A few days after BehindMLM reported on Billionico being a suspected secret GSPartners backdoor, a paid press-release popped up on a random website.

Supposedly authored by “T. Chandler”, the headline for The Fort Worth Press article reads:

BEHINDMLM BLACKMAIL WITH ANONYMOUS SLANDER ON THE INTERNET

What follows is typical of unsubstantiated nonsense scammers upset with BehindMLM’s reporting come up with.

In the ever-growing digital world, police, prosecutors, and law enforcement agencies face the challenge of keeping up with the increase in defamation and slander on the internet, especially when it is committed by mafia structures and criminal organizations like the creators of behindmlm.com.

These harmful actions can destroy the lives of individuals and undermine trust in online communication and divide society.

Facing this threat, law enforcement agencies around the world have stepped up their efforts to combat defamation and slander, as well as extortion through “behindmlm” on the internet.

Within 24 hours syndicated paid press-releases were claiming GSB Gold Standard Corporation had filed a lawsuit against BehindMLM.

These articles and press-releases all point back to The Fort Worth Press article.

So what’s going on here?

For starters, “T. Chandler” doesn’t exist outside of The Fort Worth Press’ website.

As for the publication itself, the actual Fort Worth Press was a Texas publication that went out of business in 1975.

The impersonator website spreading misinformation about BehindMLM was set up sometime after the domain was last registered on September 20th, 2023.

Before it was repurposed to circulate misinformation press-releases late last year, The Forth Worth Press domain hosted a right-wing commentary blog.

Something odd on The Fort Worth Press impersonator website is its “imprint” page.

Before we get into that though, what is an imprint page?

According to SecurePrivacy;

The Impressum (sometimes also called an Imprint) is a required page on all websites in German-speaking countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, that reveals information about the publisher of that site.

Interesting.

Here’s The Fort Worth Press impersonator website’s imprint page:

Note that ownership information isn’t disclosed. Instead The Fort Worth Press claims it is “represented” by Durathor LLC, a Texas shell company.

Durathor LLC is then “represented” by Durathor LLC, a Florida company.

Durathor LLC as a registered Florida company was dissolved in 2014.

That aside, why would a US website pretending to be a Texas publication comply with German law?

They wouldn’t.

Note the highlighted “commercial register” link in the imprint screenshot above. It’s hosted on an EU Amazon Web Services server.

Whoever is actually running The Fort Worth Press is based out of Europe, and likely has ties to Germany, Austria and/or Switzerland.

While I can’t say for sure, two butthurt lawyers from Germany come to mind.

GSB Gold Standard Corporation, which holds itself out to be a “German software, IT, and blockchain company”, is owned by Josip Heit (right).

Heit is a German national originally from Croatia.

Back in 2021 Heit announced he’d acquired defunct German media companies Berliner Tageeszeitung, Berliner Tageblatt, and Deutsche Tageszeitung.

Berliner Tageblatt has disappeared but Berliner Tageeszeitung and Deutsche Tageszeitung are attached to respective German websites in their name.

These websites display syndicated news from third-party sources. The idea is to make them appear like actual news sites.

Sprinkled in with the syndication though are press-releases published by Heit. Or was.

Heit’s been recently deleting previously published press-releases. Here’s a Google archive of a headline announcing Heit’s recent hiring of an Arizona attorney to defend regulatory fraud charges.

That article has been deleted.

Last year BehindMLM reader Melanie documented a Berliner Tageeszeitung press-release pertaining to Heit’s chum Alex Bodi.

That press-release has also been deleted. So have the past ones mentioning BehindMLM.

The takeaway is that The Fort Worth Press impersonator website looks and functions much in the same way Heit’s German press-release “news” websites do.

They also share remarkably similar website source-code. Here’s the source-code of Berliner Tageeszeitung’s imprint page (click to enlarge):

And here’s The Fort Worth Press impersonator website’s imprint page source-code (click to enlarge):

You can scroll through both and compare yourself. They’re not identical but they’re similar enough to strongly suggest both sites are based off the same template source-code.

I’ll leave it up to you to put two and two together.

As to GSB Gold Standard Corporation filing a lawsuit against BehindMLM, they haven’t.

In late 2022 GSB Gold Standard Corporation filed a petition with the NYSC. Respondents to the petition were Google and GoDaddy.

BehindMLM is a non-party but has since intervened. In the interests of transparency, I published a detailed article explaining what was going on last November (note Heit’s law firm Irle Moser recently had that article blocked in Germany).

I continue to provide legal updates as I’m able to. The latest being BehindMLM’s motion to quash subpoenas attached to GSB’s petition is under appeal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently filed an amicus brief in support of BehindMLM’s appeal that’s worth a read.

Another amicus brief from GlassDoor, Indeed, Pubpeer Foundation, Reddit, TripAdvisor and Yelp was filed a few days ago. I’ll report on that pending court approval.

As to the baloney about US authorities “put[ting] a stop to the criminal activities of the internet terrorists from behindmlm.com”, here’s what US authorities are doing:

  1. Texas described GSPartners as “various fraudulent investment schemes that are threatening immediate and irreparable harm”
  2. Washington described GSPartners’ MLM business as “fraudulent activity”
  3. Alabama claims GSPartners was “evading Alabama laws and making guarantees that are unrealistic”
  4. California described GSPartners as a “fraudulent crypto investment scheme”
  5. Kentucky asserted GSPartners “acted as an unregistered issuer of unregistered securities through its publicly available websites”
  6. Wisconsin described GSPartners as a “global fraud scheme”
  7. Arkansas claimed GSPartners is “perpetrating numerous fraudulent investment schemes that are threatening immediate and irreparable harm to investors”
  8. New Hampshire accused GSPartners of “fraud and deception”
  9. Arizona determined GSPartners’ threat to “public welfare requires immediate action” and
  10. Florida’s undercover investigation into GSPartners revealed “unlawful activities“
  11. Mississippi described GSPartners’ Ponzi scheme as the “offering and selling fraudulent (of) certificates tied to digital assets”
  12. Georgia fined GSPartners, Josip Heit and Michael Dalcoe $500,000 for securities fraud
  13. Massachusetts’ Attorney General’s Office counted GSPartners in a list of “crypto scams”

An ongoing US federal investigation into GSPartners and Heit is also underway.

GSPartners is owned by GSB Gold Standard Corporation. This all started with BehindMLM’s GSPartners review in 2021, with Heit unable to let his bruised ego go since.

Really hoping I don’t have to update this article but if we see anymore silly press-releases I’ll leave an update below.

 

Update 15th March 2024 – Sure enough Josip Heit’s German law firm Irle Moser is tied to the Fort Worth Press impersonator website.

An application for The Fort Worth Press as a European Union Trademark was filed last September.

As discovered by BehindMLM reader “Concerned” in the comments below, Irle Moser is the registered trademark correspondent.

Liudmyla Starosud is the trademark owner. No idea who she is but Starosud is also the registered owner of GSMedia.

As per its website, GSMedia is “a media division of: GSB Gold Standard Corporation AG”.

And with that, we’ve come full circle to GSB Gold Standard Corporation being the confirmed source of misinformation about GSB and BehindMLM documented in this article.