HoaxGirl, Valerie, and Wilhelmina: The one that almost got away

Yesterday we received a charming missive from HoaxGirl, apropros we know not what. We’d seen her sniffing around the place for a few days, but we must confess that her unprovoked comment took us by surprise, both by its vehemence and its vindictiveness.

“Your blog made someone kill themselves”, she writes.

Really? And the first person they thought to contact was someone who claims to have no connection to the Hampstead SRA hoax? Sure, that makes perfect sense. Just what we’d do. [insert eye-roll]

But what the hell: if this bizarre allegation is true, please, by all means report it to the police. We will be more than happy to discuss it with them, and if it turns out that we had anything to do with a person’s suicide, we will shut down immediately. No questions asked.

Meanwhile over on YouTube…

HoaxGirl seems to have been on a bit of a roll yesterday. Not only did she leave us a note (well, a few, but we have an aversion to spam, so we deleted most of them), but she put this up on a video featuring herself and Angela Power-Disney:

So you should probably know that I have a program that shows me exactly what tags you are using on the videos you make about me, and it appears that you are using the legal names of my family members. I’m sure that would go over great in a court case. Here’s a screen shot, showing I can see all the background data behind your videos. https://postimg.cc/image/krs1sa2fp/

And verily, she spake the truth: for she was indeed using a popular app called “fb Videolytics” which gave her, among other things, the information that her mother Valerie Robitaille (aka Val Robitai, aka Naicheval Robitai), her step-father James Robitaille (no known aliases), and her husband Tivon Rivers (ditto) had been tagged on the video.

Why HoaxGirl’s access to this crucial info should frighten the person who made the video we do not know, but apparently she was under the impression that it would make them run away screaming. Whatevs.

However, HoaxGirl’s threats about anyone daring to mention her family members in the context of her attempts to hawk fraudulent products online jogged our memory.

In particular, we were reminded of a longish series of posts on her old blog, the one she took down a few months ago, presumably realising that, as they say in marketing, “the optics” were bad.

Unfortunately, despite her claims to astonishing tech wizardry, she neglected to clear the cached version, and so we were able to save a rather nice copy of it to the internet archive. You know, for posterity’s sake.

Here’s the brief version, but if you’d like to see the whole thing in all its glory, by all means use the link here.

The story of Wilhelmina

Once upon a time, in a smallish city on the west coast of Canada, there lived a very nice and well-meaning elderly lady named Wilhelmina.

Wilhelmina was a widow, her husband Gerry having passed away a few years earlier, but he had left her a considerable sum of money, which was apparently burning a hole in her pocket.

Wilhelmina was a modern sort of senior citizen, who liked to, as the young folks say, “surf the web”, and one day she happened upon a website which, she thought, might offer her the opportunity to spend some of Gerry’s hard-earned cash, whilst doing the world some real good.

The website claimed to be run by hard-working folk who were building, out of the goodness of their hearts, a machine which promised to deliver free energy to all the poor people of the world. Wilhelmina got very excited when she discovered that she could donate $1,000 to these kind free-energy-machine inventors, with the mere click of a PayPal button!

She longed to give them even more…but as luck would have it, her bank intervened to thwart her. Wilhelmina was not pleased, and she wrote about her experience for the kind and generous QEG-makers (for this is what the magical energy machine was called).

Now, as any con artist grifter upstanding free-energy machine maker will tell you, when you get a fish like this on the line, you don’t let it get away. And so HoaxGirl, the Chief QEG Promoter Herself, immediately emailed Wilhelmina to keep her chatting and help her open her wallet.

HoaxGirl assured Wilhelmina that she was doing a Very Fine Thing Indeed, helping poor people improve their lives.

Excited, Wilhelmina wrote back straight away:

Hello, Hope. I appreciate what your family has been doing and I’d like to help in some way in promoting Free Energy. Do keep Youtubing. This is where I’ve recently found you and where I will keep in touch. And do keep us all informed as to how your translation program is coming along for your free and open-source QEG Build Manual. A thousand dollars per language seems like such a good deal. Your family has been doing all the grunt work up to now. Perhaps I can do my part by contributing a little. I wish you well. – Wilhelmina –

More money? This crazy old broad charming and erudite rich lady actually wanted to send them more money? HoaxGirl (who was perhaps not quite the lovable humanitarian she seemed) got chills just thinking about it.

However, she had important things to do, such as issuing malicious copyright strikes on anyone who dared take her name in vain, and writing up blogs viciously slagging anyone who crossed her, and so she assigned her mother, Valerie, to Wilhelmina Duty. Hey, they were two old ladies, they could talk about crocheting or gardening or something. As long as Valerie kept Wilhelmina talking, and Wilhelmina kept remembering that she wanted to give, give, give.

Because, you see, “keep them talking” is one of the big rules in the con artist’s playbook.

Another rule is: win the victim’s sympathy:

Dear Wilhelmina. My husband, James, and I are so very grateful for your donation 24 hours ago. James has been needing capacitors for the next generation QEG and we were really scrimping to save for some. Your incredibly generous donation came at just the right time for us and we thank you so very much from our hearts. We continue the work! Many blessings. – Valerie and James –

The two women wrote back and forth, and quickly began to develop something resembling a friendship. Wilhelmina told Valerie about her garden, and Valerie talked about how she’d scammed her way into used an unorthodox mode of entry into a famous garden near Wilhelmina’s home city.

In almost no time, Wilhelmina was offering the Grifter Family a very very large donation indeed: $100,000!

In exchange, all the grifters needed to do was keep doing what they’d always done: tinker with their pretend energy device, claim they were mere moments away from giving it to the world, and find fun ways to forestall uncomfortable questions such as “You’ve been saying it’s nearly ready for years now, when are you going to cough up?”

Wilhelmina wrote:

From your QEG project, I know of your family’s conviction and determination, and I know you can squeeze a nickel so hard it flattens into two dimes. What could you do, I wonder, in the matter of getting Free Energy to the people who most need it, if you had a hundred thousand dollars to spend as you please? Say the word and it’s yours with no strings attached – no business plan, no progress reports, no accounting to me.

The Grifter Family were nearly wetting themselves with joy. This was one big fish, and she was on the line voluntarily! No one could pin a thing on them—she was doing this of her own free will!

Dollar signs shone in their eyes. They drooled, they grovelled, they sang and danced for joy.

Valerie wrote,

09/09/15
Hi Wilhelmina! It will take us a little time to respond properly to your letter as we are truly astounded at your proposals. But I wanted to respond right away to let you know we are processing. Actually, we’ve been crying. Is it possible this is divine timing and we are meant to perform an assignment together? Are you and your late husband, Gerry, the angels we have been hoping to meet for more than two years? As you probably know from what you’ve read about us, we have had a hard way to go but we keep going because we are on assignment! Thank you so much for attaching the photo.  I can see Gerry’s light.

Amazingly, it seemed that Gerry was doing what the QEG would never do: he was spontaneously emitting light! Not bad for a dead guy.

Wilhelmina responded:

09/10/15
Hello, Valerie. You don’t need to be writing me. Honestly. You’re a busy woman, and I’m in the habit of looking into my emails about once a month! I know – I’m not quite in sync with the times. And I will be looking for you now and then on Youtube and on your websites, so I can keep up to date on your news there. I’ve been shuffling money around, and I think I’ll have $120,000 arriving in my local bank today. I’m planning to send you the whole wad at once, and I THINK I now have got Paypal hooked up to my local account so I can get this all done in a single go.

If the Dr. Greer thing doesn’t work out, I know you’ll put the money to good use somewhere, using it in any way you can think of to get Free Energy into the hands of the people. Or . . . at least having a good try at it anyway.

I have one question: I sent you some money by pressing a button on your ‘Free QEG Build Manual’ page and that was easy. I could type in any amount I wanted to. Would it work for you if I did that again?

“Would it work if she did that again?”

Hahaha! laughed the Grifter Family, who were by this time engulfed in paroxysms of joy. “Would it work” for some gullible old fool in another country to hand them over $120,000 (that number just kept getting bigger!) via their PayPal account?

Yer darn tootin’ it would!

Valerie wrote:

I’ve called Paypal to alert them to a large transaction coming through shortly. The best way to send it is to go to your Paypal account and click ‘send to friends and family’. Our Paypal address is (dadada) . Otherwise, Paypal will take 5%. There are really no words that I can find to express how much we feel blessed by you – it is hard not to think of you as an angel. This action, and your humility and quiet beauty has us also believing we might live to see a happy ending yet! I hope you don’t mind if I do continue to write and keep you updated – you don’t have to respond although I feel you are such a kindred spirit that I would love nothing more than to stay in touch. We will certainly keep posting all updates for FTW, QEG, and our humanitarian efforts.

But alas, there were complications.

Wilhelmina wrote that she was making her way through “a maze of cross-border banking complications”. “I’m going to make it through, but it’ll take a little time”, she wrote.

Valerie and the rest of the Grifter Family were nearly chewing their own arms off with anticipation, but she wrote back trying to sound calm, sharing a few details of her own life and telling Wilhelmina that she “intuited” that she was a famous writer; Wilhelmina responded that she wasn’t famous, but loved to write. They chatted and discovered that they were “kindred spirits”. Whoever could have imagined?

The course of true love never runs smooth, however.

Wilhelmina wrote:

09/17/15
Hi Val. About your money. The gears are grinding, but slowly. First, I sold some stocks from my American investment company. When that was done, I phoned them to wire the money to my RBC account here in Nanaimo. Because of the large sum, this got held up by the RBC Wire Transfer Team, who got in touch with me by phone. I was advised, when I told somebody where the money was going, not to convert it to Canadian dollars and then back into US dollars, as I’d wind up with less money than I started with.

So I got an appointment with my bank here and went down and opened something called a US Dollar account here in my local branch. The money is sitting in there now, minus a little that got lost along the way.

The next thing I did was to try and connect Paypal to this new account, and I ran into a line of small print that told me that, in Canadian banks, Paypal only deals in Canadian dollars. Shucks.

So I got another appointment down the hill and the next RBC fellow I spoke to advised me to open a separate account in an American bank in the States, and he told me that RBC has an affiliate RBC bank in Philadelphia that does this. This is now in the works. Since I have American citizenship, everything seems to be moving smoothly. My next step is to move the money into this new account, and then see what Paypal has to say about it all. I expect this will work, and – thank you for the heads-up – I have found the ‘send to friends and family’ button on Paypal and will use it.

However, this morning I’m thinking maybe I could forget about Paypal and do a wire transfer directly from my US Dollar account here in Nanaimo into your bank. I’ve just called the RBC and it sounds like this is ok with them. I’d walk down to the bank and someone there will get the job done properly for me.

Do you think this would work for you? And is it a good idea? If so, the bank information I’d need from you is: Transit #, Financial Institution #, Bank Account #, Swift Code # (usually needed for overseas accounts, the lady told me), and Routing # (usually for US accounts). We soldier on! – Wilhelmina –

“RBC” stands for Royal Bank of Canada, by the way. And apparently they guard their clients’ interests quite fiercely, as we shall see.

Valerie responded,

09/17/15
Wilhelmina. I was just writing you when your letter came in. OMIGOSH! What a lot of hassle. We always have trouble due to our dual residencies, here in the US and in Morocco (which I explain in my next letter). Here’s the info you need:(dadada)

One can almost “intuit” her tapping her fingers impatiently as she waits for the cash to land in her account.

There were more problems: Wilhelmina wasn’t sure how to fill out the wire transfer form, she didn’t quite know how to work her email’s delete function…but finally she worked it all out, and all systems were go.

Valerie and HoaxGirl spent the weekend planning a nice, well-earned break at a little boutique hotel in Bali. Or perhaps the Turks and Caicos Islands. A hundred and twenty grand will buy a lot of massages, pedicures, and margaritas, even with the exchange rate being what it is.

And just to be sure that Wilhelmina wouldn’t forget that whole kindred spirits thing, Valerie wrote her a long, newsy email full of pictures of their life in Morocco.

And then…it all started to go pear-shaped. Wilhelmina wrote:

09/21/15
Good morning, Val. Never a dull moment. I’ll read your email later, but I’ve just had a call from my local bank manager regarding my order for a wire transfer. Apparently, when the bank went to send it, the “recipient was flagged as potentially fraudulent”. So my bank is holding the money and is about to do some sort of a ‘fraudulence review’ for my protection, and will get back to me.

But don’t get in a sweat. This is just another snag, and it’ll get straightened out. I am not surprised at it, considering how the spread of Free Energy technology is about to change . . . well . . .  is about to change just about everything in our world that needs changing! We’re on the right track. – Wilhelmina –

Nothing to worry about, Valerie assured her. James had had that account for years. And last time they did a really big transaction, their own bank had had to check for fraudulent activity for their own protection.

It would be fine, she told Wilhelmina. After all, they were favoured by God:

09/22/15
Wilhelmina. I’m writing you from my phone – please forgive the auto correct.

My bank just called to say that because we don’t use a SW I FT code when we get wire transfers they have to go through an intermediary bank which is Wells Fargo. (Did they tell you this?) Funny, because I remember just a year ago having to scramble for those SWI FT codes because you couldn’t get a transfer without it. And figures it would be Wells Fargo – those are the ones that took our house – just stole it as they’ve done to millions of others.

The bank also said it can take 3 to 4 days for a wire transfer. We used to get them from Taiwan in the beginning and it only took about 10 hours so something’s changed.

Just keeping you updated as I get info. I’m really not worried about it at all as we are blessed and highly favoured! We have an assignment from the divine to help people that are suffering. And we’ve always been provided for, so what could stop us now?

Wilhelmina wrote back: the wire transfer was in the works, but it was taking time. Her banker had frozen her account so that it was “deposit only”.

Panicked now, Valerie sent several more reassuring messages.

But ’twas all for naught:

09/25/15
Hi Val. I’ll get to your messages later. I’m afraid I’m going to set you crying again, but this time it won’t be for joy. I was just down to see my bank manager again this afternoon to clarify my position with them, and what I’ve learned is that I have been effectively hobbled. I cannot send money, by any means or in any quantity, to either the Robitaille family or the QEG project.

I cannot send a wire transfer, I cannot send a bank draft. I cannot send a personal check, no matter how small. I cannot send a Paypal payment. I cannot send a money order through the Post Office using my debit card.  And  any unusual cash withdrawals I make from my checking account will henceforward be investigated.

The policies of the bank are set in steel and there is no way I am able to bend them. Their job, as they see it, is to protect me from squandering my money, and you folks have a flag on you, and I am no longer invisible, but have my own flag on me, and that is the end of that.

All of my future banking activities with the RBC will be monitored. I am permitted to spend and give my money freely, provided it is on projects and people who are flag-free and meet with the approval my watchdog, who is the nice branch manager of my bank. Perhaps I will buy myself a Lamborghini. I’m sure they would allow this.

It makes no difference to the bank that I have just opened my American investment portfolio to them and proved that I do have this money to spare. It makes no difference that I am aware that what you’re working on is emerging technology that may or may not emerge, and that it could be a flash in the pan and fizzle, and that, in spite of this, I would like to send some money your way and see what you can do with it.

It makes no difference that I am satisfied as to your integrity and your good intentions. Nothing makes a bit of difference.

I asked the branch manager, at the end of our chat, “How do you think I can get this money, or any amount of money, to these people in a way that would satisfy both the bank’s interests and my own?”

He could only lean back in his chair and shrug his shoulders. I feel no rancour towards him. He’s just doing his job. It’s not his fault that you have a flag on you. And I feel no rancour towards the bank. If I were to move my money to any other respectable bank, they would find the same flags.

“You might try a Payday Loans place,” he said to me, “and see if they have a Western Union that can do something for you with cash.” I’m going to check this out tomorrow. – Wihelmina –

And that, dear readers, was the end of that. The RBC, bless them, had shut the whole thing down, and the Grifter Family swam away hungry.

Well, almost. Wilhelmina did add a short post-script:

10/03/15
Dear Reader, I wrote a note to Val somewhere in the middle of this mess that I didn’t send to her because I didn’t want to get her down, but it’s been eating away at me, and I’m now going to tell you what I remember of it.

I had a phone call from someone on the ‘potentially-fraudulent-recipient review board’. I think of her as the RBC ‘tough’. She was a tough bird. We hadn’t been talking long before she backed me up against the wall and brought out the rubber hose and laid it on me. Were the Robitaille’s personal friends of mine? How well do I know them? How long have I known them? Where did I meet them? It was not a conversation we were having, it was an interrogation, and I was the one sitting in the hot-seat. I bumbled around for a bit and then I caught on to her game.

I asked her, “What is it that the bank knows about the Robitaille’s that I don’t?”

She wouldn’t tell me, not a word of it, but she did say, and her voice was rising both in volume and in pitch as she warmed to her subject, “I know their types! They sink their teeth into you and they don’t let go until they’ve milked you dry.”

This is exactly what she said. I am not making this up, folks, I’m remembering it.

To no avail did I tell her, with my own voice getting an edge to it, that I’m a person not easily milked. To no avail did I remind her that the money in question is mine, and if I choose to buy a yacht with it or if I choose to throw it on a bonfire, the choice is mine. To no avail did I tell her that the bank is supposed to be the servant and I am supposed to be the boss.

Her only reply was to tell me, point blank, that she could order a bank draft to be made out to me immediately for the entirety of my holdings with the RBC, and I was free to take my banking business elsewhere.

I surrendered then. I cowered. I grovelled. I said, “Thank you, but no thanks.”

I didn’t say it to her, but I was thinking it, and I’m saying it to you now: “I won’t be booted out in the middle of a cold and rainy night with no place to go. I will go, but I’ll go at a time of my own choosing. And I bloody well, damn well, will never – ever – be back.” – Wilhelmina –

p.s. One more time! To sum this up, what I learned from my RBC ‘tough’ is that the bank will let me use my money to buy a condo, and it will let me use it to take an extended trip around the world, but there is no way in hell it will let me use it to further the development of Free Energy technology. This burns me. Grrr!

And so it ended, not with a bang but with a whimper: Wilhelmina’s wise bankers, who took their fiduciary duty towards their recalcitrant customer with all due seriousness, wind up being painted as the bad guys in this little story, but perhaps some part of Wilhelmina knew that they were right to have done so?

That’s what we’d like to think, in any case.

And the Grifter Family lived on, continuing to stretch out the QEG con as long as they could.

Addendum: According to a video posted by Wilhelmina herself, she was in fact finally successful in getting around her banker, and depositing her savings in Naima’s and Valerie’s gaping maws.

It’s a sad ending, and we sincerely hope that Wilhelmina has learnt her lesson. As for Naima and Valerie, their grifting careers continue apace, though it does look as though sales are sagging lately. Ah well, too bad, so sad.

p.s. Hope Girl has been making snorting and snuffling noises recently about this blog having been hacked and all functionality shut down. Like this nice little porkie pie, for example:

Let’s just say that if I were unable to run this blog, I wouldn’t be able to share this with you. Funny that Hopey hasn’t clued in that her claims are so easily disproved, isn’t it?

p.p.s. It’s now July 2020. Blog still seems to work. Waiting for that sooper-special hack job to take effect. What’s the hold-up, Hopey? Perhaps your little friend “Jesus” isn’t quite the internet genius he claims to be?

While we wait, perhaps you’d like to look at this rather cogent explanation of why Hope’s QEG scam will never and can never work. Because: physics.