Watford Corp collapses, “fake SEC warning” exit-scam?
The Watford Corp Ponzi scheme has collapsed.
As part of their exit-scam, Watford Corp’s anonymous admins have put up what appears to be a fake SEC website closure notice.
Sometime over the past few days Watford Corp’s website was pulled offline.
In its place the following message has been put up:
I’ve been covering the MLM industry for over ten years now. I’ve reported on numerous SEC civil actions against MLM Ponzi schemes.
Not once have I seen the regulator seize control of an MLM company’s website domain.
Where criminal seizures have taken place (non-MLM), there is typically information provided relating to the seizure.
If anything, the seemingly fake notice Watford Corp has put up reeks of being cobbled together by a non-native English speaker.
Let’s start with the message text;
To the Securities and Exchange Commission it seems that the public interest and Investor protection requires the suspension of trading in securities. Inc. (“Watford LLC”) out of concerns about the adequacy and accuracy of publicly available information about Watford LLC, including its financial condition and operations, if any, in light of the lack of stock listing on the NASDAQ communications service issuer whose share price has risen during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The Commission believes that the public interest and investor protection demand the suspension of trading in the securities of the above company.
THEREFORE, ORDERED in accordance with Section 12 (k) of the Stock Exchange. Law of 1934, according to which trading in the securities of the above company is suspended.
The language itself is awkward. To a native speaker, it reads like a messy cobbling together of otherwise coherent sentences.
And then there’s the claims themselves.
- Watford Corp has never been registered with the SEC.
- Watford Corp has never had a stock listing on NASDAQ.
- There is no “Stock Exchange Law (1934)”.
I believe the law Watford Corp’s admins have tried to reference is the Securities and Exchange Act. Which doesn’t apply because, as stated, Watford Corp has never been publicly traded.
The use of multiple regulatory logos, two of which represent the SEC, is also a red flag.
The website notice was accompanied by a September 28th video, uploaded to the official Watford Corp YouTube channel:
In the video the actor playing Richard Watford, Watford Corp’s fictional founder, reads a prepared statement written in broken English.
[0:31] It is worth mentioning that the company registration procedure in the SEC is negatively affect our holding operation as a whole, and slow down its growth and development.
Nobody who natively speaks English put that script together.
The Watford actor goes on to claim that Watford Corp “work with securities”, but “cannot meet the SEC requirements”.
If he’s talking about securities law, said requirements would require Watford Corp to disclose audited financial reports, proving the use of external funds to pay returns.
Whilst simultaneously claiming Watford Corp has “acted strictly within the laws”, Watford states securities regulation is “unfair and unlawful”.
The actor goes on to state Watford Corp intends to file a counterclaim against the SEC (no evidence of an SEC lawsuit exists).
To avoid being called out on their bullshit, viewer comments on Watford Corp’s video have been disabled. For reference, Watford Corp has been committing securities fraud since it launched last year.
On a technical level, Watford Corp’s website domain still uses CloudFlare name-servers. The domain registration itself hasn’t changed since July 2019.
Had US regulators actually seized the domain, both of these details would have been updated to reflect that.
Putting all of this together, the conclusion is simple; Watford Corp collapsed and its admins have done a runner.
In Watford Corp’s marketing material, such as the video linked to above, Richard Watford is played by an actor with a British accent.
Outside of staged marketing videos, Richard Watford as represented doesn’t exist.
All of that said, Alexa currently estimates that 43% of Watford Corp’s website traffic originates out of the US.
Given Watford Corp’s relatively high overall traffic rank (in the 15,000s), it’s not out of the question for it to be on the US regulatory radar.
Based on the message presented on Watford Corp’s website however, I’m not buying it.
I’ve run a search on Pacer to check if there’s any federal lawsuits involving Watford Corp or Richard Watford. None exist.
Pending any further information surfacing, stay tuned… else chalk Watford Corp up as yet another MLM Ponzi “sorry for your loss” bust.
The Richard Watford exit-scam video is full of omegalulz. Brilliant!
Oh – bloody – dear. A new high (low) point in ponzi exit scams has been reached.
“Richard Watford” almost had me in stitches with his oh-so-serious” face as he read the nonsense.
To paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams, that warning reads almost, but not quite, entirely unlike an actual SEC notice. Actually, the “but not quite” part doesn’t apply, but I like quoting “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.”
The superfluous governmental seals were a nice touch.
Reminds me a bit of that “constipated wincing” Max Payne face!
Considering Watford LLC was supposed to be an American corporation, and Richard Watford is clearly British, one wonders why he recorded his farewell message somewhere in continental Europe. (There are round, recessed power sockets on the table, which neither the US nor the UK have. Those are also used in parts of Asia and Africa, but what one sees through the window looks rather European.)
Still, a securities scam taking the money and running by pretending to be shut down by the SEC is bloody brilliant. Oz only gave them a “moderate effort” rating when they got started. I think they made up for that in the way they ended it.
@PassingBy: Pretending to be shut down by regulators as your exit-scam isn’t a particularly original idea. The “Related Posts” under the article give one example:
https://behindmlm.com/companies/magellan-international-ponzi-collapses-email-harvest-exit-scam/
Since we’re talking locations: only three weeks ago, they posted a preposterous video in which Mr Watford promises an array of luxury cars, and a holiday home they call a mansion (for which not even an approximate location is mentioned), to people who buy enough Watford “shares”. Because that’s what all legitimate companies do: give away random expensive stuff to shareholders.
The bit with the cars was shot on a road next to the marina of St Laurent du Var, in the south of France (between Nice and Cannes), the holiday home is clearly somewhere near there too. There are plenty of rental agencies for those kinds of things in the area, faking being rich being a popular holiday passtime on the Côte d’Azur.
At the end he also shows a Watford-branded MasterCard, which you can order from the website. Why any company would issue credit cards to its shareholders isn’t explained.
What an entertaining lot they were.
Have you seen the fake press conference on the same YouTube channel? It’s…incredible.
It has a fake audience composited into the shot (or else paid actors sitting incredibly still and silent), which is mad enough for the first minute or two, but when it gets to the questions at the end, it’s on another level.
You would have to be literally insane to think it was a real press conference. I wonder if the actor is a total dupe?
Compared to the current exit-scams we’ve been seeing (some schmuck types in a new name into his smart-contract script), Watford Corp’s is an Oscar performance.
@Anon
While I’m confident Richard Watford is portrayed by an actor, at some point you have to call into question awareness.
It takes five seconds to run a search on “Richard Watford” or “Watford Group”. Not withstanding reading scripts full of rubbish about BLM protests affecting non-existent servers and making claims about fake regulatory shutdowns.
@Malthusian:
Come on, that Magellan International shutdown page isn’t anywhere near as good. They only suggested that there was some regulatory intervention.
Watford went all-out, not just naming the SEC, but including the seals of no less than three other US government agencies as well.
Claiming to have been shut down by the SEC, the FTC, the FDIC and the DOJ, all at once, that is just wonderfully brazen.
It also must have been part of a long-term plan. Which brings us to the fake press conference video, from July. “Richard Watford” devotes a whole chunk of that to a conspiratorial rant about the SEC, whose primary role according to him is shutting down successful American companies.
They were clearly laying the groundwork to make their gullible victims believe the SEC is to blame, months ago.
That press conference is indeed wonderfully absurd. I like how out of the nine supposed journalists the back of whose heads we can see, five are very young men with near-identical short-back-and-sides haircuts. So much neater than what one normally sees among a journalistic rabble.
They’re also terribly polite, they only raise their hand in silence if they want to ask a question, like docile schoolchildren, and when Watford doesn’t pick them on their first attempt, they never raise it again.
They reward him with applause at the end, another wonderfully surreal idea.
The person who wrote the script also forgot somewhere along the line that these people are supposed to be journalists, and has them asking questions as if they were shareholders.
I noticed one telling detail about the background the scammers come from. When going on about the current BLM protests, Watford calls them “unauthorized protests”. There certainly aren’t any Western countries where anyone would think you need authorization to have a protest.
As to Anon’s remark about having to be insane to believe that’s a real press conference, I don’t agree. If your target audience is naive people, with dollar signs in their eyes, looking at this across a huge cultural and language gap, it may well be good enough. I discovered another YouTube channel which is part of the scam:
youtube.com/c/NewMillenniumTeam/videos
Just look at the countries those videos are targeted at.
To financially naive people from those, who are also unable to spot the atrocious English used (despite the actor’s native British accent), or the many other mistakes they made (such as the fact that some of the bogus US companies they sold shares in were LLCs, which don’t have shares), Watford probably appears like they think a legitimate American company would.
Among that multitude of videos, there’s annother entertaining one that caught my eye:
youtube.com/watch?v=ryD5JpTNWME
They went to the trouble of compositing their own stuff into lots of green screen stock video footage of American streets. Which means they also put in their own bad English (trucks which say “Only available on the United States”).
Plus, they overlooked one big truck, which drives past at 0:53, in all its untouched green chroma key glory.
Generally, they put some considerable effort into this, compared to most of their peers.
For at least a few of those fake companies of theirs (New Millennium Wind Energy, Kronos), perhaps all of them, they stole the identities of real companies that went out of business a few years ago, so there seemed to be an online footprint. For the New Millennium one, they even stole the picture of the CEO, although changing his name from Thacker to Tucker.
It made me realize just how much about a company which no longer exists simply remains online, without any indication that it shut down. (The defunct Kronos Science Laboratory in Arizona, which went out of business in 2013, even still has a Facebook page, which appears to be owned by a somewhat nostalgic former employee or owner.)
So if you set up a new website to create the impression there’s a going business, perhaps incorporate a shell company with the same name, and unless someone is already looking into this with a strong suspicion that someone is trying to fool them (and has good English, and at least some basic understanding of how incorporation works in a country like the US), it can be made very convincing.
The video they made in the supposed Kronos laboratory is also considerably more elaborate than the routine rented office stuff. From a prop certificate headed “Diploma” shown in the background it was probably shot in Estonia – someone already spotted a woman appearing in stock photography from a Tallinn-based photographer in another Watford video.
Stealing the identity of someone dead is common enough among conmen, but this is the first time I’ve encountered it with companies.
You certainly do in the UK: gov.uk/protests-and-marches-letting-the-police-know
While the police technically can’t stop you holding a protest, they can order you to change the route or limit the numbers. Which could neuter the demo if they put their minds to it.
So there is a difference between an authorised protest that has sought police permission and complied with any changes / restrictions they imposed, and an unauthorised protest where you can expect the riot squad to turn up.
Everywhere, you need permission to use public places in ways they are not normally allowed to be used.
Demonstrations usually involve people walking on roads where only cars are meant to be, for instance. That’s not the same thing as needing authorization for a protest.
Guys, I think it does not require so much attention. “Unauthorized protests” could be nothing more than an awkward “language issue”.
They probably mean something like “groundless protests” or “protests without reasons”.
And where is this Watford fellow supposed to be out of again? Why would he have a “language issue”?
K Chang:
I tend to believe (as many others there) that so called “Richard Watford” is actually an hired actor/white horse reading someone’s script (someone’s not fluent in English). But it’s over the top to make judgement about the scammers country of origin based on the phrase “Unauthorized protests”. That was my point.
PassingBy is good in finding location clues in photos and videos published by scammers, but I am afraid… here we have not got enough keyboards, power sockets, lookout of the windows etc… to make a qualified location guess.
He kind of reminds me of the man of that English couple that used to pimp My Advertising Pays.
I know it’s obviously not him, but I can’t decide if I think he’s a pure dupe or not. He’s an awful actor, that’s for sure.
ANGEL TEMEN TUTURANMU, SCAM FOR COVID 20 LOL BY RICHARD WATFORD LLC.
Please we need a solution about all this.
The solution is don’t invest in Ponzi schemes in the first place.
watford llc company. Investor fraud, people will curse you for not being a good person.
If you want to live in peace, then do what you tell investors. the dog.
They’ve already got your money. Pretty sure the scammers behind Watford Corp couldn’t give a stuff about silly curses from the third-world.
We have heard a lot about the scam. I’m one of those who invested in this.
Can the FBI be involved in this? I mean can they investigate thi matter? The truth is the people have messed up with a lot of us.
Given the US is the largest source of traffic to Watford Corp’s website and the lying about regulatory shutdown, I could see an FBI investigation.
Trouble is it’s unlikely whoever is running Watford Corp is based out of the US. We’ve got the standard hired actor playbook out of EU/SE Asia.
Doesn’t hurt to file a complaint, just keep your expectations realistic.
Hello All!
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Watford LLC was actually a Russian scam, just like Alcore, Libronic or any of the following YouTube based scams: Forrise, Diamonds Capital, Umo-Finance or BB Sheldon, etc.
The Russians behind these scams must eventually have understood that people in the world aren’t as dumb as they want them to be and changed their original approach of using bad Russian actors with VERY thick Russian accent in English to sell them as CEO-s with Irish (that was the funniest) or Australian or some Western European background.
So they hired this bold jerk to play Mr. CEO. What they forgot is to change all the dumb background artists with typical Natasha and Ivan faces, they forgot to tell the cameraman that people in the west do not film people’s hands as they do in Russia, during an interview and the idiots definitely forgot to NOT use an Olga to make the interview(s) with given Mr. CEO on the videos.
So, yeah! Russian crap scam! Mirage! About time it’s gone!