This is to advise people that there is a group operating out of Las Vegas, NV that are running a telemarketing scam called "Police Protective Fund."

They formerly operated the "Police Protective Fund" scam on the East Coast until they ran into trouble with law enforcement.

The scam involves telemarketing phone calls in which money is solicited that would supposedly go toward the families of police officers that were killed in the line of duty. However, this is a scam and law enforcement agencies, police officers, or the families of police officers receive little or no money. One report says the four families of slain police officers received a very small amount, less than 1 percent of the money donated to the "Police Protective Fund."

The current number being used for this scam is:

702-869-6008 (caller ID: "SWA")

If you get a call from this number and you are on the Do Not Call list, please file a complaint at www.donotcall.gov

Also file a complaint at "NCL's National Fraud Information Center/Internet Fraud Watch"

I would also encourage everyone to call this number (702-869-6008) as frequently as possible and let these worthless scum bag con-artists know how you feel about them stealing money from people, including the elderly.

Their main phone number out of Los Angeles is 323-465-5537 (call as frequently as you can)

If you have donated funds to the Police Protective Fund scam, immediately call the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept. non-emergency line at 702-828-3111 (or your local police department as they operate in multiple states)

and the Las Vegas FBI Office at 702-385-1281 (or your local FBI office).

It is very important that you call both as they seem to be slow moving to take action on this issue.

Previous numbers used by these scum-bag crooks include:

702-269-9600 (caller ID: "Police PF")

702-838-6333 (caller ID: "SWA")

These worthless crooks took in $5.9 MILLION dollars in 2006 and donated (supposedly) $40,000 (if that). The losers running this scam make salaries of over $100,000 each from your public donations.

Additional info on the "Police Protective Fund" SCAM from 800notes.com:

"This phone number is a scam!!! If you receive a call from (702) 838-6333, call to report them immediately! They kept calling my number and the title, 'SWA' shows up on my caller ID. They don't leave messages, but when you call them back they change their name each time you do. The first time I called they answered, "Police Protective Fund", the second time I called they answered, "Fundraising Office". I never got a straight answer out of them, but they wanted my information (Credit Card numbers, address to mail "packet", and full name). The one guy that answers the phone (a youner sounding man with a hispanic accent) says they are fundraising for 'Dead Officers' or 'Officers killed in the line of duty.' He stated they were in Edinburg, TX, but the number they call from is based in Las Vegas.

When I called the Edinburg, TX police, the Washoe & Clark Co. police in Nevada, all said they don't 'EVER' solicit money over the phone...! I kept calling back and they would hang-up, change their voices to sound different, and change the name of who they were, repeatedly. I have reported the number and the people to the FTC-Fraud division, and the phone company. The number is listed to Charlene & Jack Nixon (who don't exist at that number)...Be very careful, and report them immmediately! Don't give them any information, money, addresses, etc.!"


"I got several calls from these people. The first time I said I don't donate money to anything unless I see some sort of brochure. Usually that's enough to make them give up and stop calling. The woman said she would send something, but tried to get me to pledge a certain amount anyway, which of course I wouldn't do. I never donate to anyone who has to call me over the phone.

They actually did send something though, which I threw away (should have kept it). It was cheesy and anyone could have made it on their home computer and printer.

Got a follow up call yesterday from some rude man named Steve. I told him they'd already called, already sent info, and I'm not interested. He tried to grill me on when I received something and why I'm not donating. When I said I will NOT donate, he hung up.

Caller ID said SWA. I called back and got an answering machine that says Police Protective Fundraising Office.

I called the Las Vegas Metro Police today and they said none of their organizations solicits over the phone and that this group is not legitimate. Since no crime was committed, there isn't anything they can do. But they advised me to contact the media, which I plan to do today as well as file a complaint with the FCC."

"I received a call from this number in Reno today. Coincidently, I also read in the Reno Gazette Journal today (6/20/07) that the Reno Police Department had released a warning concerning a suspected scam affecting the Reno area. The scam concerned solicitation of funds to benefit police. See RGJ "Reno police warn of phone scam" on google. I mentioned this to the solicitor on the phone and told him that if I wanted to donate to the police I would call the police department directly. If this was legit, I'm sure he would have told me which police department / fund or whatever to call back. Instead, I get an "OK" and a prompt hangup. Total scam."

And this from Alerts- Police Protective Association Spoof Phone Calls

Colorado Springs Police Protective Association Name is Being Spoofed to Get Donations
Posted: 4/02/2007

The Colorado Springs Police Protective Association (CSPPA) has informed the Better Business Bureau of

Southern Colorado of a serious telephone scam occurring in Colorado Springs.

Robin Rogers, the executive director of the CSPPA, has received numerous calls from citizens saying they are receiving rude, harassing and threatening telemarketing solicitations.

The scam artists are spoofing the name of the CSPPA to make it appear as if these were legitimate calls for donations.

Some citizens have even been told by the con artists that if they do not contribute to the fund, they will not receive police protection.

And while the Colorado Police Protective Association (CPPA) – a completely separate organization - is
running a donation campaign, they do not use these aggressive tactics. A representative from the CSPPA is available for interviews. Call Katie Carrol at 719-636-5076 ext. 118 for
details.

Additional links of interest detailing the Police Protective Fund SCAM:

AG files lawsuit against Police Protective Fund
Joplin Independent:AG files lawsuit against Police Protective Fund

Chief says scams claim ties to city's fallen officer
Chief says scams claim ties to city's fallen officer

Duncan Warns of Police Charity Scam; Out-of-State Group Using "Mail Drop" in Montgomery County; Calls for Stepped Up Enforcement by State
Montgomery County, MD - Press Releases

Police Fund-Raisers Accused of Fraud
Police Fund-Raisers Accused of Fraud

Beware The Police Protective Fund
Beware The Police Protective Fund. at cvillenews.com

Here is a list of the some of the primary losers behind the bogus "Police Protective Fund"

Principal scumbags/con artists include:

Mitch Gold (the head jackass - sentenced to 8 years in prison)

Joe Shambaugh (ex convict and currently a fugitive)

Phil LeConte

David Dierks

James Williams

Frank Colaprete

Michelle S. Smith

Robert M. Friend Jr.

Duane Kolve

If you work for, hire, date, befriend, or associate with these losers you are just as much of a scum bag as they are and one day you will get what you deserve!

Do not donate money to the Police Protective Fund!!!

More on the Police Protective Fund from the Orange County Register:

December 7, 2007

Register Watchdog Report: All glitter, little good

Telemarketing machine pulls in millions while its inventor does time in prison.

Charity was sweet for Mitch Gold.

Before prosecutors finally caught up with the king of Orange County telemarketing, the 5-foot-11-inch, 264-pound Gold ate several times a week at Ruth's Chris Steak House, drove a Jaguar (license plate "Sir Gold") and kept a Ferrari Testarossa in the garage of his hilltop San Juan Capistrano home.

Donations, $25 or $35 at a time, harvested from hundreds of thousands of people, helped pay for it all.

Charity regulators around the country cheered in July 2002 when a federal judge sentenced Gold to eight years in prison for fraud.

Before his sentencing, Virginia regulator Jo Freeman gave the judge a list of Gold's charities and solicitors. Her list filled eight single-spaced pages.

Handing Gold a long sentence, Freeman wrote, "will be sending a strong message to the rest of his network."

She was wrong.

In the first four years since Gold fled the business in late 2000, an Orange County Register investigation found former clients, employees and subcontractors raised nearly $83 million in the name of charities such as the American Deputy Sheriffs' Association, the Association for Disabled Firefighters and the Junior Police Academy.

Total kept by fundraisers and charity executives: $76.7 million.

Total spent on good works: $5.7 million - 7 cents for every donated dollar.

Typical charities spend 85 cents of every dollar raised on programs, according to a Register analysis of more than 150,000 nonprofit tax returns nationwide.

Gold and his students turned traditional charity upside down. They exploited a legal vacuum that lets charitable solicitors say almost anything to raise money for client charities that devote almost nothing to programs and services.

Gold's students are making more money than he did, spending even less on charity and, with few exceptions, avoiding the official scrutiny that landed their teacher in prison. Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has stripped resources from investigations of white-collar crime. That has opened the door for dubious charities to raise more money than ever.

"They're taking money away" from other charities, said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a group that monitors nonprofits.

This is the story of Mitch Gold's network - how he built it and why it continues to flourish without him. The Register pieced the story together from nearly 10,000 pages of public documents and dozens of interviews with regulators, victims and telemarketing insiders. Gold agreed to be interviewed in prison and then canceled. Most of his former associates declined to be interviewed.

CÔTE DU FRAUD

Gold founded his fundraising empire in Orange County in 1987 after he went bankrupt franchising T-shirt shops.

At the time Orange County was just beginning to earn a national reputation as the "Côte du Fraud" (French for "Coast of Fraud") a fetid Petri dish for crooked banks, phony investments and prize scams. The county was notorious enough to earn the starring role in a 1990 congressional hearing on fraud.

It would take charity cops years to figure out how to attack Gold. By the time they did, he had built a money machine, reaping $10 million a year through 84 subcontractors for two dozen charities in at least 28 states.

When Gold went to prison, his money machine chugged along without him.

• Ex-convict Joe Shambaugh, one of Gold's legal advisers, set up shop as a charity administrator. Until last summer, he managed four closely linked charities from a rundown office in Santa Ana. The Shambaugh charities raised $16 million from 2001 through 2004. They spent about 1 cent on the dollar for charitable projects.

• Robert M. Friend Jr., who had formed one of Gold's last big charity clients in May 1999, spun off four charities that raised $8 million. Amount spent on charitable works: 8 cents on the dollar.

• Former Gold clients David Dierks and Phil LeConte raised more than $27 million for three police charities. They spent 13 cents on the dollar for programs. Dierks and LeConte paid themselves $1.1 million.

Most of the money donated to these charities actually went to the fundraisers, many of whom once worked for Gold.

Take Wisconsin fundraiser Duane Kolve, who wrote to Judge David O. Carter vouching for Gold's good character. Kolve earned more than $8 million from Shambaugh and other former Gold associates. Three years ago, Kolve raised $118,000 for the Association for Firefighters & Paramedics, a Santa Ana group run by former Gold associate Michael Gamboa. The charity's share was 10 cents on the dollar.

"Maybe he didn't have a seminar, 'How to Run a Charity Scam,'" said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellyn Lindsay, Gold's federal prosecutor. But "he was teaching others."

THE FORMULA

Gold's fundraising students have flourished by sticking to a formula he perfected. The first step is to find a small, struggling charity or create one with an appealing name.

Next fundraisers tie that name to one of a litany of causes, often ripped from the day's headlines: wheelchairs for children, bulletproof vests for cops, death benefits for widows.

And when the money rolls in, the fundraisers send the charity just enough cash to keep most regulators at bay.

Gold was partial to charities with veterans, firefighters, cops or children in their names. Of 24 charities that he represented in the late 1990s, 22 traded on one of these causes. Among them: American Veterans Network, American Veterans Relief Fund and Help Hospitalized Veterans. His followers have stuck to that strategy.

Former aide Shambaugh managed the Association for Disabled Firefighters and the Disabled Firefighters Fund. Former Gold client Friend runs the Disabled Firefighters Foundation.

One doesn't have to create a charity from scratch to get an appealing name. It's easier to persuade an existing charity to simply register some attractive business names.

In May 2001, former Gold courier Adam Cohen signed a fundraising contract with Emmanuel Outreach Ministries, a nondenominational church in Fullerton. The contract listed a half-dozen business names for Emmanuel, including Hospitalized Children Fund, Help for the Homeless Program and Hear the Cry of the Children International.

Over the next two years Cohen raised $1.1 million nationwide. Emmanuel, which drew about 50 people to Sunday services, got $105,000, according to state reports.

Shiloh International Ministries, a former Gold client, had five business names, including Adolescent AIDS Foundation, American Veterans Network and Help Hospitalized Children Fund.

"The names were fantastic," said William Borland, a retired Pebble Beach stockbroker who sometimes got three calls a day from former Gold associates representing children, veterans and firefighters. "It was everything that touched the human heart."

ONE-SIDED DEALS

Attractive names make Gold-style charity telemarketing possible. One-sided contracts make it lucrative.

A typical Gold-style contract guarantees a charity a set amount or a fixed percentage of the take - seldom more than 15 percent and sometimes far less. On top of that, the fundraiser usually owns the donor list. This practice, condemned by charity watchdogs and some commercial fundraisers, effectively strips the charity of its independence. Without its own donor list, the charity is at the mercy of the fundraiser.

The formula is like a funhouse mirror version of traditional charity.

U.S. charities spent about 85 percent of their money on programs and less than 2 percent on fundraising from 1999 through 2003, according to the Register's data analysis of about 150,000 organizations provided by Guide-Star, a nonprofit charity tracker.

A tiny fraction of those charities - about 500 groups nationwide - spend more than 75 percent of their money on fundraising, the analysis found.

Why would any charity take such a one-sided deal?

"To us it was a good thing because we weren't having to, I guess, literally do anything," former American Deputy Sheriffs' Association president and Gold client Larry Smith testified in 2001.

David Tubbs, Shiloh's chief financial officer, said Gold's reputation didn't stop the organization from doing business with him.

"Even I knew that Mitch was a pretty bad character," Tubbs said. "But we needed the money."

TOO MANY PROMISES

Shiloh illustrates the colossal mismatch between donors' expectations and reality.

Based in an old bungalow in La Verne, Shiloh has depended on telemarketing for more than a decade. It solicited in 34 states in 2004. Its founder Wallace Christensen was ordained in the Universal Life Church - the original "mail-order ministry."

Between 1997 and 2004, Gold and his successors raised $6 million for Shiloh. The solicitors took $4 million. Most of the rest went to overhead, including stipends for Christensen, Tubbs and other officers. The charity spent 9 cents on the dollar for grants to hospitals and individuals.

It delivered considerably less than the telemarketers' scripts suggested.

In a 1999 deposition, Federal Trade Commission attorney Tracy Thorleifson read portions of Shiloh's telemarketing scripts to Tubbs and asked him to explain what they meant.

Thorleifson: "'During the course of the year, as you know, we provide a number of special outings for the kids, such as amusement parks and professional baseball games.' In what way does Shiloh through Handicapped Children's Services of America do these things?"

Tubbs: "In late '97 we provided two baseball tickets that were provided from Mitch's office to a Dodger game that we gave to the Foothill AIDS Project that they used to send someone to a ball game."

Thorleifson: "Two tickets?"

Tubbs: "Two."

That same year, Gold and other solicitors raised $356,000 in Shiloh's name. The fundraisers kept two-thirds of the money.

Two years ago, with Gold in prison, solicitors raised more than $500,000 for Shiloh. Former Gold subcontractor Tom Buchman and other fundraisers kept three-fourths of the money. Shiloh spent most of its share on overhead. It reported spending 6 cents on the dollar in contributions and aid to individuals.

'LIKE SHARKS'

Repeat donors are the mother lode of charity telemarketing, milled from thousands of cold calls like gold ore from gravel beds. They are known in the trade as "mooches."

Mildred Rockey was a mooch. Sometime after 2000, the 90-year-old Palos Verdes Estates widow suffered a series of small strokes. Her deterioration was so gradual that her family at first did not notice. But telemarketers working for former Gold associates Timothy Lyons, Jeff Atkins and Shambaugh quickly realized they'd found an open checkbook.

After her condition worsened, Rockey gave almost $45,000. She gave it $25 or $50 or $100 at a time, in checks slipped under her doormat for waiting couriers.

Couriers occupy the bottom rung in charity telemarketing. They appear at a donor's doorstep within hours or even minutes of a call, before the donor can change his or her mind.

Couriers were visiting Rockey once or twice a day before she exhausted her bank account. One even forged her signature on a check, misspelling her first name as "Mildrid."

"These guys are like sharks," her son John Rockey said. "They sense weakness."

William F. Borland outwardly has little in common with Mildred Rockey. He's a retired stockbroker in Pebble Beach, someone intimately familiar with the getting and keeping of money. But he, too, was a mooch - a "golden mooch" who between 1999 and 2002 wrote $80,000 in checks to groups controlled by Gabriel Sanchez and other Gold successors.

"When I got three requests a day," Borland said, "I began to wonder. I'm sure the word was out: 'Hey, we got one here.' They were damned good at what they did."

'LIFE AS PARTY'

University of Tennessee sociologist Neal Shover has studied fraudulent telemarketers for years. He thinks they're interested in one thing: "life as party."

Shover and Glenn S. Coffey of the University of Northern Florida interviewed 45 telemarketers convicted of federal crimes.

They found people who earned $100,000 to $250,000 a year while working just 20 to 30 hours a week. That left plenty of time for "life as party."

"One subject said that they 'would go out to the casinos and blow two, three, four, five thousand dollars a night,'" Shover and Coffey wrote. "Asked how he spent the money he made in telemarketing, one subject replied, 'houses, girls, just going out to nightclubs and lots of blow [cocaine]... lots and lots of blow, enormous amounts.'"

Work itself could be life as party. On the job, many solicitors dressed casually, used drugs and alcohol and got a thrill as potent as any drug from a successful call.

For Mitch Gold, "life as party" required cool cars. His company paid $657.47 a month for his Jaguar. The company also paid for his $85,000 vintage Ferrari Testarossa.

His chief protégé, J.P. Cohen, who went to prison with Gold, was a serious gambler. Tom Buchman, a former Gold subcontractor, said Cohen loved Pai Gow, an Asian form of poker, and would drop $50,000 a night.

BRIEF TRIUMPH

Mitch Gold casually defied the law for a decade. Then he ran into a federal prosecutor named Ellyn Marcus Lindsay and the County of Orange Boiler Room Apprehension task force, a group of local and federal cops based in Santa Ana.

Lindsay and her COBRA team pinned felonies on Gold, J.P. Cohen and a handful of other Orange County fundraisers.

Their triumph was brief.

Gold was indicted Sept. 5, 2001. Six days later, as jetliners struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, COBRA shut its doors.

The dismantling of COBRA was a small act in a sweeping nationwide transformation of law enforcement that has left donors with few places to turn for help.

The FBI quickly shifted agents and money to terrorism. Scott Gicking, a COBRA task force member, was among 300 FBI agents reassigned from white-collar crime to terrorism.

In August 2004, the Government Accountability Office reported that the FBI referred 23 percent fewer white-collar cases to prosecutors in 2003 than it had in 2001 and opened 32 percent fewer investigations. The GAO said the data was inconclusive because other agencies such as the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Internal Revenue Service had stepped up investigations.

But unpublished GAO research released to the Register and reports by the Justice Department's inspector general suggest the shift in FBI priorities could hamper investigations of all but the biggest frauds.

"Nobody else can do the sophisticated, long-term white-collar crime investigations that the FBI does," three top agents in the FBI Financial Crimes Section told the GAO. "We have the largest number of white-collar crime agents of any law enforcement agency. We have specialized expertise."

A September 2005 report by the U.S. Justice Department inspector general warned of an "investigative gap" in federal efforts to combat telemarketing fraud. The FBI slashed the number of agents working telemarketing cases from 60 in 2000 to just 16 in 2004, the inspector general said. No other agency filled the gap left by the FBI.

Charities that willingly accept a few pennies on the dollar, and the fundraisers they hire, have charged through this gap. The nation's 500 least-efficient charities paid fundraisers a combined $276 million - 88 cents of every dollar the charities spent - in 2003, the last year for which complete records are available, according to the Register's analysis.

The charities spent just 8 cents on the dollar for the causes that donors thought they were supporting. The public gave these charities a combined $429 million in 2003 - nearly $100 million more than the previous year.

Some of these charities are run by former Gold associates and clients like Robert Friend and Shiloh International Ministries.

But there's also the Association for Police and Sheriffs, an Anaheim group that raised almost $1 million and spent barely 2 cents on the dollar, to help battered women. There's the Firefighters Charitable Foundation of Westerly, R.I., which raised nearly $11 million while spending 12 cents on the dollar to assist fire and disaster victims. There's the Children's Charity Fund of Sarasota, Fla., which raised $1.2 million and spent 9 cents on the dollar assisting disabled children.

A few of those charities may have just had a bad year. But 150 of them, including the Association for Police and Sheriffs, spent most of their money on fundraisers three straight years.

"It's based on the market," said Lloyd Jones, president of the Association for Police and Sheriffs, which gets 10 cents of every dollar raised in its name. "The more you're established, the better the percentage."

But charity expert Putnam Barber, editor of the Internet Nonprofit Center in Seattle, said charities that consistently accept high-cost fundraising "are the froth on top of this sewer."

The courtroom war on dubious charities did not end Sept. 11, 2001. But the federal cutbacks raised the stakes for regulators and ultimately for donors.

Fewer FBI agents on the white-collar beat, fewer open investigations and fewer referrals to prosecutors boil down to this: Prosecutors must choose charity cases more carefully. And they have to be prepared to run a legal marathon.

It took Lindsay and the remnants of her COBRA team until November 2003, about five years, to nail onetime Gold client Gabriel Sanchez and his high school pal Timothy Lyons for a one-man church scam in Orange County.

Two other former Gold associates were charged in the past month after lengthy investigations. Former Gold apprentice Joe Shambaugh was indicted on federal fraud charges. He is now a fugitive. Onetime Gold subcontractor Duane Kolve was accused of criminal racketeering by Wisconsin prosecutors.

"There needs to be a more concerted effort to rein in and regulate charitable solicitation fraud," said Eau Claire County, Wis., District Attorney Richard White, who prosecuted Kolve. "If it's happening here, how many other places is it happening, and at what level?"

Lindsay had wanted to do more.

"I tried to get any investigators I could find to work charitable fraud, and I can't find an investigator," she said. "You have a willing prosecutor and nobody to investigate the crime. It's depressing."

Contact the writer: (714) 796-5030 or rcampbell@ocregister.com