Were We Stoned ?

Were We Stoned ?

Some readers may have noticed our website was unavailable for one day earlier this week. We are regularly targeted by scammers and most of the time they have little success, but this time they were able to persuade our hosting provider to take down the website due to an alleged copyright infringement by Safe Or Scam. Normal service was resumed by the end of the day, but we have had to temporarily remove the alleged offending item for a while as is required by US Law.

So what was the alleged offending item ? It’s actually a very interesting case because it was a blog article we published on our site in March 2020. It was one of our ‘Scam Alerts’ which was called ’Insolvency Case Support Scam’.

This article was published 18 months ago and it covered one of the standard follow-on-frauds where scammers pretend to be working with an insolvency firm and they claim to have recovered money for investors. We were contacted by one of the scammers’ intended victims in February 2020 asking for our opinion on phone calls and emails he had been receiving. He sent through the paperwork he had received. We told him it was a scam and we published the Scam Alert. Nothing very unusual about that. We do it on a regular basis.

So we were very surprised this week when we were informed by our hosting provider that somebody in California had come forward and claimed that they had written the entire article and that we had effectively stolen it and published it on our website in breach of their copyright. Unfortunately, we are not able to show you the article for a week or so because we agreed to take it down while the complaint/complainer is looked into, but we can give you a link to the complainer’s site where this article (at this moment in time) is currently published. This is because, after all, this person claims to have written it and claims that we stole it from this site ! So whilst we are not allowed to show it to you ourselves, you can read it in full on the complainer’s website.

The article can currently be viewed on this LINK. 

We have been advised that the person making the complaint and the alleged author of the article is:

COMPLAINANT:
Full Name: Karen Ruckert
Street Address: 4133 Rainbow Road
City/State/Country: Los Angeles, California United States
Phone: 626-283-9586
Email: [email protected]

COPYRIGHT INFO:
Description of Copyrighted work(s): https://legalkarenruckert.tumblr.com/post/663588929088438272/insolvency-case-support
Original work(s) attached.
INFRINGEMENT DETAILS:
URL of Infringement: https://safeorscam.net/insolvency-case-support/
Identification of Infringement: “A company calling itself Insolvency Case Support is operating a follow-on-fraud. A man going by the name of Robert Howarth (it will not be his real name) has been cold-calling investors claiming that Insolvency Case Support Ltd has been “appointed as the liquidators of Pan Global / Solari Holdings“. He follows up with a letter which is so poor that his scam colleagues must be laughing at him behind his back.”

Now, we can’t promise “Karen’s” link will stay there so it might be gone by the time you click on it because it’s a scam. We have downloaded an image of it for future reference.

What we can say with absolute certainty is that the blog article was entirely all our own work, it is a Safe Or Scam original piece and was 100% written by us from scratch. We don’t actually mind if ‘Karen’ wants to use it, but she should really have read the article more thoroughly because it contains statements which prove beyond any doubt that it was written by us. For example, the article ‘Karen’ claims to have written includes the following statements:

“We have a group of 37 investors working with a UK solicitor to recover money from the Solari scam”.  Well, there’s a coincidence. We also have a group of 37 investors working with a UK solicitor (it’s 38 now by the way). What are the chances of Karen and us both having 37 Solari investors? Pretty slim I would say considering there were only ever around 45 investors in total ! Of course, we can prove our investors exist. Sadly, she cannot.

Another section states:

“Renovare Fuels Ltd, Teysha Technologies Ltd and Nextgen Nano Ltd all have their registered offices at the law firm of Taylor Vintners LLP. That is the firm which recently wrote to a Solari investor warning him that he was slandering their clients (Matthew Stone and Duncan Clark) because he referred to them as being “convicted fraudsters”. That is a fair point. We wrote to Taylor Vintners on the investor’s behalf apologising for the use of the word “convicted”. Neither of them have been convicted”.

There’s another coincidence. One of Karen’s imaginary investors wrote to Taylor Vintners and accused their clients (Matthew Stone and Duncan Clark) of being convicted fraudsters. Taylor Vintners then allegedly wrote a warning letter back to her investor and Karen then wrote to Taylor Vintners herself apologising that her investor used the word ‘convicted’. Hell’s Teeth – what an amazing coincidence. Exactly the same happened to us ! We’ve got the letters to prove it. We might even publish one of them in our next article.

We could go on and on because there are other examples, but suffice to say that our hosting provider has seen through the attempted scam copyright claim.

Now…….. when something like this happens out of the blue it peaks our interest. We start wondering about two things  –  WHO ? WHY ?

We can forget about Karen Ruckert. There is an attorney in California called Karen Ruckert, but it’s not her. She would not make a false statement under penalty of perjury. She also wouldn’t use a gmail address for official business. It was someone using her name.

So who else would want that SPECIFIC article taken down ? Not any of our other blog articles, but that SPECIFIC article. The obvious candidates would be the people or organisations named in that specific article. Those would be:

1. Insolvency Case Support  /  Robert Howarth.  It’s not likely to be them. They were operating a follow-on-fraud. They don’t worry about being found out. They just rebrand the same scam, use another false name and start again. They’re not interested in an article which exposed them 18 months ago.

2. Dr Constantine Pagonis. He’s not worried by that specific article either. There are other harder hitting articles about him and he has a hell of a lot on his plate at the moment. He has been involved in a dozen or more scams and some of them are very high profile. His company was also FCA-regulated which means heat will be coming on him from more powerful adversaries than us. No, he’s not behind this.

3. Taylor Vintners LLP – the UK law firm. Well, that really would be a surprise. There are law firms which value their ethical integrity and those which do not. It doesn’t really matter what we think of Taylor Vintners because it is simply inconceivable that it would be prepared to file a false copyright claim either for itself or for any party, even if that party were a long-standing client of theirs. No, it’s not them either. In fact, we think they’re not going to be very pleased at all if this scam claim is linked to one of their clients. That would really be testing their ethics and integrity to the limit you would think. The perpetrator of the copyright scam claims that he/she has been in correspondence with Taylor Vintners and gives specifics, which happen to be identical to our correspondence. Taylor Vintners is mentioned several times by ‘Karen’ so if they value their reputation they would want to get to the bottom of it themselves.

So who does that leave ? Well, at the beginning of this article we asked “Were We Stoned ?”

4. Matthew Stone  /  Duncan Clark and their companies Renovare Fuels Ltd, Teysha Technologies Ltd and Nextgen Nano Ltd. They are mentioned quite a lot in the article. The article also mentions Matthew Stone and Duncan Clark’s involvement in the Solari scam which might go to the heart of this entire sequence of events. Solari was the scam which involves the 37 investors and which neither Matthew Stone, nor Duncan Clark, nor Taylor Vintners (as the law firm representing these men and their companies) have ever been willing to answer direct questions about.

They’ve given answers to questions which haven’t been asked and have avoided the ones which were asked, like “Were Matthew Stone and Duncan Clark involved in the Solari scam, and if so, what were their roles and how much money did they receive?” We already know the answers to that question. We’re just forcing them to recognise that they’ve been found out. They were described by others involved in the Solari scam as being “the architects and founders of the Solari investment scheme”. It’s quite telling that neither of them will answer simple questions, but we recognise it is a challenge for them to own up to having founded an investment scheme where 85% of investors’ money was siphoned off in fees and commissions. There’s not really a defence to that. It’s thoroughly dishonest.

Whichever way you look at the scam copyright claim, it doesn’t look good. If we have published anything which isn’t true, the wronged party can write to us and we will correct it if they can prove to our satisfaction that we were wrong. Matthew Stone has used Taylor Vintners as his legal representatives, both in attempting to defend against our allegations AND in raising investment for his various companies. Caveat Emptor.

If Matthew Stone is behind the false copyright claim because he needed to have the article removed, then that is pretty serious because he has been prepared to break the law to prevent others reading the article. It is an offence to file a fake copyright claim. Unfortunately, it’s back-fired on him because here we are writing another article about him and Duncan Clark and their various companies. What’s more, the offending article is still visible if you use the link above ! Gun, foot, shoot, ouch !

So, we think we might have identified who was behind the false copyright claim and we are left with WHY, or more relevant would be to expand that question to WHY NOW ? After all, the article has been up for 18 months and they’ve known about it all that time, so WHY NOW ?

We’ll keep you hanging on that one until our next article which is being pulled together as I write. Publication this week. We’ll be mentioning Solari (of course), but also providing some more information on Teysha Technologies, Nextgen Nano, Renovare Fuels and Matthew Stone’s latest venture – Project RF-1 Ltd.

Aaaah, Project RF-1 Ltd – now we’re getting warmer. We have been receiving some interesting reports concerning Project RF-1 Ltd which may well provide the answer to the WHY NOW question.  Anyone considering doing business with Project RF-1 Ltd would be well advised to insist on full disclosure of the involvement of Matthew Stone and Duncan Clark’s involvement in the Solari investment.

Our advice to Matthew Stone and Duncan Clark is to come clean with the Solari investors and consider how they can compensate them for the losses investors have incurred at their hands. We believe Matthew Stone’s later ventures were funded with the misappropriated Solari investors’ money and we want those investors to get their money back. Maybe it’s time for Taylor Vintners to offer some sage advice to the deadly duo about owning up to their involvement in Solari and doing something to refund investors. That would certainly be a better approach than resorting to extreme measures to try to prevent any prospective partners from reading damaging, but truthful, blog articles.

To view an earlier article on the Solari Scam please click here – LINK

The question at the start was “Were We Stoned”?  Yep, we think it’s pretty clear that we were.

To view our latest article which follows on from this one please click here – LINK.

UPDATE 25th November 2021:  The party which made the false claim failed to provide any evidence proving who they were or that they had written the article. They tried it on and they lost. Our article has now been republished and can be viewed here on this LINK. We hope nobody was fooled into investing with them while our article was down.