A reader of Fraud Files recently contacted me to offer some information on the inner workings of ShopToEarn. Readers of this blog have had plenty of questions about the company and its founder, Patrick Welsh. One reader did a bunch of research, and came away with more questions than answers.

The information provided by the latest reader, who we’ll call Jamie, is interesting to say the least. Here’s what Jamie had to say about Shop To Earn…

Forget about the massive cost. Forget about the millions that will still be “uninsured.” Forget about the fact that healthcare will be rationed. Forget that those over 65 will be considered more expendable and therefore be denied some care. All that is bad enough…

But now there’s finally a piece reporting on what you’ll lose (or be prohibited from doing or getting) under the new health plan proposed for America.

Times must be tough over at Mary Kay. Instead of focusing on “enriching women’s lives” as the company is so fond of saying, they’re instead busy running around suing all kinds of people. A couple of weeks ago, Mary Kay filed suit against Yahoo for including advertisements with Mary Kay keywords in their email service.

I’m not a believer that a bad economy means more fraud is occurring. Those who say this is happening simply have no basis for that opinion. Because so much financial fraud goes undetected, it is impossible to determine if it’s growing or not. (But saying fraud goes up in a bad economy makes good sound bytes!)

One of the credibilty builders (i.e. smokescreens) that United First Financial agents use when trying to sell their Money Merge Account is… “It’s based on the Australian banking system!” The claim is that this “system” has been used successfully in Australia for years, and so we should believe in it too!

However, the truth is that this “system” is all but dead in Australia because people (and regulators, to some extent) figured out what a scam they were.  Here’s some information provided to me by someone in Australia who has done extensive research on the issue of mortgage acceleration:

Obamanomics has made it popular to call on the “rich” to pay “their fair share” of taxes. Lets increase taxes to pay for ineffective, unnecessary, wasteful government spending, but lets make sure the “rich” are the ones who pay those increased taxes. After all, if they have a lot of money, they should pay a lot in taxes, right? Except what those promoting this idea often ignore is that the “rich” already pay far more than “their fair share” of taxes. They already pay almost all of the taxes.

written by: terminatedramp

USANA publishes a distributor average earnings chart to be used to recruit new distributors into their business opportunity. See the following USANA website that provides their earnings chart: http://www.usana.com/dotCom/opportunity/payplan/index.

Quoted from their website is the following:

Auditing firms are in a world of trouble. Their audit procedures haven’t really kept up with the changing business environment, and the expectations of the users of financial statements are practically impossible for auditors to fulfill. Regardless of the many disclaimers auditors provide about their work (that they don’t provide absolute assurance on the numbers, that they usually don’t find fraud, that they’re only looking at a fraction of the transactions behind the financial statement), financial statement users have much higher expectations.

Today I was in a class on overseas banking and reporting requirements for individuals and businesses. I wanted to learn about the latest regulations and their enforcement. We discussed the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program, through which taxpayers can “tell on themselves” to the IRS regarding their previously secret foreign bank accounts. The will not be criminally prosecuted, and will have to pay a penalty of 20% of the value of their offshore accounts.

Taxpayers who don’t participate in voluntary disclosure but are later discovered to have secret foreign bank accounts are subject to much stiffer penalties and the threat of criminal prosecution.

Sounds great, right?

Today a seller of the United First Financial Money Merge Account product threw out a challenge: Show him how a simple spreadsheet can pay off a mortgage faster than MMA. He said that his client owed $200,000 on a mortgage, and with only $200 “extra” cash left each month after regular living expenses, the MMA product made it possible to pay off that 30 year mortgage in only 13.2 years.