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In many instances, chargebacks eventually surpass the 100 per month limit and the signers find their MIDs shut down by Visa/Mastercard.  The ramifications are significant as the signers’ credit is harmed and possibly left with unintended tax consequences.   Furthermore, depending on the circumstances of the MID shutdown, the signers' might find themselves listed on MATCH, a blacklist created by Visa.

"The practice of acquiring and load balancing merchant accounts via 'signers' to avoid detection from regulators is 'outright bank fraud,'" opines a white-collar criminal defense attorney who asked not to be named in this article.

Jeremy Johnson, a notorious free trial scammer, was recently prosecuted for submitting false information to banks to acquire MIDs to load balance transactions at iWorks.  In Johnson’s case, he was forced to forfeit all of his assets, including hundreds of millions of dollars, his home, car collection, and business.   Johnson is now serving an 11+ year prison sentence.

The only crime Johnson was convicted of was providing false information to banks.   Legal experts believe that had Johnson been convicted of the rest of the charges in his indictment that he would have received over 30 years in prison.

The Jeremy Johnson case created case law for criminal prosecutions of free trial operators that utilize “signers” to load balance transactions in their negative options schemes.

Rebrand & Do It All Over Again

In many cases, free trials pushing products like HNB's Garcinia Wow either lose their ability to process credit cards or receive civil fines from the FTC/State AGs.

With assets captured and injunctions preventing future operations, you would think that the operation would stop, right?   Wrong.

“Regulators have been completely ineffective in their civil fines and forfeitures for these scams.   It’s like whack-a-mole, by the time you shut one down another is popping up.  The only way to stop it is to criminally charge the operators for mail and wire fraud, force a prosecution, and send them to prison for a very long time” says a former employee of the FTC whom asked to remain anonymous.