ATM LEASEBACK SCHEMES-- any insight?

[Lost Income]

Thanks Gregg

For now, I have made real phone contact with Sara at the SEC and Kevin at the Receiver, and have submitted info to the SEC/Receiver Website Questionnaire. Doubtful this person with the nationwideinvestor gmail address, or anyone else, can be of more helpful in getting some money back out of Joel & Ed for investors.

[webhick]

The Receiver is the one handling things the victims are most concerned with, and that again is not going to be an overnight process. In the usual course of events Receivers generally give either a quarterly or bi-yearly report to the court as to where things stand and if they need special help or guidance with something

The next report should be due around February.

[Lost Income]

FYI - The SEC/Receiver Site now has updated info regarding the recent court case.

I phoned one of the US Attorney Personnel listed at the bottom of this new info, and was told that in 1-2 wks the investors will be receiving a letter from the FBI/US Attorney requesting detailed info about their personal interaction with Joel & Ed, which the judge will read to influence his level of sentencing for Joel & Ed.

[notorial dissent]

In other words, the victim impact statements.

[Judge Roy Bean]

In other words, the victim impact statements.

For those who were more than just participant/victims, this could be an interesting exercise in how much of the truth has to be told.

[The Observer]

In other words, the victim impact statements.

And this is where the victims are going to get their once to fully impact on whatever Joel and Ed get hit with. I would suggest over the next couple of weeks, each victim should be reconstructing all conversations they had with these scammers, review all correspondence, if any, and any other documents provided by Ed and Joel. As well, the victims need to document and verify their investments and what they actually lost, not only in terms of money, but also any emotional or physical impact (such as depression or illness) that came about once they had realized they had been scammed.

Note that I say "document and verify", meaning that you have been under care of a mental health specialist or physician and that they can provide a diagnosis that directly links to Ed and Joel ripping you off. I suspect claiming that you are depressed or suffering from a mental breakdown will be discounted by the court without any proof provided.

In addition, be sure to show how the loss of money impacts your ability to provide for yourself in the future. If you were counting on that amount of money to provide an income stream, you will need to show that if you had invested the money in an alternate legitimate investment, what the loss of future income would have been. As well, if you are now having to work longer before retiring or had to go back to work, you need to mention that as well and how that impacts on your life.

What will be especially important is if you can show conversations where Joel and/or Ed demonstrated callousness, indifference, evasiveness or vagueness to you when you were asking questions about their operations or trying to verify the safety of your investment.

[The Observer]

For those who were more than just participant/victims, this could be an interesting exercise in how much of the truth has to be told.

I would guess those particular people will avoid sending in an impact statement in the hope that they get overlooked.

[Lost Income]

I actually met with Joel before giving him a check, and during our conversations he told me "that in the beginning NAS had a hard time finding investors because everyone felt it may be a ponzi scheme, and then after they were in biz for a while people finally trusted them". Can't wait to explain this and several other conversations to the judge.

[grimreaper]

FBI is sending out letters for investors to provide info on their investments. It's a mandatory requirement. Relative just got one in the mail.

[Tednewsom]

Saw this wonderful quote today:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[webhick]

The receiver's second report is available at his site. Some interesting things:

• The servicer who withheld monies is still withholding (now up to $70k) and claims it's due to a line of credit but has not turned over any paperwork to back up those claims.
• The receiver is trying to get Oasis to cough up financials but they're not cooperating.
• Over Oct, Nov and Dec of last year, NASI averaged a net operating income of about $52k. If you include the payments that were supposed to be made to the ATM locations, but weren't paid, then it brings the average down to $42k.
• The receiver thinks he should be able to file a report on the forensic accounting within the next 60 days.
• There's a list of actual ATM locations. For shits and giggles, a curious investor may want to just see if all their ATMs were vapor. Not that it means that the investor would have a stake in that ATM since Joel likely put those ATMs on multiple investor reports, but it would be interesting.
• There's also a P&L of sorts.

I'll post something more in-depth tomorrow on the blog.

[notorial dissent]

I'm kind of surprised that the servicer is still sitting on the money, but then again not all that much, I suspect their line of credit agreement agreement was probably as dodgy, or worse, than the rest of the goings on.

Oasis was also supposed to be under the Receiver's control, fact that they are stalling does not bode well at all. I suspect a much closer look will now be warranted there. This could well get interesting before it is settled out. Based on the report I suspect that the Oasis financials are going to be every bit as convoluted as NASI's if not worse. Revelations here could get entertaining as well.

Ouch, $42-52K for final quarter, not pretty at all.

The forensic report ought to be as they say, a real page turner, that is what I've been waiting for. I'm impressed they got that far that fast.

I would suspect the ATM location report will be more depressing than anything else.

[Tednewsom]

[*]Over Oct, Nov and Dec of last year, NASI averaged a net operating income of about $52k. If you include the payments that were supposed to be made to the ATM locations, but weren't paid, then it brings the average down to $42k.

Can someone translate this for me? Is this is (presumed) average monthly income from the few real ATMs?

[webhick]

[*]Over Oct, Nov and Dec of last year, NASI averaged a net operating income of about $52k. If you include the payments that were supposed to be made to the ATM locations, but weren't paid, then it brings the average down to $42k.

Can someone translate this for me? Is this is (presumed) average monthly income from the few real ATMs?

It's basically the average monthly profit. Which wouldn't be too bad except the only expenses are ATM location payouts.

[notorial dissent]

Not bad, except that it doesn't take in to account the payments that were supposed to be made to investors, and who knows else, and it sounds like they are having problems even getting all of the net they have coming, which would make me look a lot closer at the whole paper operation. I really do want to see that forensic reconstruction of the books and accounting to see what really was going on.

From what I got from the Receiver's report, calling the "boys" accounting methods and practices primitive was an exercise in sarcasm and understatement, as it sounds like the checks were produced from a list that one partner generated somehow for the other who then had the checks MANUALLY typed up to go out each month. Which translates to they had NO books at all from all appearances, all they had was their sucker list. I mean they could have spent $30 bucks on a piece of cheap accounting software to at least cut down on the work and guesswork of generating the monthly checks, and they didn't even do that. Masterminds - NOT!!!!

[The Observer]

Well, in one way they were masterminds in that they ensured that the forensic accounting would meet every barrier possible in trying to reconstruct this mess. It won't be surprising if Joel and/or Ed avoid a couple of charges simply because the accounting couln't establish a critical piece of proof.

[notorial dissent]

At this point the only thing I can see that they could have done to make it harder would been to have run on a strictly cash basis. Reconstructing this from bank statements is going to be an incredible thrill.

[Tednewsom]

I spoke to one of my sources the other day, who had repeatedly counseled her clients to get their money out of the scheme. Other than her initial mistrust of Gillis on a personal level ("Sometimes you can just tell when a person's lying."), the giveaway to her as an accountant/bookkeeper was something that was mentioned in this thread about 25 pages back: reports of returns on individual machines being nearly identical. "It made no sense. Machines in completely different locations all supposedly made the same amount each month as each other, plus or minus a couple of dollars. An ATM in an airport in St. Louis would be listed as paying out $645, a machine in a store in Phoenix would be $653, an ATM at a Reno gas station would be $649. The odds that all of these payoffs would be nearly the same was unbelievable."

FYI, y'all: there's a guy who's doing a video documentary about this scam. He (as with my source) is one of the few who actually asked Gillis for and received a refund on his "investment." (In his case, because he suddenly needed the cash; in hers, because she smelled a rat.)

[notorial dissent]

Your book keeper lady had a valid point, anyone at all remotely familiar with vending machines could have told you the same thing, although I still think the guaranteed return was more than enough for me. STill, YMMV depending upon experience.

[Tednewsom]

YMMV? I'm sure that's a useful acronym, if you know what it means. However, in my case... huh?