by Structured Settlement Watchdog®
Finding accurate information about structured settlements is hard enough without having to deal with people or entities that try to game the system. In July I wrote about a sophisticated redirect scheme which appears to involve thousands of domains registered through Domains by Proxy, a service of GoDaddy.com that permits owners of domains to remain anonymous.
Here’s how the re-direct scheme works. You search for a term such as “MetLife structured settlements”. You see search results that appear to be real formatted in ways such as:
- News About (Name/Keyword) in (State)
- Want Info? (Name/keyword) in (State)
- Search Help (Name/keyword) in (State)
- Stuff About (Name/Keyword)
- Read (name/keyword)Guide to (Name/Keyword) (State) [see JG Wentworth complaint link below from paragraph 31 p 8]
Everything on (name/keyword) in (State)Should you click on any one of these links you are taken to a landing page that was apparently designed to generate leads for the owner of the re-direct landing page domain. The sophistication of the scheme is such that it appears that once you click on it in one browser if you try to show it to someone you will get a blank page (so-called 404 error).
Last summer the re-direct was to webuypayments.net, a website developed by, or on behalf of Sovereign Funding Group, a company that purchases or acts as a broker for the transfer of structured settlement payment rights. Sovereign was tied in to webuypayments.net as the result the discover of a work order for webuypayments.net
Woodbridge Structured Funding sent a cease and desist letter to Sovereign Funding and its CEO David Springer, giving them a deadline of October 7, 2011 to comply. On October 7, 2011 those websites were then pointed (without any direction or authority from us) at our corporate website by the perpetrators of the sophisticated scheme for a period of about 2 weeks at which time they were pointed to a obscure page on Wikipedia. In the interim David Springer and Sovereign Funding were named as Defendants in two law suits over the scheme brought by J.G. Wentworth and Woodbridge Structured Funding respectively. The lawsuits are public record. While the search listings remained the utility of the rogue domain re-direct afforded no opportunity for the perpetrators to profit from about the 3rd week of October 2011 UNTIL NOW!
It has recently been discovered the rogue domain redirects are again pointing to a live lead generation site for factoring, this time called freedom1stfunding.com. Freedom1stfunding is registered through a domain privacy service in Nobby Beach Australia. The website has no phone number and no address.
Notwithstanding the connection with the rogue domain re-direct scheme, it is the opinion of the structured settlement watchdog to any one dealing with structured settlements:
- Avoid dealing with Freedom1stfunding.com because its website fails to display an valid address in the United States
- Avoid dealing with Freedom1stfunding.com because the website fails to display a valid telephone number in the United States.
- Avoid dealing with with Freedom1stfunding.com because claims a copyright in a company that does not appear exist and the website has no address and no phone number
- Check the whois.net for the domain registrar for freedom1stfunding.com. If it is private and registered overseas, avoid the website like the plague.
- If you have already filled out the information form on Freedom1stfunding.com seeking a free quote to cash in your settlement and received a call (Freedom1stfunding.com says Enter your Information Below and We will Contact you within 4 Hours), please email or call me with their information and details of the follow up. As consumers you have the ability to participate in outing the bad actors who are behind and intend to profit from this rogue re-direct scheme on the backs of the goodwill and trademarked names of others.
Postscript
A February 21, 2012 Prezi for Genex Capital Chief Operating Officer Boris Drubetsky was later discovered on line that appeared to suggest an involvement with Freedom1stFunding.
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