolf Hitler are that in the former, there’s been no trial and the people are still alive, and in the latter there were usually show or peremptory trials usually followed by immediate execution.
Stalins Handiwork
Though life is precious, today’s innocents (innocent unless proven guilty, remember) may have at times wished they were dead.
The targets have no chance to surrender, and the Afghan government has raised concerns. The drone strikes are dubbed ''Kill TV'' or ''Taliban TV'' because soldiers watch live video feeds of bombs and missiles detonating, with one source admitting it is uncomfortable viewing: ''You can see everything.''
Because the real devilish forces, whereby a supposedly civilised country like the United Kingdom can kidnap and torture with impunity, still exist. Pregnant Fatima Bouchar was not a terrorist and nor was her husband. Their terrifying ordeal at the hands of our secret service stands testament to that.
These are the real devils in our midst. They are the real terrorists. Under false pretexts they continue to bomb civilians with drones and kidnap and torture those they can’t kill. Though from different political persuasions, successive governments draft laws cover up the previous one’s actions.
What an evil nasty bunch they are. Cameron and his crowing cohorts are just the latest in a long line.
Meanwhile,
MPs and judges can retire to fully indexed-linked pensions, unlike the rest of the public sector workers who have been recently brutalised and scape-goated in the press for the thieving behaviour of gambling banker-politicians.
MPs and judges are protected from harm by the very secret services they’ve steered and governed while the rest of us are made
to feel fear at home, where none exists
to feel loathed abroad, when we have done nothing
All due to the evil machinations of these few folk.
The Real Reason for Secret Trials and Internet Censorship
Question: Why Pictures of Drones and Dead Innocents, Yet not many Kidnaps?
A. Simple. It’s the same mentality of person that sends in the drones to kill innocents as kidnaps innocents. In fact, it’s the same people. They stand there smiling on our TVs, in suits, with the appropriate amount of gravitas dependant on the situation.
The real devils in our midst. The real terrorists.
CIA Guilty of Torture and Kidnap – Damages of 1.5 Million Euros Amazing news today. An Italian court has bravely taken on the leader of the Western World and convicted 22 CIA agents of kidnap and torture. (see CIA agents guilty of Italy kidnap). The man on the left with the wacky beard and hat,...
Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, aged 23, of Ketchum, Idaho, is a member of the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, from Fort Richardson, Alaska. He was captured in circumstances that aren’t clear and has appeared in a Taliban video (prev at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-soldier20-2009jul20,0,4913063.story), seen world-wide. So far, it appears...
FTC Permanently Stops Six Operators from Using Fake News Sites that Allegedly Deceived Consumers about Acai Berry Weight-Loss Products
Above is the FTC’s own headline from a news release yesterday. The story is that they’ve hammered six operators of fake news sites into making settlements that surrender their assets. They’ve also halted the six operations plus those of four others, making ten by my calculation!
What Is a Fake News Site?
Do you really need to ask? !! (These are for news7digest, see more below on this!).
Anyone who even casually browses the web will have seen these news exposes, quite often advertised down the right side on Facebook and in banner adverts on even the most sensible of websites – like this one, say!
How the adverts work is that they are paid for by the operators. They deliberately pay to get premium visibility slots, using Google often, but not exclusively.
The fake news site itself will be plastered with well known icons of top companies (like CNN, BBC, CBC, ABC, Google even!) and purport to be a serious investigation by a journalist into whatever the scam may be. A short list of such scams that we’ve revealed here are:
…produces several links to the actual Channel 4 in the UK, and the scam site….
This shows the deliberate, deceptive and despicable way in which the site name has been chosen to closely imitate a legitimate and bona-fide news organisation. Fraud, in other words – as the definition says – “an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual”
Amazingly, if you click the link several times, each effort takes you to one of three different landing pages for a new site, the actual fake news site of,
news7digest.com
This shows up in the header image in two, but confusingly is called Consumer Reporter in the other! They are all visually quite different.
The three screenshots near the top of this article are indeed the three fake news sites which you’ll land on by clicking on channel4online.co.uk.
Here they are again, to save you scrolling:
Conclusion
Is this the end of the fake news sites? Well, obviously not.
They are still very very current and still very very visible. The highly photoshopped images adorn well known websites to the point of irritation. However, the settlement was only yesterday. The note on the FTC statement goes on the say;
A settlement order is for settlement purposes only and does not constitute an admission by the defendant that the law has been violated. Settlement orders have the force of law when approved and signed by the District Court judge.
Despite this, it appears the six defendants are caving in as no appeals have been launched. They are and the details of the settlements are as follows:
Ricardo Jose Labra Labra’s $2.5 million judgment will be suspended when he pays $280,000 and records a $39,500 lien on his home.
I see it as a warning shot. The actual wording of the terms against the six goes as follows. It’s quite onerous and specific, I think, which means that these News7Digest screenshots at the top of this posting put the operators in deep doggy do if they don’t get their act together pronto. The highlights are mine.
As part of its ongoing crackdown on bogus health claims, the proposed settlements will require that the six operations make clear when their commercial messages are advertisements rather than objective journalism, and will bar the defendants from further deceptive claims about health-related products such as the acai berry weight-loss supplements and colon cleansers that they marketed.
The defendants also are required to disclose any material connections they have with merchants, and will be barred from making deceptive claims about other products, such as the work-at-home schemes or penny auctions that most of them promoted. The settlements also require that these defendants collectively pay roughly $500,000 to the Commission because their advertisements violated federal law. This money amounts to most of their assets.
A Sample of My Previous Posts Mentioning Fake News Websites
This all proves that what I and others are saying is wrong – and the FTC is proving it! Virtually everything that the scammers do the FTC has now taken issue with and imposed heavy penalties. It’s now, as they say, case law, as well as being the law of the land. Let’s hope that Willms who chucked his power derived from ill-gotten wealth at me making me pull a page or two for a time, gets his just deserts – sometime this year would be nice.
Just Think Media Settles With Google Over Trademark Infringement Last year Jesse Willms threw the lawyer dogs at me which forced me to pull some posts. I’d been calling him a scammer which was obviously in clear contradiction of his (now public) self-vision as a charitable philanthropist. However yesterday, Google, who had originally sued 50...
PreScript Advice If you think you’ve had your bank ‘cleaned out’ by any of a multitude of ‘life cleanse’ or ‘colon cleanse’ type internet scams, there is only one real remedy… Ask for a charge-back against the company through you credit card company. Your reason, when asked, is that the company has either: Not adhered...
Back in 2009 I stumbled upon a negative option scam for which those involved were sued by Google (and folded with an out-of-court settlement) and were prosecuted by Uncle Sam, losing again. Initially, I was completely unaware of the depths of deception to which these people would stoop, but then I rapidly discovered the nightmare web that they’d constructed and how difficult it was for ordinary people, duped by slick honest-looking promises, to un-pick themselves from it.
Not only that, I quickly realised that PWW weren’t the only spawn of the devil and that others, like Jesse Willms, were up to very similar tricks. See:
The above list of links more-or-less shows how we found out the Pacific Webworks (PWW) story. They’re by no means the only set of devils in the world trying to scam people, but they’re the one’s I stumbled upon first. That’s all.
Their business was to set up website templates that their “customers” could use to extract money from their customers by use of the negative option scam. In effect, they were selling the tools to steal to people, who then had the option of calling it a day or selling the tools to steal on themselves, thus stealing.
To promote it they used mass advertising through paid ads on Google (using the Google and others’ trademarks to make it appear that these offers were endorsed by those referenced), through Quad, which they owned, and fake news or personal information websites (flogs) loaded with follow up ads. The promotions could be their own, but for the most part it was all done by “affiliates” (their customers) that all took varying degrees of commission for follow-through clicks.
The advertising was managed by Bloosky Interactive that also operated through 3rd parties unsolicited email adverts, spam to you and me.
Underlying it all was the credit card processing business which they also owned (Intellipay) usually through the securecart domain.
All parties involved, except the final folk who didn’t really understand how bent this whole operation was, fully understood the nature of this business. How could they not? – when they were selling “services” for $1.95 for which they’d get $30 commission!!!
In June 2009 we experienced limited merchant account processing capabilities which created a situation where we could not satisfy payables to marketing partners. To generate needed cash in the 2009 second quarter we sold a portion of our hosting portfolio that was in excess of merchant account limitations to The Quad Group, LLC, a related party (the “Quad Group”) for $157,786. Quad Group is owned and managed by current directors, officers and an employee of Pacific WebWorks. We may periodically be required to enter into sale transactions with Quad Group to properly manage our merchant account processing requirements.
Neat huh?
Cuts and Thrusts
So that’s about it, as I currently understand it. PWW’s managers/owners had customers on two levels, that is;
The direct affiliates and associated advertisers who were enticed into the operation or migrated from other similar schemes via the lure of easy money. These people used the templates to lure others with promises of easy money, paid as commission for attracting others to run the same schemes. The schemes didn’t sell anything – except the scheme! A true pyramid scam!
Duped suckers. These, numerically the vast majority, soon realised after one or two mysterious withdrawals from their account of amounts around the $79 mark, that it was a scam.
The thrust of the plan was the hope that most people wouldn’t do anything, wouldn’t investigate much and wouldn’t associate with other suckers through embarrassment or whatever, just writing off the episode as one of life’s bad judgements. Thus PWW would make say, $200 from which all the ads and affiliates would get their cut.
Just Desserts
Statue of Justice
Unfortunately for PWW, it didn’t work out quite like that. Sure they made pots of money for a few years, but they upset too many people and eventually, through the power of communication via the very internet which was their arena, news of what they were doing became so much that first Google, then Uncle Sam had to act.
Black September
But still the shit kept coming their way. Just as I’d predicted in my postings (see list above), karma would get them. On 19 September 2011 this year a class action was brought against the three main bodies behind the scam – Booth Ford v PWW et al – Barbara Ford is to be commended for her patience. It was 2009 when she first filed for a class action!
In it, we see just how badly PWW have been acting for years. Section 11, for me, sums it up perfectly!
Booth Ford v PWW et al Section 11
So there we have it! Now where’s the problem?
Rip-off Too Big!!
On 1 December 2011, Quad (who are actually essentially the same people as PWW with an almost similar board make-up – in fact the Google settlement made it plain that wives of the directors had been roped in as well), filed to be removed from the Class Action because they might have ripped off too much from people!eh?? See QUAD_GROUP_NOTICE_OF_REMOVAL
The essence of their legal Fabian tactic (as I see it) is that:
They scammed people from all over, not just Illinois, so it’s not a valid class action.
They scammed people so much (by over $5m they say), that it’s the wrong court in which they should be tried, so ditch your claim against us!
They scammed people by so much that the class action lawyer’s fees alone will be $9m so same reasoning as point 2!
Quad Group Sums
Their sums in the above court removal document are in this screenshot. There are others as well. Of course, Quad (PWW with a different hat on remember) aren’t admitting any liability at all with this, so my use of the words scamming bastards reflects my personal opinions, not a statement of fact. These opinions are based on the facts that:
Pacific Webworks acquiesced to all of Google’s demands when sued for illegal trademark usage.
Eborn and others lost their case when sued by the Texas AG when using PWW’s templates*, finance processing and networks to scam folks for millions of dollars.
PWW lost their case when sued by Uncle Sam.
PWW admitted filing untrue SEC accounts and changed accountants twice because of this.
One of the accountants was directly related to a PWW director.
It’s noteworthy that the sum of $43m is derived from one “illegal” charge of ~$80 plus one subsequent charge of ~$25 multiplied across the claimed customer count of ~455,000 persons – because I have evidence from people who’ve contacted this site and others that some people had up to half a dozen illegal account withdrawals before they could put on a stop, which implies that the allegedly scammed amount could be much, much higher.
It’s also noteworthy that Quad’s own suppositional sums show high value amounts from this “business” yet for all this time, no dividends were paid and the only way investors in the company could make money was through share price changes. If you tie this information to the incorrect accounting and familial accountant/director relationships, plus the fact that PWW is largely the same people as Quad, then collusion looks highly likely over this time period and the SEC will quite possibly be knocking following the conclusion to this class action.
With regard to the SEC, the same SEC filing that revealed Quad’s dubious formation also reveals that;
Our client base includes approximately 30,000 active customer accounts. We rely on the efforts of our internal marketing staff and on third party resellers, including our wholly-owned reseller, TradeWorks Marketing, to add accounts to our customer base. – see SEC Link
Well they can’t both be right, can they, Quad? Is it 455,892 customers in your sums or is it 30,000 in the SEC filing?
Linkages
Copious links are included in the articles referenced by the site references at the beginning of this article so I haven’t had time to re-reference all the above statements. But they’re there should you wish to look.
I certainly hope that the Fabian tactics don’t work and that people see them for what they are.
Notes & Addendum
* Eborn et al used website designs very similar to those provided by PWW. Whether they were exactly the same is a moot point in my view, because like a burglar who learns to house-break from another burglar, the crow-bar used will not be exactly the same crow bar, but it’s the idea of using a crowbar that’s important to the final act of theft. In other words templates, like crowbars, are just tools. Eborn’s websites were almost carbon-copies of those from PWW using all the Visual “tools”, the money processing and the affiliate networks that they “employed”. Many sites (I had a huge list of them and copied images directly from the site before they locked it down) were partly or wholly hosted on pantherssl.com via Bloosky. These co-incidences didn’t happen by chance and show intelligent design behind their purpose. (Thanks Paul!)
Introduction I knew there was something really, really dodgy about that MyBookFace.net crap highlighted in this post the other day. Not only are they connected to some serious malware (as detailed in the posting), but they’ve an interesting line in popups!!! Google Treasure Chest Rises Yet Again! Here’s what to do… Go to http://mybookface.net making...
Just Think Media Settles With Google Over Trademark Infringement Last year Jesse Willms threw the lawyer dogs at me which forced me to pull some posts. I’d been calling him a scammer which was obviously in clear contradiction of his (now public) self-vision as a charitable philanthropist. However yesterday, Google, who had originally sued 50...
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