In Willms case, unlike Dorko, all of his assets were seized. Yet the deftness that has characterized his entire business career, Willms was back at it just weeks later selling free trial programs to consumers seeking driving records, criminal records, and vehicle-history reports (just as Carfax does).
Was Jon Dorko just a front man signer in the HNB operation or was he indeed the mastermind behind the alleged scam that thousands of consumers reported to their credit card providers as fraud?
The credit card infrastructures that organizations such as HNB use to keep their billing operations going may have crossed the line from civil forfeiture risk to criminal bank fraud, a precedent that was recently set in the Jeremy Johnson case.
Jeremy Johnson used “signers”, or dummy stooges that are nothing more than people used to open up Visa/Mastercard merchant accounts, to sustain a negative option billing scheme that defrauded consumers across the country. Jeremy Johnson was eventually prosecutued and sent to prison for over 10 years.The HNB operation, much like Johnson’s iWorks, utilized The United States Postal Service to ship unauthorized purchases to consumers, possibly placing HNB and its operators in violation of 940.18 U.S.C. Section 1341, also known as mail fraud.
