All in the family: Mother-daughter tag-team scammers

Yesterday we introduced you to HoaxGirl’s mum, Valerie Robitaille, aka Val Robitai, aka Naicheval Robitai. When we last saw Valerie, she was writing long, fawning emails to an older lady in Canada who had foolishly decided to hand over a largish portion of her inheritance from her husband.

But Valerie is not, as they say in the grand old U.S. of A., a one-trick pony. No sirree Bob! In fact, she is an educated lady, possessing both a Master’s degree in Science and a PhD in Community Health Education and Promotion.

Well, not quite a PhD really…it’s a “PhD(c)”.

According to the Advances in Nursing Science blog, the little “c” indicates that

…the person has passed into ‘candidacy,’ meaning that the person has completed all coursework requirements, and (in a U.S. system of doctoral education) now only has to complete the dissertation to be awarded the degree. This is also known as the ‘ABD’ – ‘All But Dissertation!’

A bit of digging reveals that Valerie studied for her PhD-sans-dissertation at Walden University, an online university with links to Bill Clinton, which was put under review in 2016. Still, there is no evidence to suggest that Valerie’s academic claims are anything but real.

Indiegogo

Most people with such grand qualifications might be expected to seek legitimate employment in the their chosen field, but not Valerie.

Instead, we find her, under the name “Naicheval Robitai”, fronting a series of Indiegogo campaigns starting in about 2013:

• The QEG Rosetta Stone Project (US$946; 8% of $11,730 goal)
  • Later moved to GoFundMe QEGRosettaStone “due to Indiegogo’s non-payment policy”. On GoFundMe, it earned a slightly more respectable US$4,599, still less than half the $11,730 goal 
•  The Peoples Fund Administrative Startup Revised for 2014 (US$1,009; 10% of $10,000 goal)
  • This fund is a collaborative effort intended to create the resources necessary to implement a strategy of selected projects that will change the paradigm
• December Soft Launch Administrative Funding (US$1,055; 1% of $85,000 goal)
  • The Peoples Fund to Change the Planet. Soft Launch for Administrative set up
•  Help the Doctor that can Help You Heal (US$191; 1% of $26,766 goal)
  • Fix The World and Jeremy Ayres unite to bring hope and true healing to The People.
• Angels in Boston*HopeGirl & Fix the World Documentary (US$2,556; 102% of $2,500 goal)
  • As planned, the HopeGirl team will begin filming its first episodic documentary in Boston on May 4, 2013.
• Home Quantum Energy Generator (US$18,064; 237% of $7,610 goal)
  • Quantum FREE ENERGY generator to power your home 

A quick scan through the campaigns reveals that Valerie and her daughter Naima Hope Feagin, aka HopeGirl (or as we affectionately refer to her, HoaxGirl) worked in tandem on several of these projects, but the most profitable of the lot by far was the last one: the pretend “Free Energy” generator.

Valchemy, Spagyrics, and other new age woo

Valerie really came into her own, though, when she discovered the seemingly insatiable public appetite for faux-scientific online health advice.

In an early blog titled Blessed Health 2013, we find PhD-level scientific observations such as:

“One can penetrate the ether through the plant—Rudolf Steiner”

Spagyrics is the term used for the practice of plant alchemy in the laboratory, whereby the healing substances of the plant are separated, purified (changed) and recombined into a stronger medicine than the original plant (as an infusion or decoction). Spagyrists attain this effect through several phases but basically the terms used are 1) separation, 2) purification and 3) cohobation (recombined product).

(Funnily enough, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical beliefs have recently been coming under serious criticism: in Hemel Hempstead, a trouble-plagued Steiner Waldorf school was recently closed, and allegations have been made that adherents to Steiner’s beliefs behave in a cult-like manner.)

You name a recent health trend, and Valerie has it: raw foodism, gluten-as-poison, the evils of GMOs and vaccines, the paleo diet, “earthing” (aka walking around barefoot for a while)…it’s all there.

Git yer orgonite bed pods here!

And in Valerie’s updated website, Holistic Health Online, we find that she’s piggy-backed on her daughter’s latest quack cure for what ails ya (even if what ails ya is entirely imaginary): orgonite.

To understand orgonite, one must first understand “orgone”, best described as a pseudo-scientific spiritual concept developed by Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s. It has been called an esoteric energy or hypothetical universal life force. It has also been called a load of tosh.

Orgonite, then, is meant to enhance or boost one’s pretend esoteric energy / life force, and combat…almost everything, with the possible exception of housemaid’s knee. Composed of resin, bits of metal, and quartz, orgonite can make a very attractive paperweight. 

But that doesn’t stop Valerie (who for the purpose of her latest blog has shortened her name to the more accessible “Val Robitai”) from hawking it not as a gift for your Dad when he starts complaining that he already has too many ties and socks, but as an actual health product: 

In true health scammer fashion, Val scares people silly with threats that they will be somehow poisoned by “5G EMF radiation”…and then she offers the remedy: orgonite!

Orgonited pendants, orgonite plates, orgonite pyramids, orgonite sleeping pods (disappointingly, “sleeping pods” were not giant egg-like beds made of orgonite, but rather prosaic-looking puck-shaped things which one puts on one’s pillow):Funnily enough, Val’s links led straight to a series of videos produced by none other than HoaxGirl. Which brings us back to Valerie’s participation in the “Fix the World” fraudulent QEG promotion…

Is there some sort of saying about “the family that scams together”? Because if not, there probably ought to be.

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Update: 21 November 2019

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:

So here’s me, unable to run the blog…funny, it seems to be working just fine, but maybe there’s some sooper-seekrit level of meta-hacking that I haven’t found yet. Then again, probably not.

Incidentally, Hopey, you might want to think a bit harder next time you decide to poke a hornet’s nest. You could get stung.

Toodles!