Reminder: Khawaja alleges that he taught Nader (who then taught the Emiratis & the Saudis) how to work with corrupt payment processors to issue prepaid gift cards and use these gift cards to make donations to political campaigns under the names of stolen identities.
If you are struggling to work out a hypothetical scenario for how this might play out, here is my attempt at a speculative example:
1. Hypothetically, this would start with entities who have gobs of cash and a clear political agenda, but who cannot legally directly fund candidates who would be friendly to their agenda.
Khawaja claims that Nader told him that the Emiratis wanted to keep Iranian oil out of the open market and had cut a deal with the Trump campaign to back out of the Iranian nuclear deal and keep Iranian oil under sanctions.
See also: “Nader has acted as a liaison between Trump‘s advisers and Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”
“In August 2016, Nader met with Donald Trump Jr. to offer help to Trump‘s campaign alongside Blackwater founder Erik Prince and Israeli social media specialist Joel Zamel.”
It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge here that Nader and Khawaja were both indicted for using a straw man scheme to make $3.5 million in illegal donations to the Clinton campaign.
But that could be a smokescreen, because: 1. The rest of Khawaja’s allegations appear to match up with other verifiable evidence. 3. That $3.5 million to Clinton is pennies compared to the $100+ million that was funneled into the Trump campaign through small donations.
Khawaja claims that Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Russia, and China were all players in the alleged scheme.
Step 2. Ok now that we have motivated players & a supply of cash, the next step is the tricky part. Because somehow, you need to get that cash transferred into the accounts linked to prepaid gift cards. Are entities associated with these players able to issue prepaid gift cards?
Oddly enough, yes. In fact, in one way or another, ALL of the entities involved with those mysterious data transfers between Trump Org, Alfa Bank, Spectrum Health, and Heartland Payment Systems have the ability to issue prepaid gift cards. Let’s take a look…
First of all, those mysterious data transfers took place between May and September of 2016.
The timing of these mysterious data transfers lines up exactly with the record-setting rush of small donations to the Trump campaign that rescued the Trump campaign between June & September of 2016.
Another side note: Stripe processes payments for lots of political campaigns, including Clinton and Sanders. And they are the payment processing service used at WinRed…
My point with that brief diversion was to loop Stripe into the list of players. So now our list includes: 1. Trump Org 2. Alfa Bank 3. Spectrum Health 4. Heartland Payment Systems 5. Stripe
There is direct crossover here between Alfa Bank & Heartland Payment Systems. Heartland was acquired by Global Payment Systems, in December 2015. In 2009, Global Payment Systems also bought United Card Services, which in turn bought Alfa Bank’s credit card processing in 2011.
Now Spectrum Health is closely associated with the DeVos family and their Amway scheme. Dick DeVos is the Chairman of the Board at Spectrum Health, and Amway Vice Chairman Bill Payne is a member of the board at Spectrum Health.
Another side note: An expert witness/organized crime expert hired by Proctor & Gamble for their lawsuit against Amway, in the 1990s, testified that Amway was/is run like an organized crime syndicate.
So let’s revise our list of players one more time to note the Alfa Bank/Heartland overlap and the Spectrum/DeVos/Amway relationships. 1. Trump Org 2. Alfa Bank ⬇️ 3. Heartland Payment Systems ⬆️ 4. Spectrum Health (DeVos/Amway) 5. Stripe
Ok we’re still working our way toward the question of prepaid gift cards. But first, we need to acknowledge that at one point in his career, Dick DeVos served as VP of Amway International where he made international markets more lucrative than the US.
According to this 2014 press release, these loyalty cards allow the movement of cash both in and out over the internet. So apparently Alfa Bank and Amway (aka DeVos hence Spectrum) have a prepaid gift card program together.
I personally find the Stripe program to be particularly interesting, because Stripe has a special program for Russian businesses in which they help Russian “entrepreneurs” to incorporate US entities, set up US bank accounts, and accept payments through Stripe.
So in a hypothetical scenario, it appears to be possible for agents of Russian intelligence services to set up Russian shell companies, work with Stripe to create US entities, transfer funds into their US bank accounts, and issue US-based prepaid gift cards instantly online. 🤷♂️
So far, we’ve established a hypothetical scenario that identifies possible motivated participants, the source of the necessary cash, and the mechanisms through which this cash could be transferred to prepaid gift cards. The next step is to use these gift cards to make donations.
Before we move on to step three, let’s first confirm this March 2012 press release from Citibank touting their prepaid Visa cards used to send commission payments to Amway victims.
Amway Corp…has selected Citi Prepaid Services for the enhancement of its electronic payment process in North America. Citi will provide an efficient, branded electronic payment solution, which includes an AMWAY™ Prepaid Visa® Card in the United States…
This account offers an alternative to paper checks for bonus payments to Amway Independent Business Owners (IBOs).
With this new electronic payment solution, IBOs will have access to a personalized AMWAY Visa card (U.S.) and an AMWAY MasterCard card (Canada), custom online account management resources, and a dedicated toll-free, 24/7, multilingual customer service team.
Amway IBOs will no longer have to wait several days for their bonus checks to clear to redeem their funds. Instead, they will have immediate access to their payment on the day the bonus is issued.
The AMWAY Visa card and the AMWAY MasterCard card can be used to make purchases in stores, online, by phone and at ATMs at millions of locations worldwide, wherever Visa and MasterCard debit cards are accepted.
Here is the July 2018 press release from Visa talking about their program with Stripe.
For the last several years, Visa and Stripe have worked closely to expand digital commerce in a number of ways, including powering instant payouts.
Today, our work continues with Stripe Issuing, an end-to-end platform for quickly creating, distributing, and managing physical and virtual cards.
“…we’re making it easier than ever before for developers and technology-first companies to be able to create virtual or physical cards with just a few lines of code,” said Lachy Groom, head of Stripe Issuing.
“…Drawing on our longstanding relationship with Visa, our technical partnership and a direct integration with their network, we’ve made it possible for companies using Stripe Issuing to create their own branded virtual or physical Visa cards for their end-users.”
In case you have any doubts about whether or not these branded cards (that can be instantly created with a few lines of code by Stripe merchants) can be used to preload with cash, here is the Visa press release about Stripes “Instant Payouts” feature.
Ok, before we move on, remember that list of players that we established further up thread? It should now be clear to you how easy it would be for them to issue prepaid gift cards that are not in the possession of real authentic users. Hypothetically of course.
Moving on to Step 3: The Donor Data
In order to make legal donations to political campaigns, this scheme would require a database of US persons under whose names the donations could be falsely attributed. Remember: Khawaja claims that this data would be sourced from the Chinese.
So are the Chinese capable of providing a database containing the personal information of US voters? Yes, the Chinese are capable of providing a database of US voters. In fact, it is estimated that the Chinese possess the personal data on 80% of US adults
So let’s review where we stand in the scheme so far.
Step 1: We’ve got the cash.
Step 2: We’ve transferred this cash to a bunch of prepaid Visa gift cards.
Step 3: We’ve got a database of US adults.
There’s only one step remaining…
Step 4: Make online donations to your desired political campaigns using the prepaid gift cards (from step 2) for payment but under the names of US adults contained within the database that you acquired in step 3.
The only caveat here is that these donations must be less than $200 each so that the donor name is not publicly reported. If the donation is $200 or more, then by law, the individual donor name is published in FEC public records…
…Which means that it would be easy for someone to find their name on a donor record and realize that they never actually made any such donation.
But all of the donations beneath $200 within any given period are aggregated & reported together on one line item: “Online donations received between time X and time Y.” The individual donor names are NOT disclosed. You’d never know if a bogus donation had been made in your name.
And remember: The money came from prepaid gift cards loaded with Saudi cash. So this isn’t credit card fraud. None of us would ever see these transactions on any of our credit card or banking statements.
So the only way to uncover this scheme would be to subpoena the original donation records from the payment processor (Stripe or Winred) and then start contacting every small donor on the list to see if they really willfully made such donations.
Remember when the Trump campaign started deceiving their online donors into making recurring donations but only claimed a 1.0% chargeback rate? This suggests that 99% of their donations are not authentic and are possibly made via this prepaid gift card scheme.
@arapaho415@TeresaCCarter2@insiderfilms1@sisu_sanity@clearing_fog@TheAtlantic To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.
In the mid-1990s, Esam Ghazzawi's name arose when investigators of the corrupt bank BCCI were trying to recover assets from Saudi Prince Fahd bin Salman, and the prince argued that his assets were being held in another account under Esam Ghazzawi's name.
The story…also states that the FBI withheld the Sarasota house information from the joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, and that it was not mentioned in the Sept.11 National Commission's final report.
Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida told Summers and Christensen that the FBI withheld information from Congress linking Saudis in Florida and California to the attacks, and that the Sept. 11 Commission's report on foreign support for the hijackers was entirely blacked out.
May 2002
The Israeli "art student" mystery
For almost two years, hundreds of young Israelis falsely claiming to be art students haunted federal offices - in particular, the DEA. No one knows why - and no one seems to want to find out.
H/t: @HelpingJournal1 salon.com/2002/05/07/stu…
In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across the country.
According to the reports, young Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year
If you were, let’s say, a college dropout in the 1970s who had a gift for structuring complex corporate arrangements and obscure financial transactions…maybe your name was something like Effrey Jepstein.
And let’s say, hypothetically, that maybe you used these skills at some point to further the operations of a commodities trader who sold sanctioned Iranian oil with the help of global organized crime.
@davetroy And it’s all connected to the Reza Zarrab/Turkey/cash-for-gold/Halkbank/Aktif Bank/Iranian sanctions evasion scheme, the gray market/black market for Iranian oil, and the transaction laundering/narcotics smuggling/human trafficking trade associated therewith.
@davetroy Note also that Viet Dinh (partner at Kirkland and Ellis, counsel to Alfa Bank) not only directed Brian Benczkowski (who worked on behalf of Alfa Bank, while at Kirkland and Ellis) to kill the data transfer investigation but also represented Reza Zarrab.
An online payment provider which last month settled US charges that it assisted fraudsters was a longstanding client of Wirecard, underlining concern about anti-money laundering procedures at the controversial German payments group.
The Federal Trade Commission said Allied Wallet helped perpetrators to defraud more than $110m from consumers in scams, pyramid schemes and unlawful debt collection operations. The company and its officers settled without admitting or denying the allegations.