(UPDATED BELOW)
BITCOIN HUSTLER TRIES TO CENSOR FACEBOOK
Believe it or not, but years after botched attempts to remove your Bananama Republic from the web and the search engines, fraud artist Patrick Visser is still trying to have links about him removed left and right.
More precisely, Facebook just informed us that it had removed some links to articles here from our Facebook page. Well, big fucking deal. All these links were old. They already did their job. Who cares. Also: When we asked Facebook about it they simply said, "Well, just post the links again."
But it tells us a lot about Patrick Visser. Apparently, the failed businessman and carbon credit hustler is unhappy with his exposure on the web. First he removed all his own websites, social media profiles and accounts, after running from Panama and his "investment" schemes there. Silva Tree and its successor, the Sustainable Capital Group - all dead and abandoned. His scams projects in Suriname and Mozambique - gone with the wind. His business partner Maurice Sjerps - arrested for fraud in Costa Rica. Wacky projects in Spain - nowhere to be found.
Your Bananama Republic has received more than one email from duped investors and people who did business with Visser. None of them were happy:
My 'independent financial adviser' got me to invest in the 'sustainable forestry project' and I even met Ed Gibb who is briefly mentioned by the Silva Tree 'ex salesman' who also mentions another director Lee Chapman. Are they corrupt too? Now I'm wondering if my hard earned cash is lost in their hands re the paulwonia tree project and now a palm oil production facility too.
And so on. This guy put most of his savings in Visser's Silva Tree scam. Not only is Patrick Visser a fraud, but he is the kind of cowardly con man who preys on small guys because he knows they don't have the resources to go after him.
FROM CARBON TO CRYPTO - BUT DID ANYTHING ELSE CHANGE?
In Israel, Patrick Visser made an attempt to be the man behind the scenes of start-up Crypto Next - a sort of a get-rich-quick Forex trading thing with digital currencies. In fact, he is now trying to mint his own money: The so-called Crypto Next Coin. After you buy these coins, you can use them to pay fees to Patrick Visser on a trading platform that he sells you: "Once you have purchased CXC you may use it to pay for transactions in the system or even start your own white label exchange," says the website.
In itself there wouldn't be much wrong with the services Visser's Crypto Next offers - if Visser and his wife weren't secretly involved. Abandoned investment schemes and scams and people arrested for fraud are obviously not the kind of track record that makes one feel comfortable making deposits with yet another trading scheme, this time crypto instead of carbon, courtesy of the same land grabbing vulture. His preference for jurisdictions with lax oversight - first Spain during the boilerroom days, then corrupt Panama, now the Isle of Man - isn't very reassuring either.
And why, one wonders, is he trying to hide if everything about Crypto Next is on the up and the up?
UPDATE: We just found out that CELE, the center for freedom of expression studies of the Argentinean Universidad de Palermo, discussed the "crimes against the honor" cases Patrick Visser, Maurice Sjerps and Keren Visser-Katz filed against yours truly, the Christian Science Monitor and journalist Sarah Miller in Panama in a book called "Hacia una Internet Libre de Censura: Propuestas para América Latina." The publication is edited and compiled by Eduardo Bertoni, the former Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights at the Organization of American States (OAS), and can be downloaded here.
UPDATE 2: What a coincidence. A day after we publish this and we have a malware infection on our website. Don't worry, it has already been taken care of and security beefed up. But still.
Leopards never change their spots……..