From the NYTimes, the saga of a good-hearted all-American businessman who just wanted to help people, no matter how many picayune little laws he had to break in order to fund his helpfulness:
… “When I think of Jeremy Johnson, I think of the most generous person I ever met,” said Mr. Gardner, an assistant loan officer in Provo, Utah. “Whatever he had, he would give and give and give.”
But what Mr. Johnson had to give — and it was quite a bit — may have come from consumers who got taken. The Federal Trade Commission says Mr. Johnson was “the mastermind” behind one of the largest and most intricate online marketing frauds ever perpetrated in the United States.
Mr. Johnson founded and ran a company called I Works, which, the agency says, marketed programs to help people get government grants for personal needs and earn easy money. According to a civil complaint filed by the F.T.C., the company lured consumers with online pitches for free or “risk-free” CD-ROMs that required only a nominal shipping fee and then charged their credit cards for recurring online memberships they were unaware of and had not consented to.
Over five years, Mr. Johnson, along with I Works, company executives and related corporations, supposedly swindled “unwitting consumers” out of more than $275 million, the complaint said. The company also discouraged dissatisfied customers from seeking refunds from their credit card companies, the complaint said, by threatening to report those customers to a company-operated consumer blacklist called BadCustomer.com.
All the while, proceeds from the enterprise were used to finance Mr. Johnson’s “lavish lifestyles” of helicopters and houseboats, classic cars and poker at a Las Vegas casino, according to a receiver’s report to the court on Mr. Johnson’s assets. Some details in the case file read as if they came from an Old West novel: according to testimony from a witness, Mr. Johnson supposedly amassed bundles of cash and buried caches of gold.
“This is the anatomy of a really interesting fraud done by a clever guy at the expense of the most vulnerable people,” asserted David C. Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who worked on the case in his previous job as director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
In addition to the F.T.C.’s civil case, taking place in the United States District Court of Nevada, he is now facing 86 related criminal charges — including conspiracy, money laundering and bank fraud — brought by the United States attorney in Utah. Mr. Johnson has denied those charges, too…
Apart from helping oneself to “help” the less fortunate, what’s on the agenda for the end of the weekend?
Sunday Longread Open Thread: What Would Jeebus Steal?Post + Comments (69)