Tuesday, July 7, 2015
SECRETARY CARTER SAYS FRANCE COMMITTED TO FIGHTING ISIL
FROM: U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
07/06/2015
SECDEF: France Committed To Fight Against ISIL
Washington, DC, United States
℠2015 - Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian brief the Pentagon press corps on their continued commitment to deliver a lasting defeat to ISIL.
WHITE HOUSE READOUT: VP BIDEN'S MEETING WITH CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER HARPER
FROM: THE WHITE HOUSE
Readout of the Vice President’s Meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada
Today in Vancouver, Vice President Biden met with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. The Vice President congratulated the Prime Minister on hosting a successful FIFA Women’s World Cup and thanked him for the outstanding hospitality. Demonstrating the breadth of the relationship, Vice President Biden and Prime Minister Harper exchanged views on a range of pressing global issues, including the threat posed by ISIL and the ongoing situation in eastern Ukraine. Both leaders reaffirmed the shared commitment to deepening robust trade relations and the early conclusion of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Readout of the Vice President’s Meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada
Today in Vancouver, Vice President Biden met with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. The Vice President congratulated the Prime Minister on hosting a successful FIFA Women’s World Cup and thanked him for the outstanding hospitality. Demonstrating the breadth of the relationship, Vice President Biden and Prime Minister Harper exchanged views on a range of pressing global issues, including the threat posed by ISIL and the ongoing situation in eastern Ukraine. Both leaders reaffirmed the shared commitment to deepening robust trade relations and the early conclusion of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
REMARKS AT INAUGURAL MEETING OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF SUBSTANCE USE PREVENTION AND TREATMENT PROFESSIONALS
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
07/06/2015 12:50 PM EDT
Welcome Remarks for the Inaugural Meeting of the International Society of Substance Use Prevention and Treatment Professionals
Remarks
John Brandolino
Director for Anticrime Programs, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
Bangkok, Thailand
July 6, 2015
Good Morning,
I am honored to represent the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) of the U.S. Department of State on a historic day at the inauguration of an important initiative which will define the United States’ global assistance in the area of substance use treatment and prevention for the years to come.
We are proud to be a founding partner of the International Society for Substance Use Prevention and Treatment Professionals, or ISSUP.
A global association bringing together the drug treatment and prevention workforce is long overdue.
Substance use treatment and prevention is an independent and multi-disciplinary field of study. ISSUP aims to promote this field and the ever-increasing body of evidence-based practices that should guide clinical practice and prevention activities around the globe.
INL’s international organization partners represented here today include the Organization of American States, the Colombo Plan, UNODC, World Health Organization, and the African Union.
Over the past years they have helped us in one way or another to:
develop protocols, standards and guidelines for the practice of treatment and prevention,
create and disseminate curriculum, including the Universal Treatment Curriculum (UTC) and Universal Prevention Curriculum (UPC), and
establish an international examination and credentialing process.
We are delighted and proud to see that these products can be disseminated through ISSUP. INL invites governments and universities not currently involved in these initiatives to join us and our collaborating international organizations.
Let’s work together to translate science into practice!
I would like to express appreciation to Thanyarak Institute for their collaboration with INL over the past years, both in addressing drug use in Thailand as well as hosting and mentoring international treatment staff.
Likewise, I would like to thank Thailand’s Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) for their long collaborative relationship with INL, particularly in the area of drug demand reduction. We look forward to a continued partnership over the coming years in the region as well as in international fora.
Finally, I extend special appreciation to all of the treatment and prevention professionals gathered here who will be formally joining ISSUP later this afternoon.
A network is only as strong as its membership. Over the coming years, this network will expand and grow broadly.
You should feel proud to be part of this movement, and to take an active role in its development.
Following this week’s activities, I hope that everyone here today will register on the ISSUP.net website and contribute to the exchange of research and experiences.
Most importantly, we are excited by the prospects of a global community of professionals commonly oriented toward the same goals and relying on each other to impact their communities, their nations, and our world.
Thank you.
07/06/2015 12:50 PM EDT
Welcome Remarks for the Inaugural Meeting of the International Society of Substance Use Prevention and Treatment Professionals
Remarks
John Brandolino
Director for Anticrime Programs, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
Bangkok, Thailand
July 6, 2015
Good Morning,
I am honored to represent the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) of the U.S. Department of State on a historic day at the inauguration of an important initiative which will define the United States’ global assistance in the area of substance use treatment and prevention for the years to come.
We are proud to be a founding partner of the International Society for Substance Use Prevention and Treatment Professionals, or ISSUP.
A global association bringing together the drug treatment and prevention workforce is long overdue.
Substance use treatment and prevention is an independent and multi-disciplinary field of study. ISSUP aims to promote this field and the ever-increasing body of evidence-based practices that should guide clinical practice and prevention activities around the globe.
INL’s international organization partners represented here today include the Organization of American States, the Colombo Plan, UNODC, World Health Organization, and the African Union.
Over the past years they have helped us in one way or another to:
develop protocols, standards and guidelines for the practice of treatment and prevention,
create and disseminate curriculum, including the Universal Treatment Curriculum (UTC) and Universal Prevention Curriculum (UPC), and
establish an international examination and credentialing process.
We are delighted and proud to see that these products can be disseminated through ISSUP. INL invites governments and universities not currently involved in these initiatives to join us and our collaborating international organizations.
Let’s work together to translate science into practice!
I would like to express appreciation to Thanyarak Institute for their collaboration with INL over the past years, both in addressing drug use in Thailand as well as hosting and mentoring international treatment staff.
Likewise, I would like to thank Thailand’s Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) for their long collaborative relationship with INL, particularly in the area of drug demand reduction. We look forward to a continued partnership over the coming years in the region as well as in international fora.
Finally, I extend special appreciation to all of the treatment and prevention professionals gathered here who will be formally joining ISSUP later this afternoon.
A network is only as strong as its membership. Over the coming years, this network will expand and grow broadly.
You should feel proud to be part of this movement, and to take an active role in its development.
Following this week’s activities, I hope that everyone here today will register on the ISSUP.net website and contribute to the exchange of research and experiences.
Most importantly, we are excited by the prospects of a global community of professionals commonly oriented toward the same goals and relying on each other to impact their communities, their nations, and our world.
Thank you.
DISCOVERING HOW ROMULAN CLOAKING TECHNOLOGY WORKS THROUGH MATH
FROM: THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Hidden from view
Mathematicians formulate equations, bend light and figure out how to hide things
The idea of cloaking and rendering something invisible hit the small screen in 1966 when a Romulan Bird of Prey made an unseen, surprise attack on the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek. Not only did it make for a good storyline, it likely inspired budding scientists, offering a window of technology's potential.
Today, between illusionists who make the Statue of Liberty disappear to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak that not only hides him from view but also protects him from spells, pop culture has embraced the idea of hiding behind force fields and magical materials. And not too surprisingly, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded mathematicians, scientists and engineers are equally fascinated and looking at how and if they can transform science fiction into, well, just science.
"Cloaking is about detection and rendering something--and the cloak itself--not detectable or seen," said Michael Weinstein, an NSF-funded mathematician at Columbia University. "An object is seen when waves are bounced off it and observed by a detector."
In recent years, researchers have developed new ways in which light can move around and even through a physical object, making it invisible to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and undetectable by sensors. Additionally, mathematicians, theoretical physicists and engineers are exploring how and whether it's feasible to cloak against other waves besides light waves. In fact, they are investigating sound waves, sea waves, seismic waves and electromagnetic waves including microwaves, infrared light, radio and television signals.
Successful outcomes have far-reaching results--like protecting deep-water oil rigs from earthquakes and vulnerable beaches from tsunamis.
Uncloaking cloaking's math and science history
Partial differential equations, coordinate invariance, wave equations--when you start talking to researchers about cloaking, it soon starts sounding a lot like math. And that's because at the very heart of this scientific question lies a mathematical one.
"There are very nice mathematical problems associated with this, and some of the ideas are mathematically very, very simple," said Michael Vogelius, NSF's division director for mathematical sciences and whose own research at Rutgers University has contributed significantly to this field. "But that doesn't mean they are simple to implement. In transformation cloaking the materials with the desired cloaking properties are found by singular or nearly singular change of variables in the energy expression--these material coefficients are sometimes referred to as the push-forward (or pull-back) of the original background. Basically, mathematicians ask, 'what do the equations have to look like to get this effect?' The thing that will be very hard--and is very hard--is to build these materials. They are singular in all kinds of ways."
That is why throughout cloaking research history, mathematicians, theoretical physicists and engineers have looked at the problem together.
According to Graeme Milton, an NSF-funded mathematician at the University of Utah, cloaking's start is rooted in math.
"Mathematicians and theoretical physicists basically had the idea independently for transformation-based cloaking," he said, adding that other mathematicians along the way--including himself--have taken the same wave equations and developed them further.
Milton and his collaborators created superlens cloaking, where cloaking occurs near lenses with capabilities far greater than traditional ones, and active exterior cloaking, where cloaking is created by active devices, and the cloak does not completely surround the object.
While cloaking has made considerable theoretical strides, its triumphs have been fairly limited for those awaiting real-world applications.
"Essentially, all the cloaking that has been done successfully in experiment involves a fixed frequency or small band of frequencies," Weinstein said. "So, it's a bit like--suppose you detect things by shining a light on them, and we all agree you're only allowed to shine blue light. I can construct a cloak that will conceal it under blue light, but if you vary the color--that is the wavelength--of the probing light, it will then be detectable. So far, we are unable to cloak something that is invisible to all colors. And because white light is composed of a broad spectrum of colors, no one has come near to making things truly undetectable."
Even with those limitations, there have been distinct milestones in cloaking research.
One of the best examples is actually widely available but probably not commonly thought of as cloaking technology, yet it applies the same sort of math. It involves sounds waves.
"Noise-cancelling headphones are basically cloaking the sounds from outside so they don't reach your ears," Milton said. "Active cloaking is very much along these same lines."
In 2006, as Milton published a key paper that expanded on the superlens cloaking he developed more than a decade earlier, a group of Duke University physicists created the first-ever microwave invisibility cloak using specially engineered "metamaterials," which can manipulate wavelengths, such as light, in a way that naturally occurring materials cannot do alone. However, it only cloaked microwaves and only in two dimensions.
And in 2014, a group in France actually did some experiments with a company to drill 5-meter-deep holes in strategic locations that would modify the earth's density and then measure effectiveness in cloaking. The experiments man-made vibrations that were at a given frequency, not earthquakes. They were able to deflect the seismic waves, showing some possibility to develop this application further.
"Science needs to figure out how to cloak against multiple frequencies before there can be any 'real' cloaking, however," Milton said. "Earthquakes and tsunamis involve a mixture of frequencies, so they are particularly challenging problems."
Passive and active approaches to cloaking research
To understand cloaking, one must first understand where the idea comes from.
When light encounters an object, it is either reflected, refracted or absorbed. Reflection means light waves bounce off an object, like a mirror. Refraction bends light waves, much like looking at a straw in a glass of water seems to break the straw into two pieces. When waves are absorbed, they are stopped, neither bouncing back nor transmitting through the object--although perhaps heating it. Objects which absorb light appear opaque or dark. These interactions between light and objects are what allow us to see those objects.
For cloaking to occur, light must be tricked into doing unusual things that reduce our ability to "see" or detect the object. Mathematicians look for how to control the flow of waves, using wave equations to characterize their behavior. Wave equations are an example of partial differential equation (PDE); PDEs are the language of the fundamental laws of physics. (Just this year, John Nash and Louis Nirenberg received the prestigious Abel Prize for their work in partial differential equations. Their contributions have had a major impact on how mathematicians analyze the PDEs used to understand phenomena such as cloaking.)
"All wave phenomena are predictable from these wave equations--at least in principle," Weinstein said. "That is, light waves, sound waves, elastic waves, quantum waves, gravitational waves. But the problem is that these equations are not so easily solved, so one tries to come up with guiding principles, useful approximations and rules of thumb. Coming to the question of cloaking, there's a mathematical property of wave equations, governing, for example, light, called coordinate invariance. That's basically a way of saying that you can change coordinates and perspectives of viewing the object, and the equations themselves don't change their essential form. By exploiting this idea of coordinate invariance, scientists have come up with prescriptions for optical properties that can cloak arbitrary objects."
In 2009, Milton and colleagues first introduced exterior active cloaking. Scientists in this field describe their research as involving either active or passive cloaking. Active cloaking uses devices that actively generate electromagnetic fields that distort waves. Passive cloaking employs metamaterials that passively shield objects from electromagnetic waves rather than intervening.
"The term 'metamaterial' is a bit deceptive," Weinstein noted. "Metamaterials are roughly composite materials. You take a bunch of building blocks, made from naturally occurring materials, and put them together in interesting ways to create some emergent property--some collective property of this novel arrangement not in naturally occurring materials. That new collective material is a metamaterial. But it's more like a device that actually interacts actively with waves moving through it."
With new metamaterial designs come new cloaking capabilities. NSF-funded engineer Andrea Alù won NSF's Waterman award in 2015 for creating metamaterials that can cloak a three-dimensional object. He and his team developed two methods--plasmonic cloaking and mantle cloaking--that take advantage of different light-scattering effects to hide an object.
Weinstein is exploring, through his research on the partial differential equations governing light, electromagnetism, sound, etc.--different ways of controlling the flow of energy, cloaking being one example, by using novel media such as metamaterials. Vogelius is known for bringing credibility to the transformation optics that serve as a backbone to cloaking broadly.
Where's my invisibility cloak?
But most fans of stealthful space ships, submarines and cloaks will still wonder: how close are we to really having any of this technology?
"I think that from the perspective of lay people, the most misunderstood thing is thinking this technology is right around the corner," Milton said. "Realistic Harry Potter cloaks are still a long way off."
Unfortunately, addressing multi-frequency cloaking will take time.
"What I do see is a merging of mathematical, physical and engineering principles to more effectively enable isolation of objects from harmful environments--there will be movement in that direction," Weinstein said. "Also, there will be important experimental advances resulting from attempts to achieve what is only theoretically possible at this time."
In the meantime, these mathematicians often look at other issues--sometimes similar ones that offer the potential to rethink their approaches.
"Right now, we're working on the opposite sort of problem--on the limitations to cloaking," Milton said. "Cloaking is just one of the many avenues I work on. Honestly, it's always stimulating to explore the limitations of what's possible and what's impossible."
-- Ivy F. Kupec
Investigators
Andrea Alu
Graeme Milton
Michael Vogelius
Michael Weinstein
Related Institutions/Organizations
Rutgers University
University of Utah
Columbia University
University of Texas at Austin
Hidden from view
Mathematicians formulate equations, bend light and figure out how to hide things
The idea of cloaking and rendering something invisible hit the small screen in 1966 when a Romulan Bird of Prey made an unseen, surprise attack on the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek. Not only did it make for a good storyline, it likely inspired budding scientists, offering a window of technology's potential.
Today, between illusionists who make the Statue of Liberty disappear to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak that not only hides him from view but also protects him from spells, pop culture has embraced the idea of hiding behind force fields and magical materials. And not too surprisingly, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded mathematicians, scientists and engineers are equally fascinated and looking at how and if they can transform science fiction into, well, just science.
"Cloaking is about detection and rendering something--and the cloak itself--not detectable or seen," said Michael Weinstein, an NSF-funded mathematician at Columbia University. "An object is seen when waves are bounced off it and observed by a detector."
In recent years, researchers have developed new ways in which light can move around and even through a physical object, making it invisible to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and undetectable by sensors. Additionally, mathematicians, theoretical physicists and engineers are exploring how and whether it's feasible to cloak against other waves besides light waves. In fact, they are investigating sound waves, sea waves, seismic waves and electromagnetic waves including microwaves, infrared light, radio and television signals.
Successful outcomes have far-reaching results--like protecting deep-water oil rigs from earthquakes and vulnerable beaches from tsunamis.
Uncloaking cloaking's math and science history
Partial differential equations, coordinate invariance, wave equations--when you start talking to researchers about cloaking, it soon starts sounding a lot like math. And that's because at the very heart of this scientific question lies a mathematical one.
"There are very nice mathematical problems associated with this, and some of the ideas are mathematically very, very simple," said Michael Vogelius, NSF's division director for mathematical sciences and whose own research at Rutgers University has contributed significantly to this field. "But that doesn't mean they are simple to implement. In transformation cloaking the materials with the desired cloaking properties are found by singular or nearly singular change of variables in the energy expression--these material coefficients are sometimes referred to as the push-forward (or pull-back) of the original background. Basically, mathematicians ask, 'what do the equations have to look like to get this effect?' The thing that will be very hard--and is very hard--is to build these materials. They are singular in all kinds of ways."
That is why throughout cloaking research history, mathematicians, theoretical physicists and engineers have looked at the problem together.
According to Graeme Milton, an NSF-funded mathematician at the University of Utah, cloaking's start is rooted in math.
"Mathematicians and theoretical physicists basically had the idea independently for transformation-based cloaking," he said, adding that other mathematicians along the way--including himself--have taken the same wave equations and developed them further.
Milton and his collaborators created superlens cloaking, where cloaking occurs near lenses with capabilities far greater than traditional ones, and active exterior cloaking, where cloaking is created by active devices, and the cloak does not completely surround the object.
While cloaking has made considerable theoretical strides, its triumphs have been fairly limited for those awaiting real-world applications.
"Essentially, all the cloaking that has been done successfully in experiment involves a fixed frequency or small band of frequencies," Weinstein said. "So, it's a bit like--suppose you detect things by shining a light on them, and we all agree you're only allowed to shine blue light. I can construct a cloak that will conceal it under blue light, but if you vary the color--that is the wavelength--of the probing light, it will then be detectable. So far, we are unable to cloak something that is invisible to all colors. And because white light is composed of a broad spectrum of colors, no one has come near to making things truly undetectable."
Even with those limitations, there have been distinct milestones in cloaking research.
One of the best examples is actually widely available but probably not commonly thought of as cloaking technology, yet it applies the same sort of math. It involves sounds waves.
"Noise-cancelling headphones are basically cloaking the sounds from outside so they don't reach your ears," Milton said. "Active cloaking is very much along these same lines."
In 2006, as Milton published a key paper that expanded on the superlens cloaking he developed more than a decade earlier, a group of Duke University physicists created the first-ever microwave invisibility cloak using specially engineered "metamaterials," which can manipulate wavelengths, such as light, in a way that naturally occurring materials cannot do alone. However, it only cloaked microwaves and only in two dimensions.
And in 2014, a group in France actually did some experiments with a company to drill 5-meter-deep holes in strategic locations that would modify the earth's density and then measure effectiveness in cloaking. The experiments man-made vibrations that were at a given frequency, not earthquakes. They were able to deflect the seismic waves, showing some possibility to develop this application further.
"Science needs to figure out how to cloak against multiple frequencies before there can be any 'real' cloaking, however," Milton said. "Earthquakes and tsunamis involve a mixture of frequencies, so they are particularly challenging problems."
Passive and active approaches to cloaking research
To understand cloaking, one must first understand where the idea comes from.
When light encounters an object, it is either reflected, refracted or absorbed. Reflection means light waves bounce off an object, like a mirror. Refraction bends light waves, much like looking at a straw in a glass of water seems to break the straw into two pieces. When waves are absorbed, they are stopped, neither bouncing back nor transmitting through the object--although perhaps heating it. Objects which absorb light appear opaque or dark. These interactions between light and objects are what allow us to see those objects.
For cloaking to occur, light must be tricked into doing unusual things that reduce our ability to "see" or detect the object. Mathematicians look for how to control the flow of waves, using wave equations to characterize their behavior. Wave equations are an example of partial differential equation (PDE); PDEs are the language of the fundamental laws of physics. (Just this year, John Nash and Louis Nirenberg received the prestigious Abel Prize for their work in partial differential equations. Their contributions have had a major impact on how mathematicians analyze the PDEs used to understand phenomena such as cloaking.)
"All wave phenomena are predictable from these wave equations--at least in principle," Weinstein said. "That is, light waves, sound waves, elastic waves, quantum waves, gravitational waves. But the problem is that these equations are not so easily solved, so one tries to come up with guiding principles, useful approximations and rules of thumb. Coming to the question of cloaking, there's a mathematical property of wave equations, governing, for example, light, called coordinate invariance. That's basically a way of saying that you can change coordinates and perspectives of viewing the object, and the equations themselves don't change their essential form. By exploiting this idea of coordinate invariance, scientists have come up with prescriptions for optical properties that can cloak arbitrary objects."
In 2009, Milton and colleagues first introduced exterior active cloaking. Scientists in this field describe their research as involving either active or passive cloaking. Active cloaking uses devices that actively generate electromagnetic fields that distort waves. Passive cloaking employs metamaterials that passively shield objects from electromagnetic waves rather than intervening.
"The term 'metamaterial' is a bit deceptive," Weinstein noted. "Metamaterials are roughly composite materials. You take a bunch of building blocks, made from naturally occurring materials, and put them together in interesting ways to create some emergent property--some collective property of this novel arrangement not in naturally occurring materials. That new collective material is a metamaterial. But it's more like a device that actually interacts actively with waves moving through it."
With new metamaterial designs come new cloaking capabilities. NSF-funded engineer Andrea Alù won NSF's Waterman award in 2015 for creating metamaterials that can cloak a three-dimensional object. He and his team developed two methods--plasmonic cloaking and mantle cloaking--that take advantage of different light-scattering effects to hide an object.
Weinstein is exploring, through his research on the partial differential equations governing light, electromagnetism, sound, etc.--different ways of controlling the flow of energy, cloaking being one example, by using novel media such as metamaterials. Vogelius is known for bringing credibility to the transformation optics that serve as a backbone to cloaking broadly.
Where's my invisibility cloak?
But most fans of stealthful space ships, submarines and cloaks will still wonder: how close are we to really having any of this technology?
"I think that from the perspective of lay people, the most misunderstood thing is thinking this technology is right around the corner," Milton said. "Realistic Harry Potter cloaks are still a long way off."
Unfortunately, addressing multi-frequency cloaking will take time.
"What I do see is a merging of mathematical, physical and engineering principles to more effectively enable isolation of objects from harmful environments--there will be movement in that direction," Weinstein said. "Also, there will be important experimental advances resulting from attempts to achieve what is only theoretically possible at this time."
In the meantime, these mathematicians often look at other issues--sometimes similar ones that offer the potential to rethink their approaches.
"Right now, we're working on the opposite sort of problem--on the limitations to cloaking," Milton said. "Cloaking is just one of the many avenues I work on. Honestly, it's always stimulating to explore the limitations of what's possible and what's impossible."
-- Ivy F. Kupec
Investigators
Andrea Alu
Graeme Milton
Michael Vogelius
Michael Weinstein
Related Institutions/Organizations
Rutgers University
University of Utah
Columbia University
University of Texas at Austin
SEC CHARGES COMPANY, CEO WITH TARGETING CHINES-AMERICANS WITH PONZI-LIKE AND AFFINITY FRAUD
FROM: U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
07/06/2015 02:10 PM EDT
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a Bay Area oil and gas company and its CEO with running a $68 million Ponzi-like scheme and affinity fraud that targeted the Chinese-American community in California and investors in Asia, including some solicited as part of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program.
The SEC alleges that Bingqing Yang knew that Luca International Group was earning no profits and sinking under a mountain of debt, yet she made presentations to investors portraying a successful oil and gas operation with millions of barrels of oil reserves and billions of cubic feet in gas reserves. Yang falsely projected outsized investment returns ranging from 20 to 30 percent annually. She allegedly commingled investor funds to prevent the scheme from collapsing and used money from new investors to make sham profit payments to earlier investors. Yang also allegedly diverted $2.4 million in investor funds through her brother’s company in Hong Kong, purportedly for the purchase of an oil rig, but instead used it to purchase a 5,600-square-foot home in an exclusive gated community in Fremont, Calif. In addition, Yang allegedly spent investor funds on pool and gardening services, personal taxes, and a family vacation to Hawaii.
According to the SEC’s complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco, Luca International conducted seminars for investors at the company’s offices and hotel conference rooms in California. Besides targeting investors in the Chinese-American community through advertisements in Chinese-language television, radio, and newspaper outlets, Yang and Luca International allegedly zeroed in on Chinese citizens who sought permanent U.S. residence through the EB-5 program, which provides a way for foreign investors to obtain a green card by meeting certain U.S. investment requirements. Yang is alleged to have raised approximately $8 million from EB-5 investors purportedly to finance, through a loan to another Luca entity, jobs and development costs for eight oil and gas drilling projects. Yang allegedly told these investors that loan was fully secured, but the Luca entity the EB-5 investors funded was hopelessly in debt and contrary to the rosy representations Yang made to investors, had no realistic possibility of ever repaying the loan.
“As alleged in our complaint, Yang falsely claimed that Luca International was a profitable oil and gas drilling operation when it was really a Ponzi-like scheme preying on Chinese-Americans and EB-5 investors who lost millions of dollars while Yang lined her pockets,” said Jina L. Choi, Director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office.
Others charged in the SEC’s complaint include Luca International’s former vice president of business development Lei (Lily) Lei, who allegedly sold securities to investors and helped Yang divert investor funds, and Yong (Michael) Chen, who allegedly raised investor funds for Yang through his company Entholpy EMC, which did business under the name Mastermind College Funding Group. Luca International’s former CFO Anthony Pollace agreed to pay a $25,500 penalty to settle charges that he played a small role in the alleged fraud.
As part of a related administrative action instituted today, Hiroshi Fujigami and his company Wisteria Global agreed to settle charges that they acted as brokers to illegally sell securities of two Luca entities. Fujigami and Wisteria must disgorge allegedly ill-gotten gains of more than $1.1 million and Fujigami agreed to be barred from the securities industry and from participating in any penny stock offering.
The SEC’s investigation was conducted by Alice Liu Jensen and Michael D. Foley of the San Francisco office and supervised by Steven D. Buchholz. The SEC’s litigation will be led by Ms. Jensen, Sheila O’Callaghan, and John S. Yun. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission.
07/06/2015 02:10 PM EDT
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a Bay Area oil and gas company and its CEO with running a $68 million Ponzi-like scheme and affinity fraud that targeted the Chinese-American community in California and investors in Asia, including some solicited as part of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program.
The SEC alleges that Bingqing Yang knew that Luca International Group was earning no profits and sinking under a mountain of debt, yet she made presentations to investors portraying a successful oil and gas operation with millions of barrels of oil reserves and billions of cubic feet in gas reserves. Yang falsely projected outsized investment returns ranging from 20 to 30 percent annually. She allegedly commingled investor funds to prevent the scheme from collapsing and used money from new investors to make sham profit payments to earlier investors. Yang also allegedly diverted $2.4 million in investor funds through her brother’s company in Hong Kong, purportedly for the purchase of an oil rig, but instead used it to purchase a 5,600-square-foot home in an exclusive gated community in Fremont, Calif. In addition, Yang allegedly spent investor funds on pool and gardening services, personal taxes, and a family vacation to Hawaii.
According to the SEC’s complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco, Luca International conducted seminars for investors at the company’s offices and hotel conference rooms in California. Besides targeting investors in the Chinese-American community through advertisements in Chinese-language television, radio, and newspaper outlets, Yang and Luca International allegedly zeroed in on Chinese citizens who sought permanent U.S. residence through the EB-5 program, which provides a way for foreign investors to obtain a green card by meeting certain U.S. investment requirements. Yang is alleged to have raised approximately $8 million from EB-5 investors purportedly to finance, through a loan to another Luca entity, jobs and development costs for eight oil and gas drilling projects. Yang allegedly told these investors that loan was fully secured, but the Luca entity the EB-5 investors funded was hopelessly in debt and contrary to the rosy representations Yang made to investors, had no realistic possibility of ever repaying the loan.
“As alleged in our complaint, Yang falsely claimed that Luca International was a profitable oil and gas drilling operation when it was really a Ponzi-like scheme preying on Chinese-Americans and EB-5 investors who lost millions of dollars while Yang lined her pockets,” said Jina L. Choi, Director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office.
Others charged in the SEC’s complaint include Luca International’s former vice president of business development Lei (Lily) Lei, who allegedly sold securities to investors and helped Yang divert investor funds, and Yong (Michael) Chen, who allegedly raised investor funds for Yang through his company Entholpy EMC, which did business under the name Mastermind College Funding Group. Luca International’s former CFO Anthony Pollace agreed to pay a $25,500 penalty to settle charges that he played a small role in the alleged fraud.
As part of a related administrative action instituted today, Hiroshi Fujigami and his company Wisteria Global agreed to settle charges that they acted as brokers to illegally sell securities of two Luca entities. Fujigami and Wisteria must disgorge allegedly ill-gotten gains of more than $1.1 million and Fujigami agreed to be barred from the securities industry and from participating in any penny stock offering.
The SEC’s investigation was conducted by Alice Liu Jensen and Michael D. Foley of the San Francisco office and supervised by Steven D. Buchholz. The SEC’s litigation will be led by Ms. Jensen, Sheila O’Callaghan, and John S. Yun. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission.
Monday, July 6, 2015
FORMER SILK ROAD INVESTIGATOR PLEADS GUILTY TO CHARGES STEMMING FROM BITCOIN FRAUD
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Former Silk Road Task Force Agent Pleads Guilty to Extortion, Money Laundering and Obstruction
Ex-DEA Agent Used Undercover Status to Fraudulently Obtain Digital Currency Worth Over $700,000
A former DEA agent pleaded guilty today to extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice, which he committed while working as an undercover agent investigating Silk Road, an online marketplace used to facilitate the purchase and sale of illegal drugs and other contraband.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag of the Northern District of California, Chief Richard Weber of the IRS-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Special Agent in Charge David J. Johnson of FBI’s San Francisco Division, Special Agent in Charge Michael P. Tompkins of the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General’s Washington, D.C. Field Office and Special Agent in Charge Lori Hazenstab of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General in Washington D.C. made the announcement.
“While investigating the Silk Road, former DEA Agent Carl Force crossed the line from enforcing the law to breaking it,” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell. “Seduced by the perceived anonymity of virtual currency and the dark web, Force used invented online personas and encrypted messaging to fraudulently obtain bitcoin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the government and investigative targets alike. This guilty plea should send a strong message: neither the supposed anonymity of the dark web nor the use of virtual currency nor the misuse of a law enforcement badge will serve as a shield from the reach of the law.”
“Mr. Force has admitted using his position of authority to weave a complex veil of deception for personal profit,” said U.S. Attorney Haag. “Mr. Force’s actions put at risk other important investigations and betrayed the trust placed in him by his law enforcement partners and the public. We are grateful for the work done by our federal partners to assist in unraveling this crime.”
“Through following the money in the Silk Road investigation it became clear that the defendant was engaged in wire fraud, money laundering, and other related offenses,” said Chief Weber. “He used his position in the investigation to bring himself significant personal financial gain. This investigation sends a clear message -- no person, especially those entrusted with the public’s trust such as federal law enforcement, is above the law and IRS-CI will use their financial investigative skills to track you down.”
Carl M. Force, 46, of Baltimore, Maryland, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California to an information charging him with money laundering, obstruction of justice and extortion under color of official right. Force’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for Oct. 19, 2015.
Force was a Special Agent with the DEA for 15 years. Between 2012 and 2014, he was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road. Force was the lead undercover agent in communication with Ross Ulbricht, aka “Dread Pirate Roberts,” who ran the Silk Road.
In connection with his guilty plea, Force admitted that, while working in an undercover capacity using his DEA-sanctioned persona, “Nob,” in the summer of 2013, Force offered to sell Ulbricht fake drivers’ licenses and “inside” law enforcement information about the Silk Road investigation, which information Nob claimed to have accessed through a corrupt government employee. Force admitted that he attempted to conceal his communications with Ulbricht about the payments by directing Ulbricht to use encrypted messaging. Although Force understood these payments, which were made in bitcoin, to be government property, as they constituted evidence of a crime, he admitted that he falsified official reports and stole the funds, depositing the bitcoin into his own personal account and then converting them into dollars. Force admitted that, at the time, the value of the bitcoin he received from Ulbricht was in excess of approximately $100,000.
Force also admitted that he devised and participated in a scheme to fraudulently obtain additional funds from Ulbricht through another online persona, “French Maid,” of which his Task Force colleagues were not aware. Force admitted that, as French Maid, he solicited and received bitcoin payments from Ulbricht worth approximately $100,000 in exchange for information concerning the government’s investigation into the Silk Road.
In connection with his guilty plea, Force also admitted that, in late 2013, in his personal capacity, he invested $110,000 worth of bitcoin in CoinMKT, a digital currency exchange company. Although he did not receive permission from the DEA to do so, he served as CoinMKT’s Chief Compliance Officer. In this role, in February 2014, Force was alerted by CoinMKT to what the company initially believed to be suspicious activity in a particular account. Force admitted that, thereafter, in his capacity as a DEA agent, but without authority or a legal basis to do so, he directed CoinMKT to freeze $337,000 in cash and digital currency from the account and he subsequently transferred the approximately $300,000 of digital currency funds into a personal account that he controlled.
Force also admitted to entering into a $240,000 contract with 20th Century Fox Film Studios related to a film concerning the government’s investigation into the Silk Road. Force admitted that he did not secure the necessary approvals from the DEA to do so.
According to his plea agreement, Force admitted that he had obstructed justice both by soliciting and accepting bitcoin from Ulricht and by lying to federal prosecutors and agents who were investigating potential misconduct by Force and others.
The investigation is ongoing. To date, Force is one of two federal agents charged with crimes in connection to their roles in investigating the Silk Road. Shaun W. Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland, a former Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service, is charged in a two-count information with money laundering and obstruction of justice related to his diversion of over $800,000 in digital currency that he gained control over as part of the Silk Road investigation. The charges contained in an information are merely accusations, and a defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.
The case was investigated by the FBI’s San Francisco Division, the IRS-CI’s San Francisco Division, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General in Washington, D.C. The following additional components assisted with the investigation: IRS-CI’s New York Field Office, HSI’s Chicago/O’Hare Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, the U.S. Embassy in Slovenia and the FBI Legal Attaché Office in Tokyo.
The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathryn Haun and William Frentzen of the Northern District of California and Trial Attorney Richard B. Evans of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section, with assistance from Assistant U.S. Attorney Arvon Perteet.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Former Silk Road Task Force Agent Pleads Guilty to Extortion, Money Laundering and Obstruction
Ex-DEA Agent Used Undercover Status to Fraudulently Obtain Digital Currency Worth Over $700,000
A former DEA agent pleaded guilty today to extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice, which he committed while working as an undercover agent investigating Silk Road, an online marketplace used to facilitate the purchase and sale of illegal drugs and other contraband.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag of the Northern District of California, Chief Richard Weber of the IRS-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Special Agent in Charge David J. Johnson of FBI’s San Francisco Division, Special Agent in Charge Michael P. Tompkins of the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General’s Washington, D.C. Field Office and Special Agent in Charge Lori Hazenstab of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General in Washington D.C. made the announcement.
“While investigating the Silk Road, former DEA Agent Carl Force crossed the line from enforcing the law to breaking it,” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell. “Seduced by the perceived anonymity of virtual currency and the dark web, Force used invented online personas and encrypted messaging to fraudulently obtain bitcoin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the government and investigative targets alike. This guilty plea should send a strong message: neither the supposed anonymity of the dark web nor the use of virtual currency nor the misuse of a law enforcement badge will serve as a shield from the reach of the law.”
“Mr. Force has admitted using his position of authority to weave a complex veil of deception for personal profit,” said U.S. Attorney Haag. “Mr. Force’s actions put at risk other important investigations and betrayed the trust placed in him by his law enforcement partners and the public. We are grateful for the work done by our federal partners to assist in unraveling this crime.”
“Through following the money in the Silk Road investigation it became clear that the defendant was engaged in wire fraud, money laundering, and other related offenses,” said Chief Weber. “He used his position in the investigation to bring himself significant personal financial gain. This investigation sends a clear message -- no person, especially those entrusted with the public’s trust such as federal law enforcement, is above the law and IRS-CI will use their financial investigative skills to track you down.”
Carl M. Force, 46, of Baltimore, Maryland, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California to an information charging him with money laundering, obstruction of justice and extortion under color of official right. Force’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for Oct. 19, 2015.
Force was a Special Agent with the DEA for 15 years. Between 2012 and 2014, he was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road. Force was the lead undercover agent in communication with Ross Ulbricht, aka “Dread Pirate Roberts,” who ran the Silk Road.
In connection with his guilty plea, Force admitted that, while working in an undercover capacity using his DEA-sanctioned persona, “Nob,” in the summer of 2013, Force offered to sell Ulbricht fake drivers’ licenses and “inside” law enforcement information about the Silk Road investigation, which information Nob claimed to have accessed through a corrupt government employee. Force admitted that he attempted to conceal his communications with Ulbricht about the payments by directing Ulbricht to use encrypted messaging. Although Force understood these payments, which were made in bitcoin, to be government property, as they constituted evidence of a crime, he admitted that he falsified official reports and stole the funds, depositing the bitcoin into his own personal account and then converting them into dollars. Force admitted that, at the time, the value of the bitcoin he received from Ulbricht was in excess of approximately $100,000.
Force also admitted that he devised and participated in a scheme to fraudulently obtain additional funds from Ulbricht through another online persona, “French Maid,” of which his Task Force colleagues were not aware. Force admitted that, as French Maid, he solicited and received bitcoin payments from Ulbricht worth approximately $100,000 in exchange for information concerning the government’s investigation into the Silk Road.
In connection with his guilty plea, Force also admitted that, in late 2013, in his personal capacity, he invested $110,000 worth of bitcoin in CoinMKT, a digital currency exchange company. Although he did not receive permission from the DEA to do so, he served as CoinMKT’s Chief Compliance Officer. In this role, in February 2014, Force was alerted by CoinMKT to what the company initially believed to be suspicious activity in a particular account. Force admitted that, thereafter, in his capacity as a DEA agent, but without authority or a legal basis to do so, he directed CoinMKT to freeze $337,000 in cash and digital currency from the account and he subsequently transferred the approximately $300,000 of digital currency funds into a personal account that he controlled.
Force also admitted to entering into a $240,000 contract with 20th Century Fox Film Studios related to a film concerning the government’s investigation into the Silk Road. Force admitted that he did not secure the necessary approvals from the DEA to do so.
According to his plea agreement, Force admitted that he had obstructed justice both by soliciting and accepting bitcoin from Ulricht and by lying to federal prosecutors and agents who were investigating potential misconduct by Force and others.
The investigation is ongoing. To date, Force is one of two federal agents charged with crimes in connection to their roles in investigating the Silk Road. Shaun W. Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland, a former Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service, is charged in a two-count information with money laundering and obstruction of justice related to his diversion of over $800,000 in digital currency that he gained control over as part of the Silk Road investigation. The charges contained in an information are merely accusations, and a defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.
The case was investigated by the FBI’s San Francisco Division, the IRS-CI’s San Francisco Division, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General in Washington, D.C. The following additional components assisted with the investigation: IRS-CI’s New York Field Office, HSI’s Chicago/O’Hare Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, the U.S. Embassy in Slovenia and the FBI Legal Attaché Office in Tokyo.
The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathryn Haun and William Frentzen of the Northern District of California and Trial Attorney Richard B. Evans of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section, with assistance from Assistant U.S. Attorney Arvon Perteet.
CDC REPORTS ON U.S. SODIUM INTAKE
FROM: U.S. CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
Sodium Intake Among U.S. Adults — 26 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, 2013
With more than 9 out of 10 U.S. adults eating too much sodium, the findings suggest a significant proportion of adults are ready for sodium reduction. The study also reveals opportunities for healthcare professionals to advise patients on limiting salt in the diet. Based on a 2013 phone survey of more than 180,000 adults across 26 states, DC and Puerto Rico, CDC research reveals that just over half of U.S. adults reported taking action to watch or reduce sodium intake – while one in five say they have received professional medical advice to reduce sodium intake. Compared to people without hypertension, a higher percentage of individuals with self-reported hypertension claim to have taken steps to watch or reduce sodium and receive advice from a professional healthcare provider.
Sodium Intake Among U.S. Adults — 26 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, 2013
With more than 9 out of 10 U.S. adults eating too much sodium, the findings suggest a significant proportion of adults are ready for sodium reduction. The study also reveals opportunities for healthcare professionals to advise patients on limiting salt in the diet. Based on a 2013 phone survey of more than 180,000 adults across 26 states, DC and Puerto Rico, CDC research reveals that just over half of U.S. adults reported taking action to watch or reduce sodium intake – while one in five say they have received professional medical advice to reduce sodium intake. Compared to people without hypertension, a higher percentage of individuals with self-reported hypertension claim to have taken steps to watch or reduce sodium and receive advice from a professional healthcare provider.
FTC, FLORIDA AG TRY STOPPING ROBOCALLS REGARDING CREDIT CARD INTEREST RATE REDUCTION PROGRAMS
FROM: U.S. FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION
FTC and Florida Attorney General Sue to Stop Illegal Robocalls Pitching Worthless Credit Card Interest Rate Reduction Programs
Another Action Targeting Robocalls from “Card Member Services”
At the request of the Federal Trade Commission and the Florida Attorney General, a federal district court has temporarily halted an Orlando-based operation that has been bombarding consumers since 2011 with massive robocall campaigns designed to trick them into paying up-front for worthless credit card interest rate reduction programs.
The court order stops the illegal calls, many of which targeted seniors and claimed to be from “credit card services” and “card member services.” The defendants charged consumers up to $4,999 for their non-existent services.
“Working with the Florida Attorney General, we’re shutting down a scam that blasted robocalls to older people and offered bogus solutions to relieve credit card debt,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “It’s illegal to sell products or services with out-of the-blue robocalls, and if you get one you can expect that the sales pitch is a lie, too.”
“These scammers were making illegal robocalls to people nationwide, some of whom were seniors on fixed incomes. Too often the services promised were never provided, and consumers faced even more credit card debt through charges made without their consent,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. “My office, in partnership with the FTC, has shut down this illegal credit card interest rate reduction scam and brought those responsible under the control of a federal court receiver.”
Doing business as Payless Solutions, the defendants have been illegally calling thousands of consumers nationwide – including many seniors – claiming that their program will save them at least $2,500 in a short period of time and will enable them to pay off their debts more quickly. After convincing consumers to provide their credit card information, the defendants then charged between $300 and $4,999 up-front for their worthless service. In some cases, they illegally charged consumers without their consent.
The joint agency complaint alleges that the defendants fail to provide consumers with the promised interest rate reductions or savings. Instead, some consumers receive a package of financial education information that they did not request or agree to pay for. In other cases, the defendants use consumers’ personal information to apply for new credit cards, presumably with low introductory interest rates, without consumers’ knowledge or consent.
The complaint also charges the defendants with making many calls to consumers whose phone numbers are on the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry, and with a number of violations of the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule and Florida’s Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The FTC and Florida Attorney General’s Office appreciate the assistance of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the Orange County Sherriff’s Office in bringing this case.
The defendants include: 1) All Us Marketing LLC, f/k/a Payless Solutions, LLC; 2) Global Marketing Enterprises Inc., f/k/a Pay Less Solutions Inc.; 3) Global One Financial Services LLC; 4) Your #1 Savings LLC; 4) Ovadaa LLC; 5) Royal Holdings Of America LLC; 6) Gary Rodriguez; 7) Marbel Rodriguez; 8) Carmen Williams; 9) Jonathan Paulino; 10) Fairiborz Fard; 11) Shirin Imani; and 13) Alex Serna.
The Commission vote approving the joint complaint was 5-0. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Orlando Division, on June 22, 2015. That same day the court entered a temporary restraining order freezing the defendants’ assets and appointing a temporary receiver over the business.
FTC and Florida Attorney General Sue to Stop Illegal Robocalls Pitching Worthless Credit Card Interest Rate Reduction Programs
Another Action Targeting Robocalls from “Card Member Services”
At the request of the Federal Trade Commission and the Florida Attorney General, a federal district court has temporarily halted an Orlando-based operation that has been bombarding consumers since 2011 with massive robocall campaigns designed to trick them into paying up-front for worthless credit card interest rate reduction programs.
The court order stops the illegal calls, many of which targeted seniors and claimed to be from “credit card services” and “card member services.” The defendants charged consumers up to $4,999 for their non-existent services.
“Working with the Florida Attorney General, we’re shutting down a scam that blasted robocalls to older people and offered bogus solutions to relieve credit card debt,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “It’s illegal to sell products or services with out-of the-blue robocalls, and if you get one you can expect that the sales pitch is a lie, too.”
“These scammers were making illegal robocalls to people nationwide, some of whom were seniors on fixed incomes. Too often the services promised were never provided, and consumers faced even more credit card debt through charges made without their consent,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. “My office, in partnership with the FTC, has shut down this illegal credit card interest rate reduction scam and brought those responsible under the control of a federal court receiver.”
Doing business as Payless Solutions, the defendants have been illegally calling thousands of consumers nationwide – including many seniors – claiming that their program will save them at least $2,500 in a short period of time and will enable them to pay off their debts more quickly. After convincing consumers to provide their credit card information, the defendants then charged between $300 and $4,999 up-front for their worthless service. In some cases, they illegally charged consumers without their consent.
The joint agency complaint alleges that the defendants fail to provide consumers with the promised interest rate reductions or savings. Instead, some consumers receive a package of financial education information that they did not request or agree to pay for. In other cases, the defendants use consumers’ personal information to apply for new credit cards, presumably with low introductory interest rates, without consumers’ knowledge or consent.
The complaint also charges the defendants with making many calls to consumers whose phone numbers are on the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry, and with a number of violations of the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule and Florida’s Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The FTC and Florida Attorney General’s Office appreciate the assistance of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the Orange County Sherriff’s Office in bringing this case.
The defendants include: 1) All Us Marketing LLC, f/k/a Payless Solutions, LLC; 2) Global Marketing Enterprises Inc., f/k/a Pay Less Solutions Inc.; 3) Global One Financial Services LLC; 4) Your #1 Savings LLC; 4) Ovadaa LLC; 5) Royal Holdings Of America LLC; 6) Gary Rodriguez; 7) Marbel Rodriguez; 8) Carmen Williams; 9) Jonathan Paulino; 10) Fairiborz Fard; 11) Shirin Imani; and 13) Alex Serna.
The Commission vote approving the joint complaint was 5-0. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Orlando Division, on June 22, 2015. That same day the court entered a temporary restraining order freezing the defendants’ assets and appointing a temporary receiver over the business.
WHEN LANGUAGES DIE
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Documenting endangered languages
The N|uu language, spoken by a few elderly people in South Africa, has features that help build a greater understanding of human language
There are fewer than half a dozen people left in the world who are native speakers of N|uu, a Khoisan language traditionally spoken in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The remaining speakers now live in and around the town of Upington. Sadly, they are elderly and when they die, the language likely will die with them.
"When one of these languages dies, it's a part of our human cultural heritage that is dying," says Chris Collins, a professor of linguistics at New York University. "These languages have unique features that tell us much about human language in general. When they die, it's a real tragedy."
Collins studies Khoisan languages, which are a group of non-Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa that have "click" consonants. These languages fall into three subgroups: northern, central and southern, with two outliers in eastern Africa. How these subgroups are related historically is an open question, he says.
In recent years, Collins has been focusing on N|uu, which for a long time experts feared had been lost. But in 1997, the late linguist Anthony Traill interviewed a woman in her 90s, Elsie Vaalbooi, and verified that she was speaking N|uu. Ultimately, other surviving speakers were identified as a result of their attempts to reclaim ancestral lands taken from them under apartheid.
"Nobody was aware that the language still existed," Collins says. "It was a surprise. Everybody thought it was dead, but it wasn't."
But "it's going to die very quickly because there are so few speakers left, and they are all older than 60. They are trying to teach it to succeeding generations, but it's not easy, and there's not a lot of money to do it."
Collins does not speak N|uu, but he is studying and documenting its complexities, believing that insights about this unusual language add to the expanding knowledge of human language.
"I find N|uu and other Khoisan languages fascinating," he says. "Each has unique structures, not found in any other languages on Earth. By studying these, you gain insights into the human capacity for language."
Collins recently received a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which annually supports a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Collins also has received a series of grants in recent years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his linguistic research, totaling about $400,000. The NSF-funded work also includes research on other Khoisan languages, including ǂHoã, Sasi and Juǀ'hoan, funding for a cross-linguistic syntactic database, as well as for the African Linguistics School.
The NSF-supported work on ǂHoã resulted in a grammatical description of the language, co-authored with the late linguist Jeffrey S. Gruber.
"One of the most remarkable features of ǂHoã is its complicated system of plurality," Collins says. "In English, to form a plural of a noun like "cat", one adds an "s" to form "cats". ǂHoã has a much more complicated system involving double plurals, with both a plural prefix and a plural suffix, that depends on the type of possessor a noun has, for example, 'their houses' has a different plural than 'their mothers.'
"Also, in ǂHoã, a verb can be put into the plural, in which case it means that the event described by the verb takes place several times," he adds. "For example, in ǂHoã, 'I shot' could be pluralized as 'I shots,' meaning I shot several times. Linguists refer to this way of pluralizing verbs as pluractionality. Studies of languages with pluractionality morphemes have deep implications for the study of the meaning of verbs in natural language."
Collins, together with the late linguist Henry J. Honken, also have shown that other Khoisan languages have traces of the complicated system of plurality found in ǂHoã.
In the case of N|uu, he and a linguist colleague in Namibia, Levi Namaseb, produced a grammatical sketch of the language, a book that provides an overview of its unusual structures. Collins and Namaseb worked together with American linguists Amanda Miller and Bonny Sands, who documented the sound system of N|uu.
As one example of a unique syntactic feature, N|uu uses a particular word to introduce expressions into the verb phrase, which he calls the "linker." This word sounds like "ng'' that one finds in the English word "sing".
For example, if someone were to say "I am afraid of your dog," it would be "I am afraid ng your dog" in N|uu. "It looks like it plays the role of 'of' but it doesn't always have the same role in the N|uu language that 'of' has in English," he says.
Also, the linker introduces adverbs. "He will dance ng tomorrow."
"Although the linker appears with a post-verbal adverb, it does not appear with a pre-verbal adverb, as in 'he will tomorrow dance,"' Collins says. "The linker is also found in 'how' questions, for example, 'how will he chop ng the wood?"
Collins' goal is to try to understand the bewildering array of contexts in which the linker appears, and to document how its use varies among the Khoisan languages.
"These results tell us about how a particular group of human languages organizes the verb phrase, and thus help establish the kinds of cross-linguistic variation a general theory of human language must account for," he says.
As it turns out, a subset of the Khoisan languages - the northern and southern Khoisan languages--all have a linker with similar properties that are not present either in the surrounding Bantu languages or in the central Khoisan languages.
"It is unclear how the northern and southern Khoisan languages all came to have the linker," he says. "One hypothesis is that they borrowed it from each other after a period of extensive pre-historic contact. Another hypothesis is that the languages share a common ancestor, and that is why they all have the linker. I think personally that the northern and southern Khoisan languages are historically related, but the evidence is not so compelling. How did they come to share a linker? It has a very specific kind of syntax."
To gather their material, he and Namaseb conducted extensive interviews over three summers with the remaining N|uu speakers, who also speak Afrikaans, asking specific questions about language constructions, and recording the responses. They also recorded a number of stories told by the N|uu consultants.
In addition to his language research, Collins also was one of the primary organizers of the African Linguistics School (ALS), which is held every two years, most recently in Accra, Ghana (2009), Porto Novo, Benin (2011, with NSF support under a grant titled "African Linguistics School") and Ibadan, Nigeria (2013).
The ALS is a two-week institute that takes place during the summer, and brings the latest work in core areas of linguistics to 70 students from African universities. The areas of focus are syntax, semantics, phonology, sociolinguistics and fieldwork.
"We have been very successful in helping graduate students to find research topics, to complete their dissertations and to gain admissions into competitive European and North American graduate schools," he says. "These students are very eager and very smart, and we have a lot of high caliber teachers. Organizing and teaching at the ALS has been one of the most rewarding of all my teaching experiences."
-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
-- Maria C. Zacharias
Investigators
Christopher Collins
John Singler
Amanda Miller
Related Institutions/Organizations
Cornell University
New York University
Documenting endangered languages
The N|uu language, spoken by a few elderly people in South Africa, has features that help build a greater understanding of human language
There are fewer than half a dozen people left in the world who are native speakers of N|uu, a Khoisan language traditionally spoken in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The remaining speakers now live in and around the town of Upington. Sadly, they are elderly and when they die, the language likely will die with them.
"When one of these languages dies, it's a part of our human cultural heritage that is dying," says Chris Collins, a professor of linguistics at New York University. "These languages have unique features that tell us much about human language in general. When they die, it's a real tragedy."
Collins studies Khoisan languages, which are a group of non-Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa that have "click" consonants. These languages fall into three subgroups: northern, central and southern, with two outliers in eastern Africa. How these subgroups are related historically is an open question, he says.
In recent years, Collins has been focusing on N|uu, which for a long time experts feared had been lost. But in 1997, the late linguist Anthony Traill interviewed a woman in her 90s, Elsie Vaalbooi, and verified that she was speaking N|uu. Ultimately, other surviving speakers were identified as a result of their attempts to reclaim ancestral lands taken from them under apartheid.
"Nobody was aware that the language still existed," Collins says. "It was a surprise. Everybody thought it was dead, but it wasn't."
But "it's going to die very quickly because there are so few speakers left, and they are all older than 60. They are trying to teach it to succeeding generations, but it's not easy, and there's not a lot of money to do it."
Collins does not speak N|uu, but he is studying and documenting its complexities, believing that insights about this unusual language add to the expanding knowledge of human language.
"I find N|uu and other Khoisan languages fascinating," he says. "Each has unique structures, not found in any other languages on Earth. By studying these, you gain insights into the human capacity for language."
Collins recently received a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which annually supports a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Collins also has received a series of grants in recent years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his linguistic research, totaling about $400,000. The NSF-funded work also includes research on other Khoisan languages, including ǂHoã, Sasi and Juǀ'hoan, funding for a cross-linguistic syntactic database, as well as for the African Linguistics School.
The NSF-supported work on ǂHoã resulted in a grammatical description of the language, co-authored with the late linguist Jeffrey S. Gruber.
"One of the most remarkable features of ǂHoã is its complicated system of plurality," Collins says. "In English, to form a plural of a noun like "cat", one adds an "s" to form "cats". ǂHoã has a much more complicated system involving double plurals, with both a plural prefix and a plural suffix, that depends on the type of possessor a noun has, for example, 'their houses' has a different plural than 'their mothers.'
"Also, in ǂHoã, a verb can be put into the plural, in which case it means that the event described by the verb takes place several times," he adds. "For example, in ǂHoã, 'I shot' could be pluralized as 'I shots,' meaning I shot several times. Linguists refer to this way of pluralizing verbs as pluractionality. Studies of languages with pluractionality morphemes have deep implications for the study of the meaning of verbs in natural language."
Collins, together with the late linguist Henry J. Honken, also have shown that other Khoisan languages have traces of the complicated system of plurality found in ǂHoã.
In the case of N|uu, he and a linguist colleague in Namibia, Levi Namaseb, produced a grammatical sketch of the language, a book that provides an overview of its unusual structures. Collins and Namaseb worked together with American linguists Amanda Miller and Bonny Sands, who documented the sound system of N|uu.
As one example of a unique syntactic feature, N|uu uses a particular word to introduce expressions into the verb phrase, which he calls the "linker." This word sounds like "ng'' that one finds in the English word "sing".
For example, if someone were to say "I am afraid of your dog," it would be "I am afraid ng your dog" in N|uu. "It looks like it plays the role of 'of' but it doesn't always have the same role in the N|uu language that 'of' has in English," he says.
Also, the linker introduces adverbs. "He will dance ng tomorrow."
"Although the linker appears with a post-verbal adverb, it does not appear with a pre-verbal adverb, as in 'he will tomorrow dance,"' Collins says. "The linker is also found in 'how' questions, for example, 'how will he chop ng the wood?"
Collins' goal is to try to understand the bewildering array of contexts in which the linker appears, and to document how its use varies among the Khoisan languages.
"These results tell us about how a particular group of human languages organizes the verb phrase, and thus help establish the kinds of cross-linguistic variation a general theory of human language must account for," he says.
As it turns out, a subset of the Khoisan languages - the northern and southern Khoisan languages--all have a linker with similar properties that are not present either in the surrounding Bantu languages or in the central Khoisan languages.
"It is unclear how the northern and southern Khoisan languages all came to have the linker," he says. "One hypothesis is that they borrowed it from each other after a period of extensive pre-historic contact. Another hypothesis is that the languages share a common ancestor, and that is why they all have the linker. I think personally that the northern and southern Khoisan languages are historically related, but the evidence is not so compelling. How did they come to share a linker? It has a very specific kind of syntax."
To gather their material, he and Namaseb conducted extensive interviews over three summers with the remaining N|uu speakers, who also speak Afrikaans, asking specific questions about language constructions, and recording the responses. They also recorded a number of stories told by the N|uu consultants.
In addition to his language research, Collins also was one of the primary organizers of the African Linguistics School (ALS), which is held every two years, most recently in Accra, Ghana (2009), Porto Novo, Benin (2011, with NSF support under a grant titled "African Linguistics School") and Ibadan, Nigeria (2013).
The ALS is a two-week institute that takes place during the summer, and brings the latest work in core areas of linguistics to 70 students from African universities. The areas of focus are syntax, semantics, phonology, sociolinguistics and fieldwork.
"We have been very successful in helping graduate students to find research topics, to complete their dissertations and to gain admissions into competitive European and North American graduate schools," he says. "These students are very eager and very smart, and we have a lot of high caliber teachers. Organizing and teaching at the ALS has been one of the most rewarding of all my teaching experiences."
-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
-- Maria C. Zacharias
Investigators
Christopher Collins
John Singler
Amanda Miller
Related Institutions/Organizations
Cornell University
New York University
Sunday, July 5, 2015
DOJ STATEMENT ON RECENT CHURCH FIRES
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Statement by Justice Department Spokesperson on Recent Church Fires Across Five States
The following statement is attributable to Justice Department spokesperson Melanie Newman regarding recent church fires across five states:
“The federal law enforcement team of ATF, FBI, the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices are actively investigating several church fires across five states that have occurred over the past two weeks. Preliminary investigations indicate that two of the fires were started by natural causes and one was the result of an electrical fire. All of the fires remain under active investigation and federal law enforcement continues to work to determine the cause of all of the fires. To date the investigations have not revealed any potential links between the fires.
“If in fact there is evidence to support hate crime charges in any one of these cases, the FBI, in coordination with the ATF and local authorities, will work closely with the Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to bring those forward.”
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Statement by Justice Department Spokesperson on Recent Church Fires Across Five States
The following statement is attributable to Justice Department spokesperson Melanie Newman regarding recent church fires across five states:
“The federal law enforcement team of ATF, FBI, the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices are actively investigating several church fires across five states that have occurred over the past two weeks. Preliminary investigations indicate that two of the fires were started by natural causes and one was the result of an electrical fire. All of the fires remain under active investigation and federal law enforcement continues to work to determine the cause of all of the fires. To date the investigations have not revealed any potential links between the fires.
“If in fact there is evidence to support hate crime charges in any one of these cases, the FBI, in coordination with the ATF and local authorities, will work closely with the Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to bring those forward.”
FTC ANNOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH APP DEVELOPER ACCUSED OF HIJACKING PHONES TO MINE CRYPTOCURRENCY
FROM: U.S. FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION
App Developer Settles FTC and New Jersey Charges It Hijacked Consumers’ Phones to Mine Cryptocurrency
Defendants’ App Installed Malware that Left Phones With Drained Batteries, Depleted Data Plans
A smartphone app developer has agreed to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General that it lured consumers into downloading its “rewards” app, saying it would be free of malware, when the app’s main purpose was actually to load the consumers’ mobile phones with malicious software to mine virtual currencies for the developer.
The Ohio-based defendants behind the app, called “Prized,” agreed to a settlement that will permanently ban them from creating and distributing malicious software.
“Hijacking consumers’ mobile devices with malware to mine virtual currency isn’t just deplorable; it’s also illegal,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “These scammers are now prohibited from trying such a scheme again.”
The defendants, Equiliv Investments and Ryan Ramminger, began marketing the Prized app around February 2014, making it available in the Google Play Store, Amazon App Store and others. Thousands of consumers downloaded the app believing they could earn points for playing games or downloading affiliated apps and then spend those points on rewards such as clothes, gift cards and other items. Consumers were promised that the downloaded app would be free from malicious software – malware – or viruses, according to the complaint.
What consumers got instead, according to the complaint, was an app that contained malware that took control of the device’s computing resources to “mine” for virtual currencies like DogeCoin, LiteCoin and QuarkCoin.
Virtual currencies are created by solving complex mathematical equations, and the complaint alleges that the app attempted to harness the power of many users’ devices to solve the equations more quickly, thus generating virtual currency for the defendants. The use of that power caused the device’s battery to drain faster and recharge more slowly, and to burn through consumers’ monthly data plans.
“Consumers downloaded this app thinking that at the very worst it would not be as useful or entertaining as advertised,” said Acting New Jersey Attorney General John J. Hoffman. “Instead, the app allegedly turned out to be a Trojan horse for intrusive, invasive malware that was potentially damaging to expensive smartphones and other mobile devices.”
The complaint in the case alleges that the defendants violated both the FTC Act and the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. In addition to the ban on creating and distributing malicious software, the court order also requires the defendants to destroy all information about consumers that they collected through the marketing and distribution of the app.
The settlement also includes a $50,000 monetary judgment against the defendants payable to the state of New Jersey, of which $44,800 is suspended upon payment of $5,200 and compliance with the injunctive provisions of the stipulated order.
This case is part of the FTC’s ongoing work to protect consumers taking advantage of new and emerging financial technology, also known as FinTech. As technological advances expand the ways consumers can store, share, and spend money, the FTC is working to keep consumers protected while encouraging innovation for consumers’ benefit.
The Commission vote authorizing the staff to file the complaint and approving the proposed stipulated court order was 5-0. The FTC and state of New Jersey filed the complaint and order in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
App Developer Settles FTC and New Jersey Charges It Hijacked Consumers’ Phones to Mine Cryptocurrency
Defendants’ App Installed Malware that Left Phones With Drained Batteries, Depleted Data Plans
A smartphone app developer has agreed to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General that it lured consumers into downloading its “rewards” app, saying it would be free of malware, when the app’s main purpose was actually to load the consumers’ mobile phones with malicious software to mine virtual currencies for the developer.
The Ohio-based defendants behind the app, called “Prized,” agreed to a settlement that will permanently ban them from creating and distributing malicious software.
“Hijacking consumers’ mobile devices with malware to mine virtual currency isn’t just deplorable; it’s also illegal,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “These scammers are now prohibited from trying such a scheme again.”
The defendants, Equiliv Investments and Ryan Ramminger, began marketing the Prized app around February 2014, making it available in the Google Play Store, Amazon App Store and others. Thousands of consumers downloaded the app believing they could earn points for playing games or downloading affiliated apps and then spend those points on rewards such as clothes, gift cards and other items. Consumers were promised that the downloaded app would be free from malicious software – malware – or viruses, according to the complaint.
What consumers got instead, according to the complaint, was an app that contained malware that took control of the device’s computing resources to “mine” for virtual currencies like DogeCoin, LiteCoin and QuarkCoin.
Virtual currencies are created by solving complex mathematical equations, and the complaint alleges that the app attempted to harness the power of many users’ devices to solve the equations more quickly, thus generating virtual currency for the defendants. The use of that power caused the device’s battery to drain faster and recharge more slowly, and to burn through consumers’ monthly data plans.
“Consumers downloaded this app thinking that at the very worst it would not be as useful or entertaining as advertised,” said Acting New Jersey Attorney General John J. Hoffman. “Instead, the app allegedly turned out to be a Trojan horse for intrusive, invasive malware that was potentially damaging to expensive smartphones and other mobile devices.”
The complaint in the case alleges that the defendants violated both the FTC Act and the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. In addition to the ban on creating and distributing malicious software, the court order also requires the defendants to destroy all information about consumers that they collected through the marketing and distribution of the app.
The settlement also includes a $50,000 monetary judgment against the defendants payable to the state of New Jersey, of which $44,800 is suspended upon payment of $5,200 and compliance with the injunctive provisions of the stipulated order.
This case is part of the FTC’s ongoing work to protect consumers taking advantage of new and emerging financial technology, also known as FinTech. As technological advances expand the ways consumers can store, share, and spend money, the FTC is working to keep consumers protected while encouraging innovation for consumers’ benefit.
The Commission vote authorizing the staff to file the complaint and approving the proposed stipulated court order was 5-0. The FTC and state of New Jersey filed the complaint and order in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
ARMY SGT. PLEADS GUILTY FOR ROLE IN AFGHANISTAN BRIBERY CASE
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Army Sergeant Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy in Afghanistan Bribery Scheme
A Fort Campbell Army Sergeant pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit bribery in connection with contracting for supplies while serving in Afghanistan.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney John E. Kuhn Jr. of the Western District of Kentucky, Assistant Director in Charge Andrew G. McCabe of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko, Director Frank Robey of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command’s (CID) Major Procurement Fraud Unit, Acting Special Agent in Charge Paul Sternal of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service’s (DCIS) Mid-Atlantic Field Office and Brigadier General Keith M. Givens, Commander of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) made the announcement.
Ramiro Pena Jr., 43, of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Thomas B. Russell of the Western District of Kentucky to a one-count information charging him with conspiracy to commit bribery. Pena’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for Oct. 15, 2015.
From January 2008 through September 2009, Pena worked as a U.S. Army Sergeant First Class at the Humanitarian Assistance (HA) Yard at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Pena and his supervisor, Army Master Sergeant Jimmy W. Dennis, were responsible for contracting with local vendors to purchase supplies necessary to support humanitarian relief in Afghanistan. On behalf of the Army, between June 2008 and March 2009, Pena and Dennis entered into approximately 217 such contracts for approximately $30,760,255.
In connection with his guilty plea, Pena admitted that he received money and jewelry from the vendors – primarily through Dennis – in return for Pena and Dennis taking action favorable to the vendors in connection with the HA Yard contracts. Specifically, Pena admitted that he received from the vendors, through Dennis, a Rolex watch in addition to $100,000 in bribe payments, which he received in approximately six installments.
Pena admitted that he sent some of the cash to his family in Kentucky, which he dispersed throughout numerous greeting cards to avoid drawing attention to the thickness of any particular envelope. Pena also used the bribe money to pay his family’s personal expenses both in Afghanistan and in the U.S., and to purchase a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
In May 2014, Dennis pleaded guilty in the Western District of Tennessee to conspiracy to launder bribe payments. In January 2015, Dennis was sentenced to serve 41 months in prison and was ordered to forfeit $115,000.
This case was investigated by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the FBI, CID, DCIS and OSI. This case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Daniel P. Butler of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Nute A. Bonner of the Western District of Kentucky.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Army Sergeant Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy in Afghanistan Bribery Scheme
A Fort Campbell Army Sergeant pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit bribery in connection with contracting for supplies while serving in Afghanistan.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney John E. Kuhn Jr. of the Western District of Kentucky, Assistant Director in Charge Andrew G. McCabe of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko, Director Frank Robey of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command’s (CID) Major Procurement Fraud Unit, Acting Special Agent in Charge Paul Sternal of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service’s (DCIS) Mid-Atlantic Field Office and Brigadier General Keith M. Givens, Commander of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) made the announcement.
Ramiro Pena Jr., 43, of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Thomas B. Russell of the Western District of Kentucky to a one-count information charging him with conspiracy to commit bribery. Pena’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for Oct. 15, 2015.
From January 2008 through September 2009, Pena worked as a U.S. Army Sergeant First Class at the Humanitarian Assistance (HA) Yard at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Pena and his supervisor, Army Master Sergeant Jimmy W. Dennis, were responsible for contracting with local vendors to purchase supplies necessary to support humanitarian relief in Afghanistan. On behalf of the Army, between June 2008 and March 2009, Pena and Dennis entered into approximately 217 such contracts for approximately $30,760,255.
In connection with his guilty plea, Pena admitted that he received money and jewelry from the vendors – primarily through Dennis – in return for Pena and Dennis taking action favorable to the vendors in connection with the HA Yard contracts. Specifically, Pena admitted that he received from the vendors, through Dennis, a Rolex watch in addition to $100,000 in bribe payments, which he received in approximately six installments.
Pena admitted that he sent some of the cash to his family in Kentucky, which he dispersed throughout numerous greeting cards to avoid drawing attention to the thickness of any particular envelope. Pena also used the bribe money to pay his family’s personal expenses both in Afghanistan and in the U.S., and to purchase a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
In May 2014, Dennis pleaded guilty in the Western District of Tennessee to conspiracy to launder bribe payments. In January 2015, Dennis was sentenced to serve 41 months in prison and was ordered to forfeit $115,000.
This case was investigated by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the FBI, CID, DCIS and OSI. This case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Daniel P. Butler of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Nute A. Bonner of the Western District of Kentucky.
COMPUTER MODELING THE U.S. ECONOMY
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Foreseeing US economic trends
Tim Kehoe's computer models gather international market data, predict impact of policy changes
Although economist Tim Kehoe's computer models are complex--analyzing numerous data sets related to the buying and selling of goods and services, trade and investment, saving and lending--the underlying premise of his research is simple.
He studies how people make economic decisions over time. Producers, for example, must look ahead and try to forecast prices, taking into account how consumer demand is going to change. At the same time, consumers making future buying choices must think about what might happen to their income during the same period.
Kehoe is developing computer models to try to accurately predict the likely outcomes.
"There is uncertainty about productivity and government policies, so many people uncertain about what's going to happen in the future make their plans contingent," says Kehoe, a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "If I am a firm and I want to sell my product in a foreign market, and I'm worried about what's going to happen to prices in that foreign market, I'll want to know how the price for those goods will translate into income in my home country."
Kehoe's research and teaching focus on the theory and application of general equilibrium models, which, in economics, attempt to explain the behavior of supply, demand and prices with several or many interacting markets with the assumptions that a set of prices exists that will generate an equilibrium.
These insights could prove especially valuable to policy makers and business leaders looking to foresee future U.S. economic trends.
Kehoe's work involves, among other things, creating models that predict the effects of trade liberalization on the allocation of resources across various sectors of the economy, in particular how this leads to a boom in foreign investment that could leave a country and its financial system vulnerable to a financial crisis.
He also develops models that analyze the impact of trade policies on the structure of industries, for example, the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
Among other things, Kehoe consulted with the Spanish government in 1986 on the wisdom of joining the European Community; the Mexican government in 1994 on the impact of joining NAFTA; and the government of Panama in 1998 on the effects of unilateral foreign trade and investment reforms.
He has been the recipient of nine National Science Foundation (NSF) grants starting in 1982--totaling about $1.5 million. More recently, he received a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which annually supports a diverse group of scholars, artists and scientists chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Since the early 1990s, the United States has borrowed heavily from its trading partners, and "we wanted to look at what would happen if the foreigners save less and, therefore, lend less to the United States, "he says. "Will it happen in an orderly way, or end in a crisis?"
He and his collaborators modeled U.S. borrowing resulting from a global savings glut--where foreigners sell goods and services to the United States, but prefer purchasing U.S. assets to purchasing U.S. goods and services--using four key data sets of the United States and its position in the world economy during a 20-year period beginning in 1992.
In the model, as in the data, the U.S. trade deficit first increases, then decreases; the U.S. real exchange rate first appreciates, then depreciates; a deficit in goods trade fuels the U.S. trade deficit, with a steady U.S. surplus in the service trade; and the fraction of U.S labor dedicated to producing goods--agriculture, mining and manufacturing--falls throughout the period.
Using their models, he and his colleagues analyzed two possible ends to the saving glut: an orderly, gradual rebalancing and a disorderly, sudden stop in foreign lending as occurred in Mexico in 1995–96.
"We found that a sudden stop would be very disruptive for the U.S. economy in the short term, particularly for the construction industry, "he says. "In the long term, however, a sudden stop would have a surprisingly small impact."
"As the U.S. trade deficit becomes a surplus, gradually or suddenly, employment in goods production will not return to its level in the early 1990s because much of this surplus will be exports of services and because much of the decline in employment in goods production has been, and will be, due to faster productivity growth in goods than in services," he adds. "We will probably produce more services, such as managerial or design services," to make up for the trade deficit decline.
"The United States is the biggest service exporter in the world, and, as services become more and more expensive, the U.S. can sell services at a higher price and buy goods from other countries more cheaply," he says.
Models are not perfect, and have been wrong in the past. His ongoing goal is to change that.
"When economists built models of the impact of trade and investment liberalization in North America 20 years ago...some of our predictions were right, but some predictions were wrong," he says. "We want to understand why, and what we still need to learn about building models, and especially think about what we got wrong and what we need to do in the future."
-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
-- Maria C. Zacharias
Investigators
Timothy Kehoe
David Levine
Brig 'Chip' Elliott
Foreseeing US economic trends
Tim Kehoe's computer models gather international market data, predict impact of policy changes
Although economist Tim Kehoe's computer models are complex--analyzing numerous data sets related to the buying and selling of goods and services, trade and investment, saving and lending--the underlying premise of his research is simple.
He studies how people make economic decisions over time. Producers, for example, must look ahead and try to forecast prices, taking into account how consumer demand is going to change. At the same time, consumers making future buying choices must think about what might happen to their income during the same period.
Kehoe is developing computer models to try to accurately predict the likely outcomes.
"There is uncertainty about productivity and government policies, so many people uncertain about what's going to happen in the future make their plans contingent," says Kehoe, a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "If I am a firm and I want to sell my product in a foreign market, and I'm worried about what's going to happen to prices in that foreign market, I'll want to know how the price for those goods will translate into income in my home country."
Kehoe's research and teaching focus on the theory and application of general equilibrium models, which, in economics, attempt to explain the behavior of supply, demand and prices with several or many interacting markets with the assumptions that a set of prices exists that will generate an equilibrium.
These insights could prove especially valuable to policy makers and business leaders looking to foresee future U.S. economic trends.
Kehoe's work involves, among other things, creating models that predict the effects of trade liberalization on the allocation of resources across various sectors of the economy, in particular how this leads to a boom in foreign investment that could leave a country and its financial system vulnerable to a financial crisis.
He also develops models that analyze the impact of trade policies on the structure of industries, for example, the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
Among other things, Kehoe consulted with the Spanish government in 1986 on the wisdom of joining the European Community; the Mexican government in 1994 on the impact of joining NAFTA; and the government of Panama in 1998 on the effects of unilateral foreign trade and investment reforms.
He has been the recipient of nine National Science Foundation (NSF) grants starting in 1982--totaling about $1.5 million. More recently, he received a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which annually supports a diverse group of scholars, artists and scientists chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Since the early 1990s, the United States has borrowed heavily from its trading partners, and "we wanted to look at what would happen if the foreigners save less and, therefore, lend less to the United States, "he says. "Will it happen in an orderly way, or end in a crisis?"
He and his collaborators modeled U.S. borrowing resulting from a global savings glut--where foreigners sell goods and services to the United States, but prefer purchasing U.S. assets to purchasing U.S. goods and services--using four key data sets of the United States and its position in the world economy during a 20-year period beginning in 1992.
In the model, as in the data, the U.S. trade deficit first increases, then decreases; the U.S. real exchange rate first appreciates, then depreciates; a deficit in goods trade fuels the U.S. trade deficit, with a steady U.S. surplus in the service trade; and the fraction of U.S labor dedicated to producing goods--agriculture, mining and manufacturing--falls throughout the period.
Using their models, he and his colleagues analyzed two possible ends to the saving glut: an orderly, gradual rebalancing and a disorderly, sudden stop in foreign lending as occurred in Mexico in 1995–96.
"We found that a sudden stop would be very disruptive for the U.S. economy in the short term, particularly for the construction industry, "he says. "In the long term, however, a sudden stop would have a surprisingly small impact."
"As the U.S. trade deficit becomes a surplus, gradually or suddenly, employment in goods production will not return to its level in the early 1990s because much of this surplus will be exports of services and because much of the decline in employment in goods production has been, and will be, due to faster productivity growth in goods than in services," he adds. "We will probably produce more services, such as managerial or design services," to make up for the trade deficit decline.
"The United States is the biggest service exporter in the world, and, as services become more and more expensive, the U.S. can sell services at a higher price and buy goods from other countries more cheaply," he says.
Models are not perfect, and have been wrong in the past. His ongoing goal is to change that.
"When economists built models of the impact of trade and investment liberalization in North America 20 years ago...some of our predictions were right, but some predictions were wrong," he says. "We want to understand why, and what we still need to learn about building models, and especially think about what we got wrong and what we need to do in the future."
-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
-- Maria C. Zacharias
Investigators
Timothy Kehoe
David Levine
Brig 'Chip' Elliott
GOLD MINE PROMOTERS CHARGED WITH FRAUD, TARGETED SPANISH, PORTUGUESE COMMUNITIES IN U.S.
FROM: U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
07/02/2015 01:10 PM EDT
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges and an asset freeze against the operators of a pyramid and Ponzi scheme falsely promising a gold mine of investment opportunity to investors in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking communities in Massachusetts, Florida, and elsewhere in the U.S.
The SEC alleges that DFRF Enterprises, named for its founder Daniel Fernandes Rojo Filho, claimed to operate more than 50 gold mines in Brazil and Africa, but the company’s revenues came solely from selling membership interests to investors and not from mining gold. With the help of several promoters, they lured investors with such false promises as their money would be fully insured, DFRF has a line of credit with a Swiss private bank, and one-quarter of DFRF’s profits are used for charitable work in Africa. The scheme raised more than $15 million from at least 1,400 investors by recruiting new members in pyramid scheme fashion to keep the fraud afloat, and commissions were paid to earlier investors in Ponzi-like fashion for their recruitment efforts. The SEC further alleges that Filho has withdrawn more than $6 million of investor funds to buy a fleet of luxury cars among other personal expenses.
“DFRF and its operators falsely claimed that they were running a lucrative gold mining business when in reality they were operating a Ponzi and pyramid scheme that preyed on investors in particular ethnic communities who stand to lose millions of dollars,” said John T. Dugan, Associate Regional Director of the SEC’s Boston Regional Office. “Investors were not given the full story about the true value and security of their investments.”
According to the SEC’s complaint filed June 30 and unsealed today in federal court in Boston, Filho is a Brazilian native who lives in Winter Garden, Fla., and he orchestrated the scheme with assistance from six promoters also charged in the case: Wanderley M. Dalman of Revere, Mass.; Gaspar C. Jesus of Malden, Mass.; Eduardo N. Da Silva of Orlando, Fla.; Heriberto C. Perez Valdes of Miami; Jeffrey A. Feldman of Boca Raton; and Romildo Da Cunha of Brazil.
The SEC alleges that Filho and others began selling “memberships” in DFRF last year through meetings with prospective investors primarily in Massachusetts hotel conference rooms, private homes, and businesses. DFRF promoted the investment opportunity through online videos in which Filho falsely claimed that the company had registered with the SEC and its stock would be publicly traded. As DFRF’s marketing reach widened, membership sales dramatically increased from under $100,000 in June 2014 to more than $4 million in March 2015 alone.
The SEC’s complaint alleges that all defendants violated the antifraud provisions of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder, and registration provisions Section 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act.
The SEC’s investigation was conducted by Caitlyn M. Campbell, Mark Albers, John McCann, Frank C. Huntington, and Michele T. Perillo of the SEC’s Boston Regional Office, and assisted by Carlos Costa-Rodrigues in the agency’s Office of International Affairs.
The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, the Boston field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Massachusetts Securities Division of the Massachusetts Secretary of Commonwealth’s office, the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the British Columbia Securities Commission, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, the Financial Services Commission of Barbados, and the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority.
07/02/2015 01:10 PM EDT
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges and an asset freeze against the operators of a pyramid and Ponzi scheme falsely promising a gold mine of investment opportunity to investors in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking communities in Massachusetts, Florida, and elsewhere in the U.S.
The SEC alleges that DFRF Enterprises, named for its founder Daniel Fernandes Rojo Filho, claimed to operate more than 50 gold mines in Brazil and Africa, but the company’s revenues came solely from selling membership interests to investors and not from mining gold. With the help of several promoters, they lured investors with such false promises as their money would be fully insured, DFRF has a line of credit with a Swiss private bank, and one-quarter of DFRF’s profits are used for charitable work in Africa. The scheme raised more than $15 million from at least 1,400 investors by recruiting new members in pyramid scheme fashion to keep the fraud afloat, and commissions were paid to earlier investors in Ponzi-like fashion for their recruitment efforts. The SEC further alleges that Filho has withdrawn more than $6 million of investor funds to buy a fleet of luxury cars among other personal expenses.
“DFRF and its operators falsely claimed that they were running a lucrative gold mining business when in reality they were operating a Ponzi and pyramid scheme that preyed on investors in particular ethnic communities who stand to lose millions of dollars,” said John T. Dugan, Associate Regional Director of the SEC’s Boston Regional Office. “Investors were not given the full story about the true value and security of their investments.”
According to the SEC’s complaint filed June 30 and unsealed today in federal court in Boston, Filho is a Brazilian native who lives in Winter Garden, Fla., and he orchestrated the scheme with assistance from six promoters also charged in the case: Wanderley M. Dalman of Revere, Mass.; Gaspar C. Jesus of Malden, Mass.; Eduardo N. Da Silva of Orlando, Fla.; Heriberto C. Perez Valdes of Miami; Jeffrey A. Feldman of Boca Raton; and Romildo Da Cunha of Brazil.
The SEC alleges that Filho and others began selling “memberships” in DFRF last year through meetings with prospective investors primarily in Massachusetts hotel conference rooms, private homes, and businesses. DFRF promoted the investment opportunity through online videos in which Filho falsely claimed that the company had registered with the SEC and its stock would be publicly traded. As DFRF’s marketing reach widened, membership sales dramatically increased from under $100,000 in June 2014 to more than $4 million in March 2015 alone.
The SEC’s complaint alleges that all defendants violated the antifraud provisions of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder, and registration provisions Section 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act.
The SEC’s investigation was conducted by Caitlyn M. Campbell, Mark Albers, John McCann, Frank C. Huntington, and Michele T. Perillo of the SEC’s Boston Regional Office, and assisted by Carlos Costa-Rodrigues in the agency’s Office of International Affairs.
The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, the Boston field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Massachusetts Securities Division of the Massachusetts Secretary of Commonwealth’s office, the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the British Columbia Securities Commission, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, the Financial Services Commission of Barbados, and the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
INDEPENDENCE DAY MARKED BY SAILORS ON USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT
FROM: U.S. NAVY
 |
| Sailors spell out #USA next to the American flag to mark Independence Day on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, June 28, 2015. The carrier is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to support Operation Inherent Resolve and strike operations in Iraq and Syria. U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Jackie Hart. |
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