@BrendanCByrne @jwomack 1. Basically you're talking about affinity fraud, which is fraud perpetrated against members of a particular group/community by someone who is part of that group, has connections to it, or who can pretend to either of the former. The anti-government "patriot" movement, which
@BrendanCByrne @jwomack 2. includes the militia movement, has long been vulnerable to affinity fraud. I wrote and taught about various patriot-related affinity fraud schemes in the 1990s and some of those, such as bogus trusts, are still used today. The fact that many in the movement place an almost
@BrendanCByrne @jwomack 3. impossibly high barrier between themselves and any outside authorities attempting to warn them, while they have a very low barrier to belief against even the most outlandish theories coming from people within their own movement, means that it is easy for them to fall for
@BrendanCByrne @jwomack 4. various schemes. One of the most outrageous, from the 1990s, involved a group We the People, who told victims that after the US left the gold standard in 1933 virtually all actions of the gov't were illegal and a class action lawsuit had been launched against the gov't over
@BrendanCByrne @jwomack 5. the issue, which the Supreme Court recently decided in favor of the plaintiffs to a tune of $300 trillion or so. Delta Force commandos were seizing gold supplies that had been illegally moved overseas and this would be used to pay off the class action lawsuit. Ever get denied
@BrendanCByrne @jwomack 6. a loan? That's worth about a million bucks. Not get admitted to college? A million bucks. All told, the average participant in the class action could expect to get somewhere around $20 million (IIRC). How did you become part of this? Well, conveniently, Congress appointed
@BrendanCByrne @jwomack 7. We the People to be the organization to process all the claims, so all you had to do to get your millions was to pay the "processing and filing fee" to We the People. We the People took in millions through this scam, mostly from their fellow members of the "Patriot" movement.
