World Patent Marketing

[wserra]

There are all sorts of scams that claim that, for a fee, they will perform marvelous feats, but instead take the money and do nothing. That's the whole idea, of course, of "advance fee fraud", the name of this forum. Virtually anything that gets marks' hopes up will qualify. There are lots of folks who convince themselves that they have invented a better mousetrap, and are willing to spend money so that they can get rich selling it. Therefore, the "we will patent and market your invention" field is as susceptible to scammers as any.

Enter "World Patent Marketing" (WPM). Established in 2014, this scam involved telling would-be inventors that they would review their products and successfully market those that passed review. They claimed that they had placed such products in every well-known store in the country. They identified certain huge-selling products as fruit of their efforts. One fee would do it all, they said. Finally, they claimed that they had been doing this for years.

Only none of that was true. Last year the FTC shut them down, first with a TRO and then a preliminary injunction. The FTC filed a list of their lies in the process. Earlier this year the injunction went permanent and a receiver took over to pay victims from what comparatively little was left of their money.

Oh, and the current chief law enforcement officer of the United States was on their advisory board. There are plenty of other reasons to think this numbnuts is a scary fuckin' choice for acting AG, but those would be political.

[Judge Roy Bean]

I know all too well how attributions can come to be inappropriately applied in these kinds of schemes. What appears on promotional web sites should not be relied on especially when they're something like "advisory board" positions. The slimiest will tack on anyone with even the thinnest of threads that would represent "advice."

Some of these people will tie you to them just because you went to school with them or had some business dealings and talked to them on the phone for a few minutes. (Been there, had it happen. They never asked, nor received my authorization to make me a "board member" let alone paid me for it. I had to threaten them with crippling legal action to get my name removed from their printed materials - this was before the 'net.)

[wserra]

Some of these people will tie you to them just because you went to school with them or had some business dealings and talked to them on the phone for a few minutes.

That is certainly true, JRB. But it wasn't the case with Whitaker. Indeed, Whitaker was an active participant in the worst part of the scam - threatening victims. And he used his past as a U.S. Attorney to do it.

On August 21, 2015, he sent a threatening email to someone who appears to be one such victim. I pulled that email from one of the voluminous FTC exhibits in the action I mention above (I left the FTC investigator's affidavit at the beginning of the exhibit to authenticate it - see ¶15 - but deleted 350+ pages between the affidavit and the email). In the email, after writing that he was a former US Atty, he threatens "criminal consequences". That's unethical everywhere - in addition, of course, to verifying his connection to the scam.

Just by the standards of this board, he's a POS. And that's without even reaching Marbury v. Madison.