To the Spammer Who's Spamming This Blog: You're barking up the wrong tree

To the spammer who's spamming this blog with anti-athiest comments...

Can't you see this blog is not about religion, but crimes of persuasion?

So, please go spam your comment elsewhere. It's WAY OFF TOPIC.

Zeek Rewards Ponzi Update: another attorney fighting the clawbacks

An attorney previously involved in the defense of Bernard Madoff, Ira Sorkin, is now representing two Zeek winners: Trudy Gilmond and Kellie King to fight the receiver Ken Bell and his attempt to recover funds for the victims of Zeek Rewards Ponzi.

Sorkin's position was that Zeek does not sell securities and thus receiver was appointed in error. Why he believes so is not certain. Presumably he knows what he's talking about, as he used to work for the SEC. However, he did not explain why Zeek does not pass the Howey test.

What's interesting is Trudy Gilmond was once listed as "employee" by the Zeek internal support board. Trudy Gilmond was also formerly of several suspect scams, one of which accused by no less than US Secret Service.

Cyber-currency: source of good... or evil?

one oz. Proof U.S. gold bullion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BitCoin, a cybercurrency, made news when it launched in 2009, as it was not released by any central bank (i.e. backed by any country or group of countries, or any real assets like gold or silver reserves), and thus, is virtually untraceable. However, it's hardly the first cybercurrency. e-Bullion preceded it by several years having been launched in 2001.

The difference is e-Buillion is a scam that involved in murder, and it was used to scam people as well.

e-Billion was created by a Jim Fayed who lived in California, though e-Bullion was specifically incorporated in Panama in 2001, and its servers located in Switzerland as to prevent "interference" by US authorities. Though eventually he had to locate some servers in California.

e-Bullion was marketed as an investment, where you can buy precious metals from them, but does NOT physically take delivery of them. Instead, you basically exchanged your "real" currency for their virtual cybercurrency, which is backed by their precious metal reserves stored in several locations, like Australia, Switzerland, and so on.

And why would you do such a thing? To trade with other e-Bullion members, of course. In other words, they're acting like a bank, but have no such license from ANYWHERE.

Zeek Defenders FINALLY filed a motion to release funds... 4 MONTHS after freeze order

According to the Federal Court System, Fun Club USA, headed by Craddock and company, has finally filed the motion to petition for release of the eWallet funds frozen back in AUGUST 2012...  something they have been promising people for many many MONTHS.

Will try to read it and give you an update soon. Despite the legalese, it probably contains a whole barrel full of laughs with many ridiculous assumptions and requests.

The problem with spread crap info: a growing snowball of crap

If you can only act as a parrot and repeat what your upline said, then this is obviously NOT meant for you. Please go read some crap... and enjoy it.

However, if you actually believe yourself to have at least average intelligence, and you don't take crap from anybody, then perhaps you should continue to read.

Previously we have covered the existence of crap info, and how to detect them. But where do crap info come from?

Frankly, a lot of crap info comes from crap info. When you repeat someone's crap info, you add your own narrative onto it, and it snowballs, grows bigger and bigger, until someone realizes that you've been spreading... well, crap! By then, you've spread so much crap, your own reputation takes a hit, and you're either so embarrassed that you'd want to dig a hole to China and hide in it, or you're so busy spreading even MORE crap to explain your previous crap that people stop listening to you altogether.

Why not stop spreading crap, esp. when it comes to SCAMS?  Of course, that requires you to engage your BRAIN, and a little research, and your "crap detector". Wait, you don't have one? Sure you do. Yours just need a tune up.

I'll cite some Zeek Reward Ponzi crap as example...

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(I am going to assume you already know how Zeek Rewards ponzi works. If you don't, please read my investigation )

When SEC shut down the Zeek Rewards ponzi scheme back on August 16, 2012, all of the various eWallets containing funds related to Zeek (both Zeek's own, and all the affiliates') were frozen in cooperation  of an emergency asset freeze order from the SEC. This was done by all 3 eWallet vendors used by Zeek: Payza, STP, and NxPay.

Considering the fact that vast majority of Zeek affiliates were told to keep their money inside Zeek as much as possible (as VIP points from buying and "giving away" bids) very few people would have money in their eWallet, unless they were getting PAID by Zeek.

If you were paid by Zeek, a purported Ponzi scheme, then it's obvious that your account needs to be frozen UNTIL the court (or court-appointed receiver) figures out how much of that money is yours, and how much really belongs to other people, but ended up in your account through FRAUDULENT TRANSFER.

And guess who's beating the drum of "free our eWallets"? Robert Craddock, the same person that tried to shut me down for pointing out how illegal ZeekRewards was.

Zeek Ponzi Update: Kettner and Friends earned 2 mil from Zeek, and Receiver Conference Call next week

By filing a motion to quash the subpoena of the receiver, the trio Sorrel, Kettner, and Kettner have revealed that together they have received almost 2 MILLION dollars from Zeek while only paid in less than $5000.

Yep, that's the sort of people that's telling everybody that Zeek's legal, and was seeking DONATIONS to fight the SEC and the receiver, mainly by hiring an out-of-state lawyer to file frivolous motions.

In other news, Zeek Receiver Ken Bell announced a conference call for coming Monday. 17-DEC-2012.

To MLMers, "Employee" is a Perjorative, but Why?

Cover of Robert T. Kiyosaki

Just the other day, when discussing a suspect scheme (it's a clone of an existing pyramid scheme), its defender trotted out this argument:

The people that call [Redacted] a scam are the quitters, employees of the world, and the people that can’t stand that there’s a 19 year old kid from [redacted] making more money than them just for traveling and showing people how to get what he has.

Clearly, "employee" is meant to be a pejorative. But why?

Blame one guy: Robert "Rich Dad" Kiyosaki.

In his various books, esp. "Cashflow Quadrant", he basically made the claim that there are four kinds of people: Employees, Self-Employed, Business Owner, and Investor. It goes something like this:

Seem to make sense, until you realize this is a MASSIVE simplification. You can think of examples all day to contradict this. You can easily span multiple categories. This sort of classification is no more useful than, say "bloodtype determines personality", or "Zodiac sign determines personality". It's a bunch of pithy stereotypes, nothing really useful. 

The truth is, nobody liked the book until Kiyosaki started pitching it to the MLM circles, where it was readily adopted as a MLM "training tool". MLMers basically claim that MLM is the easiest way for a regular E to move over into B. 

But is it real? Is MLM really the tool to move from E to B? 

Don't Make Threats Over the Internet, or You May Regret It

Image via CrunchBase

It's no joke to threaten someone, except maybe as a one-time joke against people you know, but when done to total strangers, it's harassment, and if prolonged, it's stalking and bullying. (or Cyberbullying)

And it's AGAINST THE LAW in many jurisdictions to utter threats over the Internet.

Just recently, in Canada, a certain D. Markuze was arrested by Montreal PD for violations of his probation terms... uttering online threats against multiple individuals. He got probation, so if he kept his nose clean, that would be the end of it.

But as you can expect, he tired to cover his tracks by going to proxy sites, coffee shops, libraries, and basically free WIFI spots to send his **** against skeptics, and he continued to harass skeptics through Youtube, internet forums, Twitter, blog comments, and much more, even though he was supposed to avoid internet forums, blogs, social networks, chatrooms, and such.

So he's now spending some quality time IN JAIL.

What does this have to do with a scam, you ask?

Zeek Loyal Affiliates Facebook Page goes underground

According to ASDUpdates, one of the more often updated Zeek Affiliate Pages that are still active, Zeek Loyal Affiliates, has gone dark, and may have gone underground, as it had deleted various comments posted by Dave Kettner and Ernest Moffitt, both of whom posted utter fantasy comments such as "SEC chairman resigned due to 1700 lawsuits filed by Zeek affiliates" and "Ken Bell Receiver is continuing his fraud" that seem to have only the flimsiest grasp to reality.

While SEC chairwoman is stepping down, a new chairwoman has already been appointed, Elisse Walters! Mary Shapiro had been on the post for 4 years, long enough! And there was NO 1700 lawsuits! If there was, it would have shown up in the court system!

However, that's not the interesting part.

Bad Argument: the either/or fallacy (i.e. false dilemma)

Chasing Madoff (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One way defenders defend a suspect scheme is to claim that a business is "innocent until proven guilty", and use that to deflect every sort of analysis by critics.  To the defenders, there are only two choices: illegal, or legal, and anything that was not declared illegal by a government or court must therefore be legal. 

This is a fallacy on multiple levels. 

As a legal concept, this is fallacious because "innocent until proven guilty" is primarily used for CRIMINAL prosecution, not civil. And if a business is fraudulent, it's a civil matter. (there are exceptions, but US is not one of them)

As a logical fallacy, this is a form of either/or (i.e. false dilemma), as a business can be "undetermined", as well as legal, or illegal. In fact, this is a fundamental concept in critical thinking, that you have to start from a "null hypothesis", and prove it either way. 

There's also the question about operating illegally, vs. formally declared as scam and received a judgement by a real judge in a court of law. For example, we knew that Madoff's Ponzi had been operating for a decade or more before it ran out of money in 2008 and Madoff confessed. So it was operating ILLEGALLY for a decade, but there was no charges. So was Madoff's scheme illegal? Absolutely. However, according to some scheme defender's logic, Madoff's scheme is NOT illegal UNTIL it's formally declared by a judge to be illegal. That's just bogus.

Now we know where Zeek "beneficiaries" live! (Sort of)

One of the many mysteries regarding Zeek was somewhat answered on December 5th, 2012, when the receiver filed several dozen documents with various Federal District Courts around the country. They are shown in abbreviated form below:

Image courtesy of PatrickPretty.com and ASDUpdates.com

As you can see, there's a LOT of them. There's only 94 district courts in the US, and there are at least 40 (UPDATE: over 60 now) different filings in various courts, showing the widespread of Zeek corruption.