In conjunction with law enforcement, USA Herald will make some major announcements in the upcoming months around this topic, including naming one of the primary operators of these schemes that has coordinated an international effort to defraud consumers.
We are going to cover the following areas of the “free trial” scheme:
- The name of the head operator behind the free trial fraud scheme.
- The names of the companies registered and actions taken against them by government agencies, including an AG office in the south east.
- The names of the merchant account providers and banks used in this scheme.
- The points of profit from the operator whom has profited yet has kept “clean hands” along the process. These points of profit include referral agreement to make a percentage of the fees from the credit card transactions processed; fulfillment fees; product fees; labeling fees; chargeback representment fees; advertising fees; and more.
- The federal statutes that may have been violated, including bank fraud that carries stiff criminal penalities.
- All of the parties that are involved in the scheme and their exact roles and purpose behind their roles.
- The lawyers that were actively involved in assisting in the process, both of whom are under investigation by their State Bar. We will go into details around their relationship with the operator.
- Recent FTC actions that mirror the actions that this operator has been able to avoid.
- The Jeremy Johnson case, which set precedent for criminal actions around illegal banking structures with commentary from U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber. We will draw striking similarities to the structure of this operators business practices to that of Jeremy Johnson.
- The pattern of conduct of this operator, which includes the facilitation of other “free trial” schemes that have amassed thousands of complaints from customers all throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.
- The names of the governmental agencies that you can reach out to in order to report the activities if you were a victim.
- A change.org petition to prompt authorities to take action to shut down this group.
- A glossary of terms that are relevent to the article for the layman reader, which we have included below and will reference in an additional article. Here we will go into how these terms apply to the alleged criminal conspiracy that we are investigating:
Shell Corp: A shell corporation is a corporation without active business operations or significant assets. These types of corporations are not all necessarily illegal, but they are sometimes used illegitimately, such as to disguise business ownership from law enforcement or the public.
