This was never published here.. - good one to store for the future:
faughnan.com
Charter Pacific's history is particularly interesting. Again, from the same source:
The LA Times article was factually incorrect when it states that the bank was under an order to tighten controls as a result of bad real estate loans. In fact it was under a FDIC cease and Desist Order owing entirely to its Bank Card operation ... Interestingly, it was lifted in March of this year without comment by the bank as to what it had done to satisfy the many requirements.
This past week the bank's CEO issued a letter to shareholders regarding the LA Times article and TV coverage.... Interestingly, he did state that "other news stories may appear" as sort of a forewarning. I reviewed the bank's press releases and noticed that in August they were in the final stages of getting approval to move the Bank Card operation to a separate subsidiary. Undoubtedly they view this as a way to get better treatment from the regulators. For one, it will get the oversight away from the FDIC which only covers state chartered banks. Non-bank subsidiaries are covered by the Fed or OCC, I don't recall which.
Also this past week the bank issued a joint press release with a company called MerchantOnLine.com wherein they would be offering state of the art merchant services to online businesses. Since I know how careful banks are (or should be) in choosing partners, I decided to do a bit of digging. WOW! I wouldn't issue these guys a simple credit card, let alone process their cards or, heaven forbid, form a business alliance with them. It [MerchantOnLine.com] is an OTC bulletin board company that became "public" by means of a hocus pocus process involving a Colorado shell company early this year. Their reported sales are around $200k per quarter, they operate at a loss, and have a $400k deficit net worth. ... A typical pattern for these companies.
After doing some searches, I found that an investment newsletter thebigbulls.com actually shares the same office and telephone number with MerchantOnLine.com. Other searches on the internet yielded numerous links back to MerchantOnLine.com for setting up internet merchant accounts. It appears that they are nothing more than a marketing operation that aggregates accounts to presumably be processed by Charter. Applications can be completed online. They delicately advise that they are specialists in handling 'off shore transactions', and that everything is "real time". In other words, "we'll connect you to the credit card processing systems and you can initiate any sort of charges you wish, and in the blink of an eye funds will be neatly deposited in foreign accounts."
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Deny Firebaugn was Markows IT-manager
Scanned copy of Whois for TheBigBulls.com
NSI- WHOIS Search Results
Registrant:
World Wide Corporate Financial (THEBIGBULLS-DOM)
15760 Ventura Blvd. Suite 1020
Encino,. CA 91436
US
Domain Name: THEBIGBULLS.COM
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Firebaugn, Deny (DF6491) deny@THEBIGBULLS.COM World Wide Corporate Financial 15760 Ventura Blvd Suite 1020
Encino , CA 91436
(818) 783-0054 (.FAX) (818)783-1120
Technical Contact:
Assayag, David (DA2975) 783-112Q david@DLTECHNOLOGIES.COM
DL Technologies, Inc.
16969 Von Karman Ave.
Suite 230 Irvine, CA 92606-4944
949-253-9444 (FAX) 949-253-9440
Record last updated on 09-Jan-2001.
Record expires on 12-Nov-2000,
Record created on 12-Nov-1998.
Database last updated on 1-May-2001 05:23:00 EDT.
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