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Court To Scammer, "Give Up Your House Or Go To Jail"
coondoggie writes "Too many online scammers get away with what amounts to a wrist-slap, but a case if Las Vegas this week seems to be heading the right direction. According to the Federal Trade Commission, a business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time. The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him, the FTC stated. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his 'asset protection services' to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors."
Can anyone else see the irony in the seller of "asset protection services" to "hide assets from potential lawsuits" failing to hide his assets from potential lawyers?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Don't give him a choice, take everything AND put him in jail...
think about it - if his service actually worked, he wouldn't have been prosecuted for running a scam :)
What I tell friends and family and anyone who wants to listen: consider all unsolicited emails as scams. The same for telemarketers - if you're on the DNC list, then those people are breaking the law by calling you which makes them criminals. You don't want to do business with criminals, do you?
Junk mail a lot (too many) of times are crooks too - you know the "checks" that come in the mail for you to deposit and send money via Western Union to others.
Some day, one of these assholes is going to scam the wrong person and they may end up wishing they've gone to jail.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
...once they ship his scamming ass off to Federal "pound-me-in-the-ass" prison.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Assuming this guy has been scamming the whole time and didn't just start in the past few years (or didn't stop in the 90s and just start up again), it's pretty sad that it's taken 11 years from the original complaint to get any meaningful actions taken. Though you could argue that's 13 years, and not 11, since apparently he hasn't complied with the court order for 2 years, with no consequences until now.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
While scumbag scammers need to go to jail, they should go to jail for being scumbag scammers.
It sounds like they couldn't get this guy for a real crime, so they decided trump up fraud charges and fish out people who fell for the scam and enter a judgment of $3,200,000.00 against him.
That's fine. If the fraud charges are valid they'll withstand appeals. If he covered his ass with "results not typical" and etc., then he should win the appeals.
The move to hold him in contempt of court until he pays up is a thinly veiled attempt to put him in prison ("justice" for his non-criminal crimes) while he works on further appeals. If he hands over the deed and otherwise pays up, it'll bankrupt him so he can't afford to proceed with further appeals.
Courts have way too much power in regards to putting you in jail if you can't afford whatever it's been decided you owe.
People need to pay their debts, and cough up for actual damages, and courts should have the power to take your assets if need be. But a lot of judges act like 12 year olds with an @ sign on IRC and abuse thier power to no end in order to shoehorn their idea of justice in.
The typical bullshit is "Pay up or go to prison. Your choice.". When a person can't pay (see 95% of "deadbeat dads"), prison isn't a choice - it's a jail sentence for a private debt that should be settled between the parties in arbitration and, if necessary, asset valuation and seizure.
That's some old world shit we were supposed to have left behind.
Not all forms of asset protection are illegal:
1. A Prenuptual agreement is technically a form of asset protection. Putting assets into some forms of trusts for dependants or descendants is also. In general, when there's a marriage or a child involved, or a business partnership, a second person's rights to privacy may mean a creditor has at best limited rights to know about assets, particularly ones they also can't legally claim. In the ordinary course, there shouldn't be legally shielded assets that a creditor could somehow legally claim if they only knew more about them. But there are often legally shielded assets that the creditor either believes aren't really shielded or that the creditor would try to take if he or she could get the debt resolved that way. If you've heard the phrase "Possession is nine tenth's of the law", maybe that explains how legal asset protection actions are possible.
2. One reason for people to form LLCs is having multiple income sources. For example, if you run a dog grooming clinic and an auto repair service, separate limited liability corps are a perfectly legal way to limit damages you can be sued for. A lawsuit effectively can't take more than the related S-corp's total assets, So if you were, for example, sued for an inadequate repair job, they can't garnish the money that comes from the dog grooming business. Note that there are ways to get around this sometimes if the case rises to criminal negligence or there's other proof the corporate structure was itself intended for criminal purposes, but the basic idea here is legal.
Who is John Cabal?
IANAL, but if you knew the intent of the person wishing to find those bomb-making instructions, and you help him anyway, wouldn't that make you an accomplice to the crime?