How Do You Know the Ponzi Schemers are Paying Off Their Previous Ponzi Scheme with Your Money?
In Which I Seek Answers from OSINT Lists
On April 29, 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil complaint against Kenneth W. Alexander II, Robert D. Welsh and Caedryn Conner, alleging they orchestrated a Ponzi scheme that raised at least $91 million from more than 200 investors in an unregistered securities offering (complaint). The SEC noted this was a classic Ponzi operation, in that it used funds from later investors to pay earlier investors. The funds weren’t only used for this purpose. Instead, as the SEC laid out in the complaint, Defendants Alexander and Welsh also previously ran a scheme, an advance fee fraud scheme. By 2021, at least five victims of that scheme had filed lawsuits against Alexander, Welsh, and a related entity, Axiom Financial, LLC. The funds raised in the new Ponzi scheme were used to pay plaintiffs from the old scheme. It was almost, but not quite, a Ponzi scheme Ponzi scheme.
What would keep an investor from getting stuck in this one-two scheme?
Everyone Likes the Tool
I recently came across a “Criminal OSINT” tool. Tool, meaning a page with lists of websites. On the tool were slightly fewer than 40 websites that one could use for “searching criminal, prison, missing persons, most wanted, terrorists, sanctions, and other databases in different countries.” This kind of “tool” is well received in the OSINT community, with many social media likes and re-tweets/re-posts of said tool. It’s presented as a guide, a handbook if you will, for getting to the bottom of something. Could prospective investors use this tool to keep themselves safe from Ponzi schemes?
Am I the Only One Wondering This?
Is this OSINT Tool actually useful? My primary concern with these sets of lists is there’s no context, no sense of when or why I would go to one of the links listed. To me, it seems to be just a rash of sites splattered across a page to look impressive. Maybe volume for the sake of volume. Which links matter? I’m always left asking:
·Why Can’t I Just Google It
I started going to the sites on the OSINT Tool. The first listed link was for “crime data explorer,” which sounds cool, but is just a repository of FBI statistics. So, for instance if I want to know about law enforcement officer deaths in a month, I’m in the right place. Checking out my Ponzi scheme, not so sure. More than a few of the links within this tool redirected me to questionable or semi-questionable, pay as you go “people report” sites. From there, for a small fee, there’s a small chance I’d learn of the Ponzi scheme I'm looking for, but I doubt it. So, I’m left wondering which of these 40-odd links matter. Why would I go to any of them?
Am I Investing in a Ponzi Scheme?
I see the need to know if I am dealing with crooks before I invest. A guaranteed return of 3% to 6% per month, along with the option to obtain 'pay orders' to prevent investment losses, might sound appealing. However, such promises should raise red flags. Some due diligence research seems necessary. But what will work best?
I skipped all the links in the OSINT Tool and just googled the names. (Granted, this is an imperfect exercise because I'll know if what I've found is what I was looking for.) I did not need any of the OSINT Tool links. When I googled the names, I found articles about the first scheme. My google search was enough of a tool that I would not invest.
What if Google Lets Me Down?
Not everything shows up in a Google search. Long ago, the failure of Google or search engines that preceded it like Yahoo and Alta Vista, was blamed on the “invisible web.” While all sorts of pages were online, they were only accessible by navigating directly to a website’s homepage or using a dedicated search portal. For instance, a search engine would not lead you to a company’s 10-K filing even though that document was “on the web”. You had to go to the SEC/Edgar site and search the company’s name there. This public yet hard to find information was deemed the invisible web. To see what’s on it you really needed bookmarks, and you needed to know which website to search. Lists of valuable sites as in the OSINT Tool mattered.
Yes, an invisible web still exists. There is the “dark web,” which are sites only accessible using the specialized Tor browser, and there are all sorts of sites that block Google and other search engine “spiders,” and thus do not show up in search results. If a site has a log-in and password page, it might not be found with a search engine. Still, a whole lot of the web is out there. If you can’t find it, don’t blame the invisible web.
Looking in the Right Places, Looking the Right Way
I Find Ownership in the News
Hidden Business Relationships in UCC Filings
Track People Down Via Lawsuits
What I mean is, the problem is you, not Google. Your search can lead you to a document or a website but may not give you context. Worse, as noted above, websites that appear to give you what you want, such as “crime data explorer,” don’t give you what you need. Understand that an OSINT Tool might not be the only place to find out about criminal conduct.
With these Ponzi schemers, as with many schemers, their shadiness might be found not in criminal records but in civil litigation. When seeking to invest, don’t we want to know more than whether these folks have ever been in jail? Allegations made in civil lawsuits can speak a lot about someone. Even without fraud allegations, just breach of contract findings can be a red flag. Often there are many civil actions without any related criminal actions. Poking around in Judy Records, a nifty tool for court records, showed me that there were civil actions filed against our Ponzi schemers. And no, Judy Records was not listed on the OSINT Tool.
Wrapping It Up
I have not yet heeded the advice of my friend Bert, who suggested that I make my posts shorter. I’m over 1,000 words. In wrapping up, I’ll say this, look at these lists of links and you might think they contain a wealth of data that will make you into an OSINT savant. You can suss out Ponzi schemes. Yet would any of them get you what Google couldn’t? Worse, if you stayed within the four corners of this tool, will you actually find bad actors? Maybe, but perhaps not. And that would seem to undermine its whole point .