von Nuthouse raided

[Famspear]

Now I'll comment.

If you read the story carefully, there is still no independent confirmation that this raid took place.

[Nikki]

Liberty Dollar employees were at the office this morning cleaning up after the raid. They referred all questions to von NotHaus.

Leads one to believe that SOMETHING happened, but we need to send Scoop out there to do a better job.

[Cpt Banjo]

I wonder if Ron Paul is aware that these nutcases are using his likeness on the coins.

[Famspear]

Cpt Banjo wrote:

I wonder if Ron Paul is aware that these nutcases are using his likeness on the coins.

Uh oh. Can you say Roberson v. The Rochester Folding Box Company, 171 N.Y. 538, 64 N.E. 442, 1902 N.Y. LEXIS 881 (1902)?

[Famspear]

The question of course is whether Famspear has read any other "right of privacy" cases since reading that case in law school.

[Cpt Banjo]

Cpt Banjo wrote:

I wonder if Ron Paul is aware that these nutcases are using his likeness on the coins.

Uh oh. Can you say Roberson v. The Rochester Folding Box Company, 171 N.Y. 538, 64 N.E. 442, 1902 N.Y. LEXIS 881 (1902)?

I read that case in law school, too -- in the casebook we used, it appeared right before Time, Inc. v. Hill, the "Desperate Hours" case that Nixon argued (and lost) before the Supreme Court.

I don't read many "right to privacy" (what a misnomer) cases myself; I rely on our firm's intellectual property gurus down the hall who keep up with that stuff.

[Demosthenes]

I wonder if Ron Paul is aware that these nutcases are using his likeness on the coins.

From http://onthehillblog.blogspot.com/2007/ ... ollar.html

All this will be a big surprise to Paul, according to the coins' manufacturer. As Liberty Dollar's legal counsel points out, if Ron Paul's campaign was informed before the launch date, the Federal Election Commission could require profits in excess of $2,300 to be distributed to the Republican Party. So the Ron Paul Dollar was created as an "independent contribution" and is distributed through the grassroots Volunteer Network.

[Cpt Banjo]

Hmmm...which means that Paul was unaware before the coins were introduced. But it's likely that he's aware now, so what does he do? Does he distance himself from these bozos while at the same time milking the "Ron Paul for President" message that the coins bear? Or more likely, does he simply say something to the effect of, "Let the justice system handle this matter," and do nothing, figuring that the bust has put a stop to the production of the coins?

[Famspear]

Cpt Banjo wrote:

I read that case in law school, too -- in the casebook we used, it appeared right before Time, Inc. v. Hill, the "Desperate Hours" case that Nixon argued (and lost) before the Supreme Court.

I don't read many "right to privacy" (what a misnomer) cases myself; I rely on our firm's intellectual property gurus down the hall who keep up with that stuff.

I'm extremely rusty on this stuff. And there is both "right of privacy" and "right of publicity." I don't remember the elements of each cause of action.

[Evil Squirrel Overlord]

Well I'll be. I would have thought some gangsters dressed up as FBI agents would have raided a long time ago. Just think of the easy pickings...

We're not going to arrest you at this time. If you cooperate by placing the bullion into the rental van and riding to the airport with us.

Alas, couldn't they just issue wooden nickles like everybody else?

[notorial dissent]

First problem with the PR release, the source, he hasn’t been honest about anything he has said from the start, I see no reason to willingly suspend disbelief simply because he finally got caught. In fact, I expect the fiction will now flow full force.

Von Nuthouse was given more than ample warning, the Treas and Mint warnings were perfectly clear and unambiguous and he chose to disregard them, and in fact flaunted them. While he did change his marketing a bit, it wasn’t significant and they were still promoting his stuff as alternate currency and money.

I would agree with buck09 here except that this bunch has never evidenced the least bit of smarts in any of the time I have been aware of them, and in fact generally radiated an air of superiority of the “they wouldn’t dare/couldn’t touch us variety” and were very smug about what they were pulling off to the point that I don’t think any of them ever conceived of the thought that they would get busted.

I further agree with buck about the actual use for the new “loonie” except that I would caution him about the metal content of the material, after all we only have von Nutburt’s guarantee that there actually is any silver at in them.

Actually with regards to some of the “coins”, there were some of them that actually would have had some collector’s value to them, as they really were quite nicely done, not nicely enough that I was going to pay his seigniorage for them, but still nicely done. But they may well have some collector’s value down the road a ways.

And now, Capt K gets back to something I brought up a ways back about the so called warehouse receipts. Von Nutburt has claimed several million dollars in circulation. Now even by my feeble math skills, that works out to a lot of metal. If his figure of 20 million can be trusted, he said while trying not to choke, considering that the coins are at best worth half face value, that still comes out to about 40,000 pounds of silver give or take depending on when they bought it, but even 1 million would require about 43-4500 pounds of silver to cover it. That is a lot of silver to either store or buy. I’d love to see the purchasing records, and metals purchases in the quantities they should have been purchasing in should leave a wide trail. A million is about 78# of gold, 4400# of silver, or 44# of platinum, these are rough estimates since I didn’t feel like doing all the averages, but they do reflect the fluctuations and general spot prices. Still, any way you look at it a lot or metal to have to move around or buy.

I agree with Capt K, I have long doubted that there was ever enough of any precious metal to cover either the receipts, currency, or e-currency, and I have long thought this was the scam, selling overpriced medallions and paper with no backing. Now maybe we’ll find out for sure. It will also be interesting to see if they actually run an assay on the medallions to see what they test out at. At any rate, I still think it was a scam from the get go, how good a one remains to be seen unil the books have actually been looked at.

[LPC]

I have a theory - there was little if any actual gold and silver to back up the gold and silver medallions and certificates, possibly none. This means that up to this point, NotHaus was running a scam, a fraud.

Now, he can get away with it by claiming "da ebil gummint" swiped his millions in precious metals, which means any paper certificates he sold have no backing and the money he made off of selling the certificates he gets to keep and he can quietly go out of business having fleeced people too stupid to realize that it was a scam, becuase they would rather believe some clown had millions in gold and silver seized by the government than the likely truth that it was all a fraud.

I like it. It's just crazy and sleazy enough to be true.

[.]

Hmmm. The Norfed site makes a few claims about von NutBar:

Luckily, the first cold call to Ed Griffin led into a lengthy investigation and ultimately to Ed's support and friendship.

http://www.norfed.org/ld/about/history.htm

That would be none other than G. Edward Griffin, author of the fantasy "book" The Creature from Jekyll Island.

"Cold call," my ass.

On Norfed's "legal" page, following all of the patriot gibberish, is this:

Paul J. Sulla, Attorney at Law
7359 Aleala Rd
Hanalei, Hawaii 96754
Telephone (808) 828-6611

http://www.norfed.org/ld/about/legal.htm

Perhaps someone has heard of him.

Regarding audits, von NutBar claims:

Every month since October 1998, Ada Loper, a CPA with Clark, Anderson, McNelis & Company, one of the largest CPA firms in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, has made an on site independent, physical audit of the warehouse, which issues the Liberty Dollar. And every month, utilizing the strictest GAAP standards, Ms. Loper issues a certified audit report to the Liberty Dollar organization, which is then posted for review on the Internet:

http://www.libertydollar.org/html/audits.asp

http://www.norfed.org/ld/information/au ... tement.htm

Which leads exactly nowhere. Just as every audit link after August, 2006 does.

http://norfed.org/ld/information/audits.htm

Seems they have a bit of a problem keeping things current on their site.

Their 2006 audit summary says they all got tegether and agreed everything was there.

http://norfed.org/information/auditfiles/2006-12-31.pdf

Yup, I'll believe that, yessirree, you betcha!

[Red Cedar PM]

Hmmm. The Norfed site makes a few claims about von NutBar:

Luckily, the first cold call to Ed Griffin led into a lengthy investigation and ultimately to Ed's support and friendship.

http://www.norfed.org/ld/about/history.htm

That would be none other than G. Edward Griffin, author of the fantasy "book" The Creature from Jekyll Island.

"Cold call," my ass.

On Norfed's "legal" page, following all of the patriot gibberish, is this:

Paul J. Sulla, Attorney at Law
7359 Aleala Rd
Hanalei, Hawaii 96754
Telephone (808) 828-6611

http://www.norfed.org/ld/about/legal.htm

Perhaps someone has heard of him.

Regarding audits, von NutBar claims:

Every month since October 1998, Ada Loper, a CPA with Clark, Anderson, McNelis & Company, one of the largest CPA firms in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, has made an on site independent, physical audit of the warehouse, which issues the Liberty Dollar. And every month, utilizing the strictest GAAP standards, Ms. Loper issues a certified audit report to the Liberty Dollar organization, which is then posted for review on the Internet:

http://www.libertydollar.org/html/audits.asp

http://www.norfed.org/ld/information/au ... tement.htm

Which leads exactly nowhere. Just as every audit link after August, 2006 does.

http://norfed.org/ld/information/audits.htm

Seems they have a bit of a problem keeping things current on their site.

Their 2006 audit summary says they all got tegether and agreed everything was there.

http://norfed.org/information/auditfiles/2006-12-31.pdf

Yup, I'll believe that, yessirree, you betcha!

Who the hell is this CPA who goes in and does an "audit" of the entire operation? I can't believe any practitioner in their right mind would sign such a thing - the report states that they inspected 100% of the program and found no errors. Any CPA who isn't a moron is sure to qualify anything that they audit with an opinion containing terms like "reasonable assurance," "test basis," and "material misstatement." Signing something like that is a great way to open yourself up for a lawsuit later. Hope their insurance premiums are current.

[Nikki]

The current audit list for Liberty Dollars is at http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/information/audits.htm

[.]

Who the hell is this CPA who goes in and does an "audit" of the entire operation?

Exactly. I've known a few CPAs over the years, a couple of which have worked full-time for me, and I doubt any of them would sign off on any audit of the sort claimed to have been performed by von NutBar.

[Famspear]

Red Cedar PM wrote:

Who the hell is this CPA who goes in and does an "audit" of the entire operation? I can't believe any practitioner in their right mind would sign such a thing - the report states that they inspected 100% of the program and found no errors. Any CPA who isn't a moron is sure to qualify anything that they audit with an opinion containing terms like "reasonable assurance," "test basis," and "material misstatement." Signing something like that is a great way to open yourself up for a lawsuit later. Hope their insurance premiums are current.

Yes, I wasn't going to say anything, since it's been so long since I did audits, special reports, and so on. That "report" does not look like anything that would be in conformity with standards promulgated by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) or any State Board. State Boards by and large incorporate much of the substance of the AICPA standards in their own regulations. Certified Public Accountants are bound by fairly strict rules on the form of a report.

I can't talk about today's standards for audit reports and special reports, as I have not practiced in that area for many, many years. But the "report" linked above looks pretty hokey to me.

In the olden days (mid-1980s, the last time I did financial statement auditing for banks, savings & loans, hotels, restaurants, oil field service companies, etc.) the AICPA standards provided for something called a "special report" or "special purpose report." In particular, a CPA could issue a special report after applying "agreed-upon procedures to specified elements, accounts, or items of a financial statement." There were also provisions for reports on an entity's system of internal accounting control.

Those "audit" reports linked above don't even come close to conforming to any AICPA standards of which I am aware.

[Red Cedar PM]

Red Cedar PM wrote:

Who the hell is this CPA who goes in and does an "audit" of the entire operation? I can't believe any practitioner in their right mind would sign such a thing - the report states that they inspected 100% of the program and found no errors. Any CPA who isn't a moron is sure to qualify anything that they audit with an opinion containing terms like "reasonable assurance," "test basis," and "material misstatement." Signing something like that is a great way to open yourself up for a lawsuit later. Hope their insurance premiums are current.

Yes, I wasn't going to say anything, since it's been so long since I did audits, special reports, and so on. That "report" does not look like anything that would be in conformity with standards promulgated by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) or any State Board. State Boards by and large incorporate much of the substance of the AICPA standards in their own regulations. Certified Public Accountants are bound by fairly strict rules on the form of a report.

I can't talk about today's standards for audit reports and special reports, as I have not practiced in that area for many, many years. But the "report" linked above looks pretty hokey to me.

In the olden days (mid-1980s, the last time I did financial statement auditing for banks, savings & loans, hotels, restaurants, oil field service companies, etc.) the AICPA standards provided for something called a "special report" or "special purpose report." In particular, a CPA could issue a special report after applying "agreed-upon procedures to specified elements, accounts, or items of a financial statement." There were also provisions for reports on an entity's system of internal accounting control.

Those "audit" reports linked above don't even come close to conforming to any AICPA standards of which I am aware.

Agreed-upon procedures reports are much more formalized and clear on what was actually performed than what they have posted. Any AUP report letter would state that they did not perform an audit and only certain specific procedures (which are then stated). The letter would also state that the AUP report is only to be used by certain specified parties (not distributed publicly) and that the sufficiency of the procedures was solely the responsibility of the specified parties. An AUP report would be the way to go for an engagement like this, but the report would not look anything like what is posted there.

[Demosthenes]

There's no one named Ada Roper at that CPA firm???

http://www.camcpa.com/contact.html

[webhick]

On October 1, 1998, the first Liberty Dollar, which is 100% backed and 100% redeemable in gold and silver, rolled off the presses.

Is anyone else getting a kick out of the fact that they claim the US dollar is not backed by anything but faith and is absolute crap because of it, and now they've just admitted that the Liberty dollar is not backed by anything but faith?