Featured Fraudster – Duane McGaw (FREE)

Duane McGaw – Litigation Funding Fraudster

Investors were offered double-digit annual “fixed returns” as high as 15%, with both returns and principal purportedly “protected” by insurance policies and other financial safety nets to ensure payment even if funded lawsuits were unsuccessful. They were shown charts indicating that all 20 asset classes issued from April, 2010 to July, 2013 had achieved substantial total returns, ranging from 27% in 27 months to 89% in two years.

It was all lies, however. None of the third-party lawsuits funded by the group had been successful prior to liquidation and purported insurance protecting against unsuccessful cases and guaranteeing investors’ principal and fixed returns either did not exist or was placed with bogus insurers. In the absence of any profits, redemptions by investors must have come from other investors’ money, meaning that Argentum Capital Group was perpetrating a Ponzi scheme. Everything exposed by OffshoreAlert when the scheme was in full swing was subsequently confirmed by liquidators Grant Thornton.

McGaw showed his contempt for investors by disappearing after the scam was exposed and failing to respond to “numerous” requests for information by the liquidators, who in their first report to creditors and investors on September 16th, 2014 accused McGaw of receiving at least £11 million from the scheme and possibly much more. In a remarkable display of arrogance and stupidity, given his potential liabilities, McGaw publicly resurfaced on July 6th, 2015, when a Vancouver-based food and culture magazine published an article about a new Japanese restaurant called ‘Q Shi Q’ that McGaw, as owner, was planning to open. OffshoreAlert blogged about this development on July 14th, 2015 and also tipped off liquidators that there was a potentially valuable asset just waiting to be seized on behalf of McGaw’s many victims.

Despite the fact that foreign defamation judgments are unenforceable in the United States under The SPEECH Act, McGaw showed how easy it is to waste other people’s money when he filed a meaningless defamation lawsuit against OffshoreAlert and its owner, David Marchant, at the Supreme Court of British Columbia on August 13th, 2015, alleging that claims he is a fraudster are ‘false and malicious’. Either he’s lying to the court or he’s so delusional that he actually believes he didn’t participate in a fraud. Neither would surprise us.

As we told Wotherspoon: “If your client is embarrassed by visitors to OffshoreAlert’s web-site knowing that he received millions of dollars by helping to swindle the elderly and others in a crude investment fraud, then he shouldn’t have participated in it. Clearly, the truth hurts.”