von Nuthouse raided

[Demosthenes]

In case anyone wants to call...

Address: Sunshine Minting, Inc
750 West Canfield Avenue
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83815 USA

Pacific Time Zone
Phone: (208) 772-9592
Toll Free: (800) 274-5837
Fax: (208) 772-9739

Email: Sunshine@SunshineMint.com

[Evil Squirrel Overlord]

Because I agree with what others have said about the role of CPAs and the purposes of audits, and there is simply no way that a CPA is his/her right mind would agree that "all facets" of an operation had been audited, that gold or silver was ".9999 fine," or that the metal was "stored properly."

Let me know if CPAs are supposed to have metallurgical purity backgrounds, because if they are: well need to change our curriculum.

[AFTP]

So in the end who keeps all the gold?

[Chrisfs]

Here's a link to a news article on it
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jZHe ... AD8SUTRH80

[SteveSy]

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.

What a conspiracy theory nut. Everything is some TP or anti-government conspiracy to you.....you might as well start telling everyone how they're all shape shifting lizards out to take over the world but will fail due to the severely underestimated power of the federal machine!

The government simply wanted to shut them down. They knew if they seized their means to do business the liberty dollar was basically dead. For what purpose did the government need to seize unminted platinum, gold and silver? How long, even if they finally win, will it remain in evidence...10 years or more?

They did the similar crap with LR when they published that they were seeking child pornography charges just to defame him. All the total BS spewed by this group about how he was involved in child pornography never even seeing him convicted. To no suprise no one said a word when the charges were dropped, just as I'm sure they will be with this little BS government endevor. While they might not be able to use liberty dollars to barter with anymore I'm pretty confident nothing underhanded will be exposed. They have accomplished their mission without even convicting, just like they had with LH.

[AFTP]

Besides, everyone knows it's the shape-shifting lizards that CONTROL the government. Hssssssssssssssss

At this point nothing with this administration would surprise me.

[Quixote]

While they might not be able to use liberty dollars to barter with anymore I'm pretty confident nothing underhanded will be exposed.

They never used liberty dollars to barter with before, so why would they start now? NORFED never characterized the use of liberty dollars as barter. The LD has always been characterized as currency, not barter tokens.

[Famspear]

Captain Kickback wrote:

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.

SteveSy responded with this:

What a conspiracy theory nut. Everything is some TP or anti-government conspiracy to you.....you might as well start telling everyone how they're all shape shifting lizards out to take over the world but will fail due to the severely underestimated power of the federal machine

Steve, the Captain was describing possible CRIMINAL behavior. I don’t see any mention by the Captain of a conspiracy, though. I also do not see in the Captain's comment any reference by the Captain to any kind of express or tacit agreement between von Nothaus and anyone else -- which would be a logical and legal requirement for there to be a "conspiracy."

To ''conspire'' means "to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end." Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, p. 243 (G. & C. Merriam Company, 8th ed. 1976).

The key word here is "join." All conspiracies, by definition, involve TWO OR MORE persons. I suspect that if you look at the statutory definitions of every conspiracy made a crime in Federal law, you will find that this is uniformly the case.

Captain Kickback did not allege a “conspiracy” or anything involving two or more persons. Regardless of what is or is not the case with Herr von Nothaus, you were way off base. You yourself raised the "conspiracy" issue.

[Famspear]

More definitions of "conspiracy," this time from Federal statutes:

18 USC 371. Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States:

If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor.

[bolding added]


18 USC 372. Conspiracy to impede or injure officer:

If two or more persons in any State, Territory, Possession, or District conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof, or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave the place, where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or to injure him in his person or property on account of his lawful discharge of the duties of his office, or while engaged in the lawful discharge thereof, or to injure his property so as to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties, each of such persons shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six years, or both.

(bolding added).


18 USC 241. Conspiracy against rights:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or

If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured—

They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

(bolding added).

You can't have a conspiracy with just one person.

[SteveSy]

Captain Kickback wrote:

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.

SteveSy responded with this:

What a conspiracy theory nut. Everything is some TP or anti-government conspiracy to you.....you might as well start telling everyone how they're all shape shifting lizards out to take over the world but will fail due to the severely underestimated power of the federal machine

Steve, the Captain was describing possible CRIMINAL behavior. I don’t see any mention by the Captain of a conspiracy, though. I also do not see in the Captain's comment any reference by the Captain to any kind of express or tacit agreement between von Nothaus and anyone else -- which would be a logical and legal requirement for there to be a "conspiracy."

To ''conspire'' means "to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end." Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, p. 243 (G. & C. Merriam Company, 8th ed. 1976).

The key word here is "join." All conspiracies, by definition, involve TWO OR MORE persons. I suspect that if you look at the statutory definitions of every conspiracy made a crime in Federal law, you will find that this is uniformly the case.

Captain Kickback did not allege a “conspiracy” or anything involving two or more persons. Regardless of what is or is not the case with Herr von Nothaus, you were way off base. You yourself raised the "conspiracy" issue.

[Famspear]

Dear SteveSy:

Rolling eyes? That's your response? That's it?

That's what I thought.

Look I'm not trying to be too harsh. I make mistakes sometimes, too, as we all do.

I have to say, however, that the imprecise use of language (such as your totally erroneous use of the term "conspiracy") sometimes is evidence of imprecision in the thought processes that generate that use of the language.

And the Captain's suspicion that something is rotten in Denmark in the case of the Liberty Dollar -- whether accurate or not -- is certainly not an unreasonable one.

[notorial dissent]

Did anybody happen to notice that the seizure warrant is based on a money laundering charge, and says nothing about counterfeiting or the like.

I find that interesting and that puts a whole other light on all this. If they are claiming money laundering and racketeering von Nuthouse is in for a lot of misery down the road.

[Ned Netterville]

Hey Quats, it has been a long time since I visited your home site. Hope all of you are well and enjoying life.

Pardon me for butting in on your feeding frenzy to point out an absurdity. You are engaged in castigating and perhaps exposing a currency scam that may end up fleecing its victims of a million bucks or so. Well, aren't you all precious? I hate to break it to you and rain on your parade, but in the arena of currency scams anything measured in millions is nothing but chump change.

But now that you've waded into currency scams up to the bottom fringe of your diapers, how about taking on some serious scamming that is ongoing? If you think I'm talking about Robert Mugabe, who is currently inflating the Zimbabwe dollar at an annual rate of 2.8 million percent, thereby stealing exponentially more value from his victims every day than your petty scammer will steal in his entire career, you would be dead wrong. h[url]ttp://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/143222.html[/url]

By now you've probably guessed that I'm talking about the boys and girls at the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) who have lately been inflating the US dollar at an annual rate of 15% in order to pay for the war in Iraq without raising taxes, and to accommodate the FRB's bailout of the big players in the financial markets (mega-banks, investment bankers, hedge-fund operators and mortgage makers) who got their tits caught in the sub-prime loan wringer. Although Mugabe's thievery is exponentially far greater than the Liberty-Dollar scam you folks are gloating over, the scam the mob at Treasury and the FRB are engaged in perpetrating is exponentially greater still. The size of the US economy and the volume of the US money supply make the FRB's 15-percent crime the real deal. http://www.mises.org/efandi/ch19.asp

Come to think of it, a Liberty-Dollar scam (if that is what it is) is only possible because some people, realizing how the Fed is silently raping them, become easy targets for picayune scammers when they try to protect their assets and earnings by finding a safer currency than the melting money of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank.

If you Quatloosian boys and girls have your assets and earnings denominated in dollars, as I suspect you mostly do, you really aren't much brighter than the victims of the Liberty-Dollar fleecing who you have been berating. In fact I'd be willing to wager a few million Zimbabwe dollars that the Federal mob has scammed more from you Quats collectively than good ole Liberty Dollars got from its victims.

[Ned Netterville]

Okay, doaky, Capt., move me if you must. One point of order. Properly understood, as it was before the word was Orwellized, infaltion means an increase in the money supply, which, all other things remaining unchanged (the standard parameter of all economic theories), causes prices to increase. To refer to the effects of inflation as inflation itself is one reason people now have to ask about the money supply numbers. There was a time when the NY Times and the WSJ published M1, M2, and M3 on a weekly basis. But by changing the meaning of the word inflation, people obviously lost interest in real inflation and began paying attention to price increases, whereby it is much easier to lay the blame on businesses, unions, and other players rather than the true inflation culprit--the government. Have you ever seen the shell game Capt.?

[RyanMcC]

Does anyone have the latest money supply figures (M0, M1, M2) for the past 5 years? That would be a true indicator regarding any changes in the money supply.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/

[johnt]

Application and affidavit for seizure warrant

http://download.yousendit.com/6BA7007920D59658

Federal agents were investigating violations of:
Title 18 USC, Sec 486, Uttering coins of gold, silver or other metal
Title 18 USC, Sec 489, Making or possessing likeness of coins
Title 18 USC, Sec 1341, Mail Fraud
Title 18 USC, Sec 1343, Wire Fraud
Title 18 USC, Sec 1956 and 1957, Money laundering
Title 18 USC, Sec 371 conspiracy

[LPC]

Application and affidavit for seizure warrant

http://download.yousendit.com/6BA7007920D59658

The affidavit for the warrants describes a multi-level marketing scheme to sell over-priced counterfeit coins by false advertising. It's hard to think of a business plan that violates more federal laws simultaneously.

The most surprising thing revealed by the affidavit is that the coins really do contain one troy ounce of 99.99% silver.

The least surprising thing revealed by the affidavit is that the value of the silver is *always* less than the face value of the coin or warehouse receipt (whether paper or electronic), and that Nothaus had calculated in advance the silver prices at which to "move up" the face amounts of the coins/receipts in order to maintain profitability. So, for example, when the spot price of silver reached $7.50, the coins/receipts that had been marked as $10 were converted to $20. That means that the coins/receipts are *never* "100% backed" by precious metals, because the precious metals are *always* worth less than the face amount of the coins/receipts.

And Nothaus thought that the price of silver was going up again, because he was already minting $50 coins with the same one ounce of silver.

[Nikki]

It is not fair to pick on him like that.

He was telling the truth when he said they were backed by silver.

He just never said how far back.

[Scoop]

The Washington Post picked up the story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02267.html

[notorial dissent]

Who'd a thunk it, and honest, well relatively speaking, crook. On the other hand, I would say his inflation proof claims were a little off the mark. A $50 medallion with 1 oz of silver is an inflation of what, 3 times actual value?

The question then remains, did he actually have enough silver/metal to cover what he had supposedly issued? I think the inventory is going to be interesting.

This one just keeps getting more and more entertaining.