by Structured Settlement Watchdog
Just a Bunch of Thespians
Over the years, I’ve encountered a parade of characters in the structured settlement secondary market who hire paid actors to gush about their services. Often, there’s no hint that these glowing “customers” are actually thespians, nor any clue whether they’ve ever so much as sniffed the products or services they’re raving about.
- Einstein Structured Settlements– a brainchild of Owings Mills’ High School chums Richart Ruddie and Ryan Blank, whose pathetic antics saw their JRR Funding and other branded companies banned from doing business in Maryland for 7 years, in January 2018, after a Maryland Attorney General investigation. One of most ridiculous paid testimonials associated with the Owings Mills chaps, was a now former Latina Fiverr actress named “Fabiola” or “pinkkoala”, who claimed in Spanish to have sold her structured settlement to buy a Bentley and oceanfront property in Florida. It was a cheap $5 hustle as an opening gambit in the marketplace and it obviously all went downhill from there for these chaps, with the “Fish N Chip scandal” and later the 7 year Maryland ban on AnnuitySold and related companies..
The print is so small on the paid testimonials that I “ant” read it without my 3-D glasses - Sovereign Funding Group, a sole proprietorship brainchild of David Springer of Mt Airy Maryland who, upon information and belief is no longer in the space. In one of the erstwhile paid testimonials, a Fiverr actress named Old Bitty Grandma misrepresented Springer as a lawyer, “not like all the others”. The fake paid testimonial was played in Court during the trial in Woodbridge v Springer in August 2014. Even after he was supposedly no longer in the structured settlement business, there appeared two more testimonials from purported Sovereign customers who were paid actresses found on paid testimonial websites.
- Lead generation website NL Brand Reviews NLRBFCU.org, portrayed a non existent person as its editor-in-chief. Only when her bio was checked, the references of social club and college supposedly attended didn’t check out.
I’m October 2019, a Delaware based structured settlement factoring company that solicits business in the United States posted video “testimonials” from individuals without any noticeable imperfections, speaking in glowing words from waterfront property. Barely visible words in ant-sized “micro-print” state that the testimonials are portrayed “by paid actors to protect the privacy of customers”. That’s a small positive, but farcical, in my opinion. If someone is in such bad shape that they are willing to trade their stable source of income for pennies on the dollar, do you believe they have the money to get gleaming white veneers on their teeth?
The following video titled “These Actors Will Read Anything That You Pay Them” is an Inside Edition investigative report that takes a serious, but humorous look at paid testimonials.
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