Cheat-o Jesus's Prosper-ity gospel, #Lexit, and other wacky Whirled matters

The past few weeks have been pretty crazy, and as summer (in the Northern Hemisphere) and the political season both heat up, it is almost certainly going to get even crazier. But just for the sake of putting in my two-cents' worth on some of the craziness, here are a few tidbits and aggregated links.

Salty Droid and Daily Kos dig into Drumpf U's Prosper connections
In case you were worried about the little fake robot's prolonged absence, there's no cause for concern. Salty Droid returned earlier this month with a teaser about the yuuuuge scam formerly known as Trump University, which he had exposed years ago for the massive fraud that it was/is. In the teaser he took a potshot at Donald Trump's obnoxious, tone-deaf self-congratulations in the immediate wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida on June 12. Salty also put together a short video that competently demonstrated the cynical lie that was Trump U.



That was just the appetizer. A few days later Salty came back with the main course, a post focusing on the intimate connection between Cheat-o Jesus' phony institution of liar education and notorious Utah boiler-room company Prosper Inc.

As many of you may know, Salty has been on Prosper's and Utah's case for years, being one of the very first to call out that "rotting vortex of fraud," as he put it. Salty's postings inspired me more than once to add my own voice to the (still-too-small) chorus too. One reason I found the matter of such interest was that Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale, a frequent snarget on this Whirled, "partnered" with Prosper years ago for his extravagantly overpriced "Miracles Coaching" scheme. Over the years, others such as In the Limelight blogger Jonathan Timar, as well as The Verge, have also nabbed Joe for Miracles Coaching and its dependence upon the Prosper-generated hard sell. There have been consumer complaints about Prosper's "business coaching" as well -- see here and here and here, for instance.

Apparently, though, Prosper's co-founder Ethan Willis got out of that racket and into another one. If I'm reading things correctly, it appears that Prosper changed hands a couple of years ago and morphed into something called Achieve Today LLC. But according to their website, Vitale and his McMiracles machine are still"partners."

At any rate, Trump U is far from the only scam in which Prosper has been involved. But it seems clear that Trump U got a lot of help and enabling from the Willis boys -- not just Ethan but his brother Damon -- back in the day when Prosper was still Prosper. The bottom line, according to Salty:

It’s not enough to call this fraud. It’s intentional manipulation :: a full degree darker than deception … and it works like a motherfucker. These guys are so good at it :: scary good … which is why they generally contract to take more than half the money in these deals.

Trump University didn’t slide gradually into scam after being confronted with the reality of the web’s unprofitable profit model … as happens to so many companies. Trump came to this game partnered with Prosper … because he was always going straight for the jugular.

That sounds pretty accurate.

By the way, Salty isn't the only one on the Prosper/Drumpf U connection. Lenny Grover put some good info together and published it on The NewsHub and on Daily Kos. Here's the Kos link.

But as I noted on my own very long post about the Drumpf U playbooks -- a post that totally overlooked the Prosper connection, I'm sorry to say (and really, there was no excuse for that, since Prosper was mentioned in the playbook PDF to which I linked) -- I don't think that knowing that Donald Trump is a scammer will make any difference to the hatriots and scammer wannabes who are pushing for a Drumpf presidency. For the scammer wannabes, in fact, it will just be a selling point.

LoonyC gets out of Facebook jail, and he's loonier than ever
Another frequent snarget on this blog, Not-Doktor Leonard Coldwell, was recently sprung from Facebook jail. I wrote about his most recent 30-day suspension in late May, detailing his whines about being "banned" because, according to him, he was writing posts in support of Donald Trump. More than likely, however, he was suspended for hate speech -- not that it stopped him from posting on Facebook. The only account that was actually suspended was his main English-language page, but he continued to post on his main German page, as well as several other pages he maintains, and he even created a new fake account under the name "Eyn Rand."

Well, Lenny has been back on Facebook in full force now for a few days, and he hit the ground whining that he is probably going to be blocked again. Even more amusingly, he is boasting that he has a huge fortune of 100 billion dollars... or maybe euros; he doesn't seem to be sure which it is. And he is going to use that fortune to create his own sovereign nation. Now, where/when have we heard that before? Oh, yeah, here -- back in April 2013 when he was boasting about having purchased 130-plus acres in South Carolina, near the Georgia border.

Anyway, Bernie at GINtruth had some fun with Loony's latest claims.

As I noted on my comment on Bernie's blog post, in all of the posts that Lenny wrote immediately after getting out of Facebook jail, he hasn't made one mention of having been “banned” because of his pro-Trump posts. Yet his Trump advocacy was the excuse he gave at the beginning of his 30-day suspension. Post-suspension, he is only blaming the New World Order, or NWO. Maybe, I suggested, he just doesn’t remember the lie he told previously. Then again, that was 30 days ago, and probably (at least 30) bottles of bourbon ago as well.

And it seems that Lenny hasn't learned his lesson about hate speech, or perhaps he is simply trying to bait Facebook so he'll get suspended again, and can whine about it and gather more names and email addresses for his "exclusive" newsletter. On his German page, under the name "Dr." Leonard Coldwell, there's this, from June 23, 2016.

In that post he links to this awful German-language site.

Here's a link to the Googlish-translated page.

And even before that -- while he was still suspended from using his main English language Facebook page -- he shared a link to this atrocious anti-Semitic work.

Post-suspension, and writing as Eyn Rand, he shared one of his favorite links -- again. And again:

Which makes his former lawyer's "eternal vocational suicide" defense of Lenny seem all the sillier. 

Indeed, judging by some of his Facebook posts, it would appear that Coldwell actively identifies with Hitler. This is from his German page:

A translation of the caption under the Hitler pic:

And then there's this: a clip from Lenny's June 28, 2016 interview with one of his long-time buddies, conspiracy nut and hate-monger Jeff Rense. This isn't the entire segment but it's enough to clearly call Lenny out for a particularly vicious form of anti-Semitism, marked by Holocaust denial and expressions of admiration for Adolf Hitler, whom he and Rense both portray as the egregiously misunderstood hero of history. Vocational suicide, indeed. Lenny's rants are the words of a maniac who has no real vocation left to destroy.



In light of the above, I'm all for Leonard Coldwell forming his own sovereign nation, but I hope it's far, far away from the United States. Actually, I'm thinking that the location for Loonyland might be somewhere in Russia, since Lenny has such a mad man-crush on Vladimir Putin and is supposedly going to be talking to him soon about how to save our world.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Russia would be a perfect place for Lenny, because overall people there are even more gullible than they are in the US, as I noted in this September 2009 snarkfest.

In any case I had been wondering about Lenny's letter to Putin. I didn't have to wonder long; on June 26 he posted this on his German page:

Here is the link he shared to the letter to Putin. It's in German, but if you don't speak that language, you don't have to mess with Google or Bing's awkward machine translations. Here is the page in English.

If I'm reading his garbled garbage correctly, it appears that Lenny did not personally reach out to Putin; he merely signed an online letter. So are we to believe Putin is singling Lenny out of the 93,000-plus other souls all over the world who supposedly signed the same online letter, and that Vlad is going to be meeting personally with Lenny?

I think we all know the truth here: Lenny is just another silly Putin fanboy, as are millions of other conservative wingnuts in the US, UK and elsewhere (e.g., Donald Trump, UKIP leader Nigel Farage, et al.). Perhaps Lenny even has a big poster of a shirtless Vlad on horseback taped to his ceiling. And so what if Amy doesn't like it? She's just a woman, and real men like Lenny don't let their wives tell them what to do.

Perhaps Lenny fantasizes about himself and Vlad prancing shirtlessly on horseback together, parading around the new sovereign nation of Loonyland, supervising drills of Lenny's Pinkshirt troops, overseeing the Lenions toiling in the organic gardens or attending the animals. Possibly he envisions Vlad and him hunting and shooting shirtlessly together like the man's men that they are.

Now that I've spoiled your appetite for dinner, let's get back to that sovereign nation notion. Like his idol Donald Trump, Lenny has been a big and mostly ignorant advocate of #Brexit. Lenny has also gotten behind #Amexit (the US leaving the United Nations) and #Texit (Texas seceding from the United States). Well, I'm here to get behind what I hope will be a
#Lexit.

Goodbye, Lenny, and good riddance.

Burning soles redux: it's not the firewalk that's the main problem
Nearly four years ago, the Emperor of Scamworld Tony Robbins' firewalking shtick made the news because some folks at a California event got their tootsies burned. I blogged about it here. Well, it has happened again, this time in Dallas, Texas. (My pal Steve Salerno at SHAMblog was invoked by ABC News to provide insight, but they apparently did a piss-poor job of it; they ran a mere snippet of a prolonged comment he'd made after the 2012 incident.)

Not surprisingly, Robbins' faithful followers claimed that the injured people got burned because of a lack of focus. But at least one participant said that it appeared that staff members didn't allow the coals to cool enough before adding more to the pile.

Maybe convicted, formerly imprisoned and now freed killer James Arthur Ray can get a job with the Robbins scampire.

In any case, as Salty Droid noted back in 2012, after the California burning soles event:

bad things that scale + the internets = very scary

6000 people walking down 10+ lanes of hot coals for 90 minutes :: seems like a big bad … but it’s not the big number we should be worried about. Each one of the those 6000 people represents approximately 100 other people who were offered the opportunity to Unleash the Power Within in San Jose July 2012 and declined. Hundreds of thousands of sales messages constantly spammed across all mediums :: to the whole world … generating the contrivance of attention.

Tony Robbins will never stop telling you that the way to move forward with your life is to keep giving ever larger amounts of yourself and your life to Tony Robbins :: but he’ll never give it back … because he is a nothing and a nobody so he can’t. As shallow a god as ever there was.

But he is a shallow god who is still able to collect millions from the hopeful and the vulnerable.


Update 27 June: Salty Droid weighed in on the latest Tony's toasted toes episode, and as usual nailed it.

The media doesn’t do stories about the huge harms done by Tony Robbins. But they love the shit out of the #footburn #ambulance thing.

Yep. But the problem goes deeper...

People want solutions for their unsolvable problems … and scammers are allowed to use deception and manipulation to take advantage of that.

It wouldn’t be possible without buy-in from liars at every level of our completely corrupted :: propaganda based … power structure.

The problem isn't just with Tony Robbins and Donald Trump. When someone as influential as former President Bill Clinton (whom I have supported, as I now support his wife) calls Tony Robbins a "very good friend," you know the malaise goes all the way up.

Sez Salty:

We best Awaken the Revolutionary Within … before there’s nothing left of our great democratic experiment but lies and burnt feet.

Update 30 June: And here is Steve Salerno, who also gets the big picture in relation to Robbins, Trump et al. and America's "Positive Mental Attitude-mania" -- a mania that has eroded common sense.

Trudeau diet book scam: come, thou long awaited refunds
Finally, and for what it's worth, many months after U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman approved the Federal Trade Commission's proposal to start compensating purchasers of Kevin Trudeau's fraudulent diet book, it appears that the refunds are finally being issued.

My friend Julie Daniel has shared this redacted screen shot of one person's huge refund.

Judging by its news releases, the FTC seems to be patting itself on the back for this one. Small victories, I suppose. It's nothing, though, compared to the millions that Trudeau scammed out of members of his mega-scam,the Global Information Network (GIN).

That's it for now... more soon.

True Spanish lies: A scam in any tongue is still a scam

For some time I've been aware of -- and have blogged and Facebooked about -- the fact that certain Scamworld sociopaths in the US love to hate on "the illegals," by which, traditionally, they most often mean Hispanic/Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America. More recently the hucksters have been hating on Syrian/Muslim immigrants as well, warning that the Muslims are taking over Europe, raping all the women in their path, and that the US is next -- but by no means have these vociferous xenophobes let "the Mexicans" off the hook. Some have been griping for years about the influx of undesirables from South of the border.

For instance, there's currently imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie, who, as reported in this June 2011 Whirled post, came down hard on the "Mexicans" a few years ago. In November 2012 my pal Salty Droid also paid tribute to Katie's apparent racism (or at least Katie's pandering to racists, which is just as bad).

And on the Fourth of July, 2014 (cue patriotic music), former Trudeau b.f.f. and alt-health/cancer quack/fake doctor/conspiracy theorist/racist Leonard Coldwell, linking to the aggressively nativist NumbersUSA site, wrote about how he is proud to be "AND [sic] AMERICAN." He wrote that "they" (the New World Order and Obama and all enemies of freedom) "want to destroy our national pride, our way of life, our language and our culture by flooding us with these illegal immigrants." By "our" language I assume he means English, which he is doing quite an effective job of destroying on his own, but I digress.

More recently, LoonyC shared this on Facebook, linking to yet another article that attempts to indict all "illegals" for the crime committed by one. Obama is blamed too, of course; it wouldn't be a proper Loony rant (or in this case, Loony-approved rant) without vilification of our president.

 
Then of course there is GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, and if you don't think he belongs in a discussion of Scamworld, read this. Apart from that whole "build a wall" shtick, Trump has made himself very not-loved by Latino voters by running off at the mouth about illegal "Mexican" immigrants being diseased criminals.

Here's a recent Facebook posting from the aforementioned Loony Coldwell, citing an article regarding yet another Trump tweet about "Mexicans."

Of course the scammers, including and perhaps especially Trump, mostly insist that they're not, not, NOT racist, and that they have nothing against "Mexicans." It's just those lazy, diseased, sexually predatory illegals they don't like. By way of proving that he's not racist and actually likes Mexicans, for instance, Kevin Trudeau said, back in 2011, that he admires Che Guevara and likes guacamole. Things haven't gotten any better since then. If anything they're worse, and If you call someone who's clearly racist out for being clearly racist, the least violent response you can expect is to be jeered at for being "politically correct" and a "libtard."

But for even the most racist scammer, one yuuuuge thing trumps (so to speak) white Western Euro-purity, and that one thing is, of course, money. And any scammer worth his or her salt has realized by now that the Spanish-speaking market is enormous and potentially very lucrative -- and damned if they're going to let a good cash op pass them by.

Accordingly, Kevin Trudeau's scampire has been peddling some of his info-frauducts in Spanish for years, both online and via infomercials. I'm sure the company currently handling those info-frauducts would gladly accept moneys from the undocumented, no questions asked. For that matter, I bet that Katie's legal defense fund would be similarly open-minded.

Leonard Coldwell, brave guardian of the English language and American culture, brags that his "mega bestselling" books are being translated into Spanish, but I'm guessing that he won't be demanding proof of citizenship status before taking money from those people who are helping to destroy said language and culture.

And despite his apparent racism, and the fact that he has shot himself in the foot business-wise with his racist remarks about Latinos, Donald Trump would gleefully welcome the Latino vote and has said he's confident he'll get it if he wins the nomination, because, he asserts, "Latinos love me".... though thousands of Latinos nationwide apparently disagree. (Illegal immigrants have no voting rights, despite what the wingnuts would have you believe.) Regarding "illegals," Trump has little room to speak, given his own business practices. And he knows as well as anyone else that if all illegal immigrants were suddenly deported, the US economy would implode.

Although there's no way of knowing for sure, I have little doubt that had Trump's more blatant Scamworldly enterprises such as Trump University and the Trump Network been longer-lived, those scams would have penetrated deeply into the Spanish-speaking market. As it is, Trump is currently dealing with a class action lawsuit over the alleged fraud that was Trump U, and he blamed the fact that the suit wasn't thrown out on the hostility of a "Spanish" judge.
 
[Update 29 May, 2016: Important development in the case of Drumpf and that "Spanish"/"Hispanic"/"Mexican judge.]

But as Salty Droid indicated in his posts about Trump U and Trump Network, linked to in the first sentence of the paragraph above the update (and you should read those posts, if you haven't already), Trump has proven himself to be a fan of network or multilevel marketing, or, as Salty put it, "the MLM fraud vortex of doom." Which is as good a way as any to segue into this point: If you think the MLM industry is sitting on its hands when there are potentially so many millions of Spanish-speaking victims to suck into that vortex, you simply haven't been paying attention.
 
Brown folks' money is just as green as white folks' money.
A long-running theme on Salty's blog is the destructive force that MLMs have been in the lives of so many people. I published a two-part guest post about the matter myself in December 2013. (Here's the link to Part 1.)

One of Salty's most frequent targets has been the mega-scam and pyramid scheme Herbalife, which he addresses yet again in his post of April 26.

I'm sure he'll have more to say about this subject soon, in light of his yet-to-be-completely-told tale of stowing away on a scammer sea cruise last fall, and of the recent release of a documentary about the Herbalife scam, Betting on Zero, which made its debut at the recent Tribeca Film festival. For the time being he has embedded a heartbreaking thirteen-minute bilingual video that poignantly demonstrates how a scam is still a scam, even in a loving tongue.



There is also a thriving Herbalife wannabe called 90 for Life, which is the unholy child, spawned in 2012, of Youngevity (founded by long-time frauduct peddler and former veterinarian Joel Wallach) and Livinity (founded by Barb and Dave Pitcock, who cut their huckster teeth with Kevin Trudeau back in the late 1990s). I've mentioned all of these folks on this Whirled previously, and here they are again. Loony Coldwell and his ex-bro Peter Wink were even involved in 90 for Life for a while, under the company name Coldwell Brothers LLC, until Loony blew his little balding top at Barb Pitcock some time in 2013, and that was that.

But more to the point here, 90 for Life, which peddles a large line of overpriced nutritional drinks and supplements and potions, launched its big Hispan-o-scam a couple of years ago, and front and center in that scheme was another longtime Katie bud (and frauduct/flopportunity peddler, Scamworld circle jerker mutual admiration society member, apparent xenophobe and Trump lover) Fred van Liew. who has also been mentioned here a few times.



"I am heavily invested in this project to open the door to the Huge Spanish speaking community throughout the world, as well as the US and Canada," said Fred in 2014. And here's a May 2015 upload of Spanish Financial Freedom with Dave & Barb Pitcock: "The most effective system for building wealth ever created."

I only recently found this upload and felt a need to join in the conversation, but so far it's just a monologue and not a conversation. I seem to run into that problem a lot. On the other hand, that particular video has only had 206 views at the time I'm writing this, so there's that.

But... if you've seen one scheme, you've seen 'em all. As Salty wrote in his April 26 post about Herbalife:

Everything they do :: everything they say :: everyone they hire … it’s all about perpetuating a lie that facilitates some of the world’s richest people str8 stealing from some of the world’s poorest people.

Every distributor I’ve investigated :: every lead generation method :: every retention method … everything … fucking all of it … lies

Yep, that about says it all. A good rule for financial, emotional and perhaps even physical survival is this: If some smirking, overfed huckster approaches you blathering about a new opportunity to realize the American dream... solo di no.