Alan Mauldin
MOULTRIE — Some Colquitt County residents apparently have put hundreds of thousands of dollars into an investment that is alleged by federal authorities to be a pyramid scheme.
The Florida Attorney General’s office filed suit Wednesday to try to recoup victims’ money, and on Tuesday the U.S. Attorney’s Office seized two houses and $53 million in assets of the company and business partners.
Assets of the company, AdSurfDaily, which reportedly operated four Internet sites, and its owner were frozen Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia, and the Florida attorney general filed suit Wednesday to try to recoup victims’ money.
No criminal charges had been filed in the case as of Wednesday, but a civil lawsuit filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleges wire fraud and money laundering in seizing the cash in multiple Bank of America accounts, a house in Quincy, Fla., and a condominium in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
“There is reasonable cause to believe that the funds that were contained in the above-identified (Bank of America) accounts and the funds that were used to acquire or maintain the real properties at issue here constitute proceeds of a wide-spread Internet-based Ponzi scheme,” the federal suit said.
The suit named Thomas A. Bowdoin Jr., owner of AdSurfDaily, and Clarence Busby Jr. and Dawn Stowers, doing business as Golden Panda and Ad Builder as well as the companies themselves.
Colquitt County resident Mike Adams said he put $5,000 into Golden Panda Ad Builder three weeks ago after attending a conference in Miami.
“I went down there and looked,” he said. “I felt like it was going to be a pretty good deal.”
A number of others in the county have put money into the company, including two who each spent $100,000, Adams said. There were other reports of investments ranging from $1,000 to $50,000.
Adams said he has some hope of getting his money back at this point.
“They might clear them,” he said. “This Golden Panda had only been up a week. All that money should about all be there.”
According to a news site on the internet, another conference was being planned for Tulsa, Okla.
A few days ago, Bill Harrison, representing Southwest Georgia Bank, wrote an editorial to The Moultrie Observer warning people to be careful of Ponzi or pyramid-type schemes. Harrison spoke in generalities, not naming any specific companies or individuals. The Observer posted a note on its website that the letter would appear in the next day’s edition, upon which e-mails threatening lawsuits were sent to Dwain Walden, editor/publisher of the Observer, if such was printed, alleging libel.
“Curiously, the e-mails appeared to be a form letter with different names attached. And ironically, the only people who named any companies were those making the lawsuit threats,” Walden said. “We considered the letter from Harrison to be good general information for anyone and published it. We followed up the next day with a similar opinion piece warning people about deceptions in general. Again, no specific names were mentioned. We often run editorials warning people to beware of flim-flammers and scammers. They can be found daily on the internet. We will continue to do that. In this instance, we aren’t making these charges, the state of Florida and the U.S. government are doing that.”
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum filed a lawsuit seeking civil damages for the victims as well as an injunction against the company, Bowdoin and company employees to “prohibit them from engaging in future deceptive marketing.”
“The lawsuit filed today (Wednesday) alleges that AdSurfDaily, also known as ASD, operated a pyramid scheme, a multilevel marketing operation which depends on new investments to keep the scheme running,” McCollum’s office said in a news release. “The lawsuit claims there were insufficient funds from any legitimate enterprise to support the profits ASD promised to pay.”
The company depended on payments from new victims to make payments to earlier investors, the release said.
The civil action alleges violation of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, and is seeking actual damages for victims and civil penalties. It is not connected with the ongoing federal criminal investigation, the release said.
For victims in Georgia, the attorney general’s Florida lawsuit could provide some compensation for losses, said Shawn Conroy, a spokesman for the Georgia Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs.
“A lot of that falls into the it-depends category,” he said. “It depends on whether there’s any money there, it depends on whether it’s in another country. It also depends on what the feds do. Usually in these situations the money is gone.”
Conroy said he was not sure whether any complaints had been filed in Georgia relating to AdSurfDaily.
Complaints in Florida lead the attorney general’s office in that state to begin an investigation about a month ago, press secretary Sandi Copes said Wednesday.
“The law permits the attorney general’s office to collect for anybody the company injured in or out of the state,” she said.
Georgia residents can contact the fraud hotline in Florida at (850) 414-3990, or if in-state at (866) 966-7226.
To file a complaint with the Georgia Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs call (800) 869-1123.
