Will Harold Camping Be Prosecuted for Fraud - No End of World Today, Dude

That's what I want to know.  People have been sent to jail for claiming things as truth that weren't so - so, what about the 89 year old idiot who claimed that today was going to be the end of the world - the great RAPTURE (not scriptual, by the way) was going to happen and the beginning of the end was to start today and finish over the next five months.  Yeah, right.  Cough cough.  Gee, Harold Camping's websites May-212011.com and familyradio.com aren't working right now.  Wonder why?  Where they the ONLY ones to be raptured?  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

It never ceases to amaze me how people can get away with crap like this.  The Jehovah's Witnesses pulled a big boner in 1975 when their entire membership pretty much believed that the end of the world was coming per the Watchtower, and that is what they preached to anyone who would listen.  The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society leadership, tongue in cheek, never came right out and said that the END WAS NIGH, but it was in all other ways implied.  When 1975 came and went and the world did not end, more than a million JWs left the fold, never to return.  The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society learned it lesson and since then, the leadership have been much more obscure in hinting at THE END.  I think 1978 was pointed to, then 1984, and 1996.  And they're still selling the same old coolaid and at least some of their members are still drinking it too.  With no notice or fanfare, after 1996 came and went without the world ending, the JWs erased from their "for public consumption" magazine The Watchtower (now comes out in two versions, one for the ignorant general public and one for the insiders who are JWs) the old byline that went something like those who witnessed the events of 1914 will still be alive to see THE END.  The 1914 date was calculated by the first leader of the JWs, Russell, based upon numbers embodied in the Great Pyramid at Giza.  I'm not kidding.  Russell's successor, Rutherford, made millions off the byline "millions now living today will NEVER die" based on the same disproven time line using 1914 as the "beginning of the end."  With a few tweaks, it lasted until 1975, when THE END was supposed to come - and didn't.  Oh oh.

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society is running into far worse issues today.  Yes, the "faithful" are whispering amongst themselves - okay, those who were BORN in 1914 will soon be 100 years old.  How many 100 year old people do you know?  Exactly -- despite its best efforts, the Watchtower Bible and Trace Society has not been able to erase from the minds of the older and oldest faithful members the point it stressed for so many years, that 1914 marked the end of "this system of things" and that people alive back then would be alive to see THE END.  Well, folks, it ain't happening.  But WT has other things to deal with, as I said - like millions and millions of dollars being shelled out in payment of judgments for sexual abuse by their male ministers - "elders" and  males who assisted in the congregations - "servants." The pot calling the kettle black - the JWs used to poke fun at the Catholic Church for their "pedophile problem."  Guess what - WT has the same problem, and had the same policies in place to squelch victims reporting the abuse to police, designed to protect the perpetrators of horrific sexual crimes.  Check out Silent Lambs.

There was also a big scandal surrounding the End Times and the founder of the Worldwide Church of God, Herbert W. Armstrong, also pointing to 1975 (COPYCAT?) as the date the world would end. He was another dude who thought he had a pipeline to God.  Har!  In reality, he was just another (accused of incest with his own daughter) rip-off artist who thought he could get away with crap (and he did, didn't he), raking in millions and millions during his lifetime, living the high life while preaching austerity and "the END IS NEAR" to his followers.

People, please educate yourselves.  Learn the Bible, and you will be armed to fight off the false teachings of all mainstream (and not-so-mainstream) religions and cults.  The Bible clearly says - and I quote -

Matthew 24:36 (King James Version) But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

Matthew 24:36 (Living Bible, Tyndale Publishers) But no one knows the date and hour when the end will be - not even the angels.  No, not even God's Son. Only the father knows.

Matthew 24:36 (New World Translation, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society publishers - yes I have one!) Concerning that day and hour, nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.

As for these false prophets - LIKE HAROLD CAMPING of Family Worldwide Radio (who raked in how many millions during this latest campaign???), why should they be protected from fraud charges just because they cloak themselves in the name of religion?  This sucks and is NOT justice.  Esther Reed, who never tried to persuade anyone to donate money to a cuckoo church or spend "what time was left" preaching to unrepentant strangers about "the end is nigh," she got sent to jail for fraud, and she never claimed to know the day and the hour that the world was going to end.  Geez.  Get real, people!  Who's really guilty of the bigger fraud here? 

Englishwoman Gets Seven Years for Using Fake Names to Bilk VAT Refunds

A lesson to me.  Thankfully I was never arrested for fraud.  I used to tell men in bars who paid unwanted attentions back in my wild days that I was Betty Boop.  Gave out fake phone numbers, too.  Yes, really!  Shame, shame on me.

Conwoman claimed to be BOTH daughters of T.S. Eliot to help steal £118k (even though the poet didn't have any children)
By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 9:07 AM on 6th May 2011

Alison Reynolds (from article)

A con artist who posed as the identical twin daughters of poet T.S. Eliot was today jailed for seven years after defrauding the Government of nearly £120,000.

Alison Reynolds pretended to be both Claire and Chess Eliot, who she claimed were the twin daughters of the poet. In fact, Eliot never had any children.Reynolds used wigs, stage make-up and a variety of costumes to portray herself as at least 32 different people, Southampton Crown Court heard.

Using some of the fake identities, she posed as a theatre producer and director and falsely claimed VAT credits in the name of bogus dramatic companies.Actors and stage technicians had complained they had been left out of pocket after appearing in productions by Reynolds. [Oh, poor babies.  Go to Hollywood, see what happens to you there!]

Reynolds, 48, from Southampton, Hants, admitted eight charges including VAT fraud - claiming back VAT she had never spent - having a false driving licence and falsifying legal letters. She claimed VAT credits in the name of bogus theatre companies including Myths And Mirrors, Dreamweavers and Plan B at different locations around the country.

The names Claire and Chess Eliot were just two of a string of disguises Reynolds used to claim tax credits in the name of the companies.

And she even wrote a play about a woman who uses a false identity to become a Hollywood producer. [Oh come on, lots of people pretend to be Hollywood producers.]

Prosecutor Cairns Nelson QC told the court: 'What is clear is that this defendant is a dishonest fantastist. She created a job lot of bent accounts and used them for each of the companies she was involved with. The level of dishonesty and fraud is breathtaking.' [Right. They're just pissed off because she got away with over 100,000 pounds in tax fraud. Men who do this get movies made about them. See below.]

Mr. Nelson said it was doubtful the firms took part in legitimate business but instead were vehicles to commit fraud using false invoices to try and fool the authorities.

Reynolds had previous convictions for dishonesty dating back to 1987 and had used 13 different dates of birth during her criminal career, the court heard. In 2002 she was made the subject of a restraining order preventing her from using other names without informing the court or police.

In 2003, she moved to Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire where she pretended to be identical twins Claire and Chess Eliot. She set up The Journeyman Theatre Company and wrote a play, Desperately Seeking Jake Roverton, to make her scam more compelling. She even convinced managers at The Brewhouse Theatre to let her rehearse there free of charge. [What is the crime here - stupidity on the part of the theatre managers?]

The ruse was rumbled after theatre staff became suspicious that they had never seen Claire and Chess in the same room. Confronted by staff, she claimed to be in fact Denise Bryan. Staffordshire police investigated but did not find enough evidence to charge her.

A year later, Reynolds resurfaced in Sheffield using the alias Rebecca Perry, this time promoting a UK tour of play, Picture Perfect, by her new enterprise, Dreamweavers Theatre Company.

Next she went to Bristol setting up Plan B Theatre Company using the assumed name Alison Kennedy, peddling a new play called Holding Out For A Hero.

When police raided the Belle Gray clothes shop Reynolds owned in Lymington in 2008, HMRC officers found passports and driving licences in a number of names. Officers also discovered To Do lists with a reminder of 'VAT invoices to fake'. One letter on headed paper from a bogus firm said one of her aliases had gone missing in the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.  Reynolds had even worked as a PA at a firm of solicitors under the name Jessica Maynard and had stolen an official stamp and headed paper to help her dupe the VAT man. [I'm sorry - I'm laughing right now.  This is just too funny.  She must have been very good at her job at the law firm.]

Abigail Coghill-Smith, defending Reynolds, who was born Virginia Povall, said she was bullied at school because of her name. She also suggested that her frauds were not complex.

But Judge Peter Ralls QC disagreed.  Sentencing Reynolds, he said: 'There is an extraordinary level of planning and preparation and a staggering level of dishonesty in this case. I'm not sure I have seen a case which involved such persistent and detailed fraudulent activity. This is not VAT evasion - you're basically stealing from the public purse, dipping in as if it's your own and taking money that you have not earned. All of the receipts and invoices you have produced have a very genuine look about them. Quite a lot of trouble has gone into producing them. You hid your identity to make it more unlikely that you would be caught.' [Yeah, right.  You're just pissed off because a woman outfoxed The Man for so long.]

Reynolds was jailed for six years concurrently for the eight counts of fraud and given a 12 month sentence to run consecutively for perverting justice and breaching a restraining order.

She was also disqualified from acting as a company director for ten years.[Ouch! This punishment hurts! Now she can't be on the Board of Directors of a NYSE listed company. Maybe we need to give this judge a job in the USA and go after the rogues and posseurs who inhabit the halls of corporate America and Congress.] A number of other counts of fraud were left on file.

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Men who do this kind of thing get movies made about them.  Two movies that I remember, specifically: one starring Tony Curtis as "The Great Imposter" - Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr.;  the other starring Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Hanks "Catch Me If You Can" - about Frank Abagnale, Jr. Abagnale actually committed financial crimes - but he passed the bar exam legitimately in the state of Louisiana when he was only 19.  Hmmmm....

Esther Reed Gets Four Years

I've posted about Esther Reed before. It's an incredible story. What I do not understand is why she is being sent to prison. The CIA should be hiring this woman! What money did she steal? Who did she rob? Who did she kill? She used other people's names, but in the end, who did she hurt? Anyone? I don't get it. Story at the Huffington Post Vicky Ward Contributing editor, Vanity Fair Esther Reed: How An Ordinary Girl Faked Her Way Into The Ivy League Today in a courtroom in South Carolina, Esther Elizabeth Reed's fantasies finally ended. The 30-year-old brunette, who has spent eight of the past ten years on the run, often entering Ivy League schools under adopted fake identities, and evading cops with an extraordinary web of deception, faces up to over four years in prison. For one man, Jon Campbell, a slight, sandy-haired tenacious investigator in the police department of the tiny town of Travelers Rest, South Carolina, it is the end of what became an obsessive case resembling the plot of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks as the FBI detective Carl Hanratty always hotly in pursuit of his prey. Campbell was Reed's Hanratty. In summer 2006 Campbell had received a phone call from a police officer in New York. Campbell was informed that Brooke Henson, a beautiful young woman who had disappeared in peculiar circumstances from her family home in Travelers Rest in the early hours of July 4th 1999 when she was just twenty -- and had since become the town's only unsolved missing person -- had been found. She was, so Campbell was informed an honors student at the Ivy League school of Columbia on New York's upper West Side. New York police had gone to seek out the young woman on the Columbia campus after a New Yorker from whom she had been seeking part-time employment doing housework had googled her and seen she was listed as a missing person on the internet. Brooke Henson told police who interrogated her that she had no desire to be reunited with her family since she was a victim of domestic abuse. She wanted to be left alone to get on her with studies. She was very convincing. The New York police officer told Campbell that they intended to close Ms. Henson's file. Campbell replied that they could close the case if they liked but there was no way the woman they had found was the real Brooke Henson. "Take some DNA" he suggested. "The Brooke Henson I knew could never have got into Columbia" he said into the phone. The girl he knew was a high-school dropout, a party girl. Something in his voice made New York officer go the extra mile. The next day Campbell's phone rang again. Brooke Henson had failed to show for her DNA test. Campbell wasn't surprised. When, weeks later, New York cops forced entry into her apartment, they tripped over a pile of calling cards from New York officers. They had been dropped through the mailbox. They found no hair, no trace of anything that would have DNA. But they did find a video card, signed in Boston, MA bearing the name "Natalie Bowman." Once again they called Campbell and relayed their findings. Who was the young woman if it wasn't Brooke Henson? Officially this was his case. Campbell rolled up his sleeves and went to work. A 40-year-old graduate of Bob Jones university, he was more anxious than anyone to solve a mystery that had preyed on his mind and exasperated him for years. Back in 2001 he had been assigned the case and handed two boxes of "indecipherable" material. He had re-interviewed dozens of local people and taken DNA samples to try solve what had really happened to Brooke Henson and found himself thwarted at every turn. "Everyone in this town had a theory about what happened to Brooke," he said. "But none of them was right." Particularly exasperating for him were the prank calls. There was a medium who claimed to have seen her body beside "yellow rope" and then there was the inmate from a neighboring jurisdiction who got cops to drive him around in the pouring rain and dig. He was pretty sure Brooke Henson had been murdered and he thought he knew who had done it and even probably where. He had just never found a body -- much to his chagrin. So, he was intrigued by whoever this impostor was, pretending to be Brooke. Maybe she had information that could help him; maybe she had known the young woman. First he had to find out who she was. He began a lonely few months of phone calls and paper trails. He called Kim Finnergan head of security at Columbia. Finnergan was helpful at first but then stopped sending him documents once the school got "lawyered up." Thereafter they cited privacy laws. Campbell had to get a federal subpoena to force them to continue to help him. It was like pulling teeth. He learned there were two Natalie Bowmans. One was a dead end in that she is a bona fide medical graduate student at Columbia and a former graduate of Harvard. Another one showed up, before two years at Columbia, in Harvard's records. He saw she had been on the debate team there in 2002. From there she had apparently vanished. Harvard had no record of her graduating. Like Columbia, Harvard was not helpful. But Campbell learned that in both places her file was flagged as a victim of domestic abuse. It is possible both knew "Natalie Bowman" or "Brooke Henson" was not her real name. Campbell retraced the steps of Harvard debate team in 2002. Harvard had taken on West Point. A few more phone calls led him to Natalie Bowman's former boyfriends -- cadet officers who had been on West Point's debate team and who had since left to take senior military postings, including the supervising of others in Iraq. He called the parents of one young man, in Detroit. Finally he got the name he was looking for; the young man's parents believed the woman calling herself Natalie Bowman was really one, Esther Reed. They'd seen her driver's license which been issued in Seattle. Rest of story.