Here is my favourite GoFundMe grift at the moment. The beneficiary (David Halsall) was part of the GcMAF empire of scam, distributing the overpriced snake-oil through Europe on behalf of David Noakes and his company Immuno Biotech (a.k.a. First Immune). He was left stranded in France, where he remains the subject of scrutiny, when French and UK agencies tired of the illegality and shut down the whole operation. GcMAF fraud had made Noakes a millionaire -- much of it raised through GoFundMe appeals or JustGiving from consumers who could not pay his charges by themselves -- but he had none to spare for his imperiled accomplices, which is why Halsall is asking for your charity instead.¹ Noakes, meanwhile, is enjoying 15 months of Her Majesty's hospitality.
The synergy between communal-charity services and medical mountebanks has become a regular target of scholarly inquiry in the medical literature: most recently, a paper in Lancet (Oncology) (see also BB). Sites like GoFundMe are what make the cancer-leech business model so profitable. They enable the fraudsters to out-source their grifting by inducing their victims to grift on their behalf: they can suck money from entire virtual communities of friends, workmates and random strangers rather than be limited to extracting the savings from one corpse at a time. Standard practice for cancer charlatans now is to have someone on staff to help prospective victims set up their GoFundMe appeals.
'gofundme hope4cancer': About 4,450 results
'gofundme hoxsey clinic': About 340 results
'gofundme "oasis of hope"': About 15,000 results
'gofundme hallwang': About 5,120 results
It only remains to add that Amanda Mary Jewell was the proprietor of the Pearl Lodge
This touches on the role of the tabloid press as co-symbionts in the Crowd-Scam industry. Having co-opted each primary victim's name to insert into otherwise-interchangeable stories about Plucky Battler / Positive Attitude / Indominable Spirit, they go on to distill tragedy and pathos from the follow-up fund-raisers for the funeral and family support.
It makes a good media narrative. It allows the newspapers and TV stations to present themselves as heroes in helping to raise the money.
Anne Pharo credits Freddie Aplin Mansfield, another Pearl Lodge AMJ's loudest cheer-leader was Steve Kellogg... a gun-licking, Tea-Party racist asshat, who owed her boundless gratitude for curing his prostate cancer with sacramental bleach enemas on a pilgrimage to
Non-white people, always expecting hand-outs
The GoFundMe appeal to cure his prostate cancer a second time specifies stem-cell therapy because of course it does, but also vertebral-fusion surgery. By then, AMJ had left Bulgaria -- motivated by a combination of (a) interest from the authorities in the unseemly number of deaths at the Lodge, and (b) Bulgarian mobsters impatient to see the colour of their loans again -- and shifted to Mexico. There, she had ascended to the rank of Holistic Health Adviser and Senior Cancer Researcher, cosplaying as a nurse at the Flor de la Salud chopshop in Puebla.
The chief malpractitioner there is a back surgeon, who insists that the non-invasive healing modalities of Harmony with Nature must always be preceded by spinal surgery, for slipped disks are always the root of every organic dysfunction; also, carving up his victims' spines is the part of his job he most enjoys.Suffice to say that Steve did not survive to vote for Trump or re-tweet conspiracy droppings from Qanon.
It would be easy to fill an entire blogpost with these AMJ-related Crowd-Scam anecdotes, but I won't have to do that if people send me their own. I will set up a crowd-sourcing website for you to send them to. Also, Fiona O'Leary is already on the case, with examples such as Aliki Buckwell, whom we meet in April 2016, dramatically cured enough to be thoroughly exploited for vindication and triumph and advertising...
...with the now-familiar Ends-Badly coda.
But now we turn to New Zealand. Oh hi, Cheryl from Perth:
Uncle Smut, you did not tell us that Noakes' Immuno Biotech is based in NZ!
This was an enhancement of reality on the part of the site's owner, Michael Stuart Kelly. Company directors were Kelly, and (for a while) Dr Ulrich-Bero Doering.³
The cheeky wee scamps also took advantage of David Noakes' legal distractions to spoof a post on his First Immune Faceborg page, redirecting potential customers to the New Zealand imitation.
Michael Kelly has enjoyed an eventful career. Company archives tell us that he co-owned an Auckland cafe/bar in 2000, progressing through Vibronic Tuning Centre, which shifted focus from musical instruments to gemstone-themed coloured light therapy and became the Vibronic Health home of Crystal Healing Bafflegab,4 then morphed into Natural Health Ltd.... along the way, acquiring a physical location as a pantechicon of New-Age frivolity at 40 St Benedicts Street. Natural Health begat Natural Cosmetics, and Immuno Biotech, which begat Natural Solutions NZ.
There used to be stbenedictshealthcare.com as a digital shopfront. Alas, after a number of recensions, that vanished in 2016 -- initially redirecting to naturalhealthsolutions.nz and then to healthcentre.nz, which is far more straight-faced and less entertaining. There is also the NaturalSolutions.nz webstore to take the place of the old Immuno Biotech.
We should pause to admire this screen-grab taken from James Bradstreet's blog: originally praising a UK purveyor of Bravo Yoghurt, it had been retouched into an endorsement of the Natural Solutions version of that life-giving fermented milk product.
Spot the difference
Notably, the stbenedictshealthcare site provided a helpful list of doctors who were woke on the molecule's all-curative properties, and could import it past customs barriers for sufficiently desperate patients. Alert readers will recognise the names of ImmunoBiotech directors.
This digression, though regrettable, is not as irrelevant as it seems. 'GiveALittle' is the distributed-donation service of choice in New Zealand. Yes, there are crowdsourcing appeals for expensive medical interventions of unproven efficacy, not funded by the country's health service; and yes, journalists find these appeals irresistable.
April 2014
July 2014
July 2014
June 2015
August 2015
Some names may be familiar. Fortunately these cases are all ancient history and I am optimistic that everyone belatedly accepted their mistakes.5
If you were wondering, Iscador is a quasi-homeopathic mistletoe liqueur brewed according to the intuitions of broad-spectrum-crazyperson Rudolf Steiner, who applied the logical precept that being a parasite of plants, mistletoe is perfectly attuned to kill parasites of the animal kingdom, i.e. cancer. Iscador was part of the Immuno Biotech pharmacopoeia though dropped from the NaturalSolutions product line-up.
Right: Höðr & Baldr: Mistletoe
injection goes horribly wrong
injection goes horribly wrong
Not actually FDA approved
Bonus seafood
1. Another casualty of the war between GcMAF and the French legal code was Lesley Hutchings, living not far from Halsall, and like him, abandoned by her erstwhile colleagues. She has opted for "GoGetFunding" for her plea for financial support.
David Halsall blogs as "Crusty Surfer", if you want your conspiracy theories to be misinformed, and your misinformation to be conspiratorial.
2. Cheryl from Perth was given a fraught account of strife between the Noakes and NZ versions of ImmunoBiotech, which she passed on to supporters:
I was advised by John my health professional at Power Labs in Fremantle to make contact with the the UK company who has been researching, testing and producing the GcMAF protein for the past 20 years, to establish if in fact the product in Auckland was the real deal. I hadn't considered this as the company in Auckland had the same name as the original laboratory in the UK. But, as John has been dealing with chronically ill people for over 20 years, and really knows his stuff, I decided that it made sense to follow his advice. Low and behold, the UK people told me that the clinic in Auckland had been set up by an ex-employee,who had registered the company using the UK company's same good name. They went on to explain that rather than fight them they had in fact started supplying the NZ clinic with product but that they had ceased doing this over a year ago, and that what the clinic in NZ were now selling was NOT the real deal! They provided evidence that this was in fact the case.I am SHOCKED.
Isn't the universe amazing?! Had the clinic not been closed (my thinking is that perhaps the UK organisation had something to do with this, although I didn't go into this with them) I would have gone and started treatments that weren't authentic. Just shows how careful one has to be. I thought I had really done my homework!
3. I had not previously realised that "Anthroposophic General Practitioner" was a thing in New Zealand. On first glance, the doctrines invented by Rudolf Steiner (or vouchsafed to him by the invisible leprechauns inhabiting his teutonic underpants) could easily conflict with primary health provision... for instance, the principle of Spontaneous Blood Circulation, where blood moves around the body of its own accord or under the influence of tides or something, and the heart merely acts as a regulator. But the specialty fills a niche in the market.
4. Obligatory Electronic Gem Therapy from the St Benedicts archives:
5. List omits a Nov 2014 appeal:
[GcMAF] is not funded by the health care system and is very expensive ($4500 per month and will need to be continued until ultrasound and blood tests show that Steve is cancer-free). GcMAF will need to be imported directly from Switzerland as the treatment has not been established in New Zealand as yet.and an April 2015 appeal:
Paul plans to use some of the money donated to fund two treatment options. The first (CTC testing) will cost upwards of $5,000 AUD and the other (gcMAF / DBPMAF) will cost over $1,500 NZD per round and it's unclear how many rounds of treatment will be needed until after treatment starts....as neither one specifies the importer of the placebo, or who prescribed it.
CTC testing may help the selection of drug for any future chemotherapy to be much more accurate and effective. gcMAF treatment may help Paul's own immune system to be able to fight the cancer on it's own, without needing chemotherapy.
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UPDATE: I hope that Amanda Mary Jewell never acclaims me as a success story, completely cured of cancer, for this is invariably a harbinger of impending death. A reader provides another anecdote:Sarah Day in the UK was talked out of accepting actual treatment for a breast tumour, and persuaded instead to farf around "controlling" it with "ketogenic diet", "complementary treatments", and some fraud's "low-dose" mock-immunotherapy "that boosts the body’s natural defences to fight cancer". Also "oxygen and vitamin therapy". This destroyed her family's natural finances, but left the cancer to metastatise unchecked.
The consequent GoFundMe page sought donations for a "more intense course of immunotherapy treatment to regain my health" but was vague about the specifics.
However, AMJ could be found circulating the appeal, urging her readers to support it generously and claiming credit as source of the previous placebos, which is a strong clue to the ultimate recipient of any donations.
It was taken down after Sarah Day's unexpected death last month, but copies were archived.
Unsubstantiated hot 'n' juicy gossip has it that AMJ has now left Belize (rails may or may not have been ridden on) and relocated her operation to Romania. The rumour does not specify whether she was accompanied by more-recent love slave Martin Buckwell, widower of previous victim Aliki Buckwell.I'll just run that by our hot'n'juicy lawyers.
