Well, it looks like our dear old friend fiend Vox Day won’t be able to make his racist superhero flick after all. Because he’s apparently lost all the money he raised for it — a cool million bucks — to a cryptocurrency con artist who was supposed to be safeguarding the funds, the Daily Beast reports.
In 2019, the racist, woman-hating blogger, fantasy author, and huge asshole began raising money for the proposed film, Rebel’s Run, featuring what the Beast calls “a Confederacy-themed superhero … fighting a global police force hunting down freethinking conservatives.”
But he couldn’t put the money in a traditional bank because, apparently, no legit financial institutions wanted anything to do with his racist ass. So he parked the cash with something called Ohana Capital Financial, which described itself in promo materials as a bank for “the unbankable.” This ersatz “bank” was run by one James Wolfgramm, who (allegedly) ended up turning it into his own personal piggy bank.
As the Beast explains, Wolfgramm was not the “self-described cryptocurrency billionaire” he made himself out to be. While he
posted pictures of sports cars that supposedly belonged to him on social media … a federal indictment filed last month [alleges that], Wolfgramm’s wealth was a sham. The sports car pictures, for example, were pulled from other websites. Wolfgramm’s business also sold what were billed as high-tech cryptocurrency mining rigs—but those too were a hoax, according to prosecutors, with their screens just running on a loop to create the illusion of mines.
Wow. He’s the world’s only environmentalist crypto dude.
In any case, the feds allege, the heavily indebted Wolfgramm ultimately just took Beale’s fan’s money to use for his own purposes, leaving would-be film producer Day and his self-described “minions” up the proverbial creek. For what it’s worth, Wolfgramm himself isn’t likely to fare much better, as he now faces four counts of wire fraud for allegedly pocketing the funds and doing other bad money stuff.
“I wouldn’t count on us getting the money back,” Day explained in a video for his “minions,” going on to suggest that the whole thing could have been “a targeted operation intended to break our community.”
But it looks like this “plot” was simply a case of an unethical crypto dude stealing rather a lot of money. Who could have expected someone running a “bank” designed for the worst people in the world to do something like that, except maybe everybody.
NOTE: If you’re unfamiliar with Day and his shenanigans, by all means check out this blog’s Vox Day archives and start scrolling your way downwards. I used to write about him all the time. And you’ll get to see lots of silly graphics with Day’s head pasted on tiny people and other stuff.
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Couldn’t happen to a more appropriate waste of oxygen.
As always, the SF community has been on this for a while, see:
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2022/10/21/the-fall-of-a-film-empire-continues
(from a 2-time LEGIT Hugo finalist)
Camestros has been covering this for quite a while, as can be seen by the links at the bottom, and for his magnum opus “Debarkle”, which can be had for free at all ebook places not named after large South American rivers. Also, in the header, if you click “Debarkle”, you’ll get a free PDF link, links to ebook sites, and links to the original posts, which were not edited and thus if typos bother you, don’t. The Compleat Debarkle PDF is proofed and edited.
(I read them all originally on the blog, and the PDF was what went in the Hugo Packet this year.)
It also has cogent links to/discussion of the general turn towards fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. we’ve had the past decade. Tr*mp, Q, the whole sordid deal.
Good, if sometimes painful, reading.
*ahem*
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA~!!!!
…So a white supremacist was using a sockpuppet cryptobank with a Native Hawaiian name?
http://www.gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Paul-Eddington-Yes-Prime-Minister-Laughing-to-Sad-Reaction.gif
Actually, that gif isn’t quite what I wanted.
This made me laugh like Voldemort
He’d have been better off stuffing it in his mattress. What a happy ending.
@FMOx: … headquartered in Arizona. Yep. (Or is it Utah? One of those)
Teddy (his real name is Theodore) is a remittance man/fugitive from justice living in Switzerland on ill-gotten gains — so that the FBI doesn’t bust him for what they sent his daddy to the ol’ greybar hotel for.
I thought Swiss banks were perfectly fine with financing dodgy stuff (item 1: Nazi gold), so the fact he couldn’t get them to baxk this crap tells you why it was doomed to fail. They knew it was going nowhere.
Chuck Tingle’s long-running take down of him was a thing of beauty and a joy forever, back about 2015-6. @Jenora Feuer probably knows all about it.
Also I think many years ago, Teddy was kicked in the head by TFG, and he was thrilled about it. 😀 I am fairly sure I am not making this up. Yet he eagerly supported Cheeto Benito twice. I’m not saying there’s a connection, but…
(I am saying that racist, fascist, con men who can never get their daddy’s approval stick together)
Anybody old like me remember Muttley the evil cartoon dog, and “The Uncola Man”? I am alternating laughing like them.
“…lost…” – Yeah, sure.
Oh I would be so interested to see what happens. A similar thing happened to the hundreds of thousands kickstarted by a transwoman for a board game that she paid to a boardgame company to produce the games for the kickstarter (game company was a shell despite multiple recommenders at conventions, CEO ran off to Canada with the money)… so she spent years trying to deliver the games herself to every backer in another way, to fulfill the promises she had made, instead of saying “bad money man took it whoops nothing I can do, must have been a targeted job!”
I don’t think this guy can do such an ethical job, although I’m sure he has lots to say vis-a-vis the ethical standards of transwomen and conservatives.
I continue to be amazed when conservatives lose money when they try to work outside the regulated system they’ve come to expect (even when they decry it as “government overreach”).
Gonna make a killing convincing conservatives that I’m the anti woke wallet inspector.
This may well be some old-school snobbery on my part but wouldn’t genuine bragging pictures of sports cars still have been a red flag? “Hey, guys! Look at what a big spender I am! My bank is totally legit!”
He could be lying. Maybe Vox Day spent the money and can’t make the film now and this is what he’s telling his fanboys so they don’t go after him.
But why would he even be keeping it in crypto instead of–
Ah. Ahahahaha
Was there ever a script for this film? I’m curious as to what exactly “freethinking conservatives” might be, other than a contradiction in terms.
Much like his ‘hero’ Trump got to the point where the only place willing to lend money to him was the bank that handled the Russian Mafia money…
@GSS ex-noob:
Thanks for the shout-out; but honestly Camestros has a better collection of it all than I do. Yes, Chuck Tingle being pulled into it was a massive self-own by Vox, and one that could have been predicted by almost anyone else. First, because Chuck Tingle was obviously no fan of the hard right to start with (I mean, he’d written a porn spoof based on the complaints that Starbucks was doing ‘Holiday cups’ rather than ‘Christmas cups’ one year). Second, because the Tingler is actually a good writer (I’d say ‘better than Vox Day’ but that would be damning with faint praise), good with humour, and absolutely amazing at ‘taking the piss’ on people who think too highly of themselves.
And third because Vox, like a lot of far/alt-right ‘conservatives’, simply doesn’t seem to grasp that people on the left (or most people in SF for that matter, which isn’t the same set) just don’t think about sex or pornography the same way people on the far right do. It’s not about ‘sanctity of marriage’, it’s about consent and enjoyment. Vox seemed to have come in with the idea that putting ‘porn’ on the Hugo shortlist would be a way to discredit the Hugo awards in general, and it just never occurred to him that the writer of the porn in question would have other opinions, or be better at expressing them than Vox was. So he had a blind spot that most of the others who knew about Tingle didn’t.
(There was actually a Kickstarter for a Chuck Tingle video game later on, with Zoe Quinn running a lot of it partly because the anonymity of ‘Chuck Tingle’ is taken a lot more seriously, partly because Quinn obviously had experience with making and publishing video games, and partly because it would be even more of a laugh in the face of the Gamergaters. Sadly while the game reached its funding goal other things have happened and it hasn’t been produced.)
And I remember Muttley, all right.
It was fun seeing the live-action version of Muttley they managed in that Peugeot Wacky Races commercial.
@rabid rabbit:
As far as such a thing exists, I would imagine it would refer to someone raised as a tradcon (or very rarely, non-conservative) and didn’t question it too much at first, but later rejected it in favor of being alt-right or libertarian-right (or both, as there’s currently a lot of overlap between the two). Which in the end, mostly just means different ideological justifications for the same things tradcons want.
@Jenora Feuer:
I seem to recall a comparatively recent comic that gave Muttley a Porco Rosso twist: he was a mad-scientifically transformed human. (I personally don’t see the necessity for that; Canis sapiens interacting with humans is very much a Hanna-Barbera trope—as evidenced by Scooby-Doo and Hong Kong Phooey.)
And thank you for affording a cue to share this Saturday morning medley from the Reverend Horton Heat (warning for Jonny Quest-typical racial stereotypes):
@Full Metal Ox:
Some other examples, just sticking with the classics: Astro (The Jetsons), Droopy Dawg, Dynomutt, Huckleberry Hound, Spike (Tom and Jerry). Arguably Huckleberry Hound doesn’t count because he lives in a reality where various anthropomorphic animal races are just another type of person, Spike might be iffy because he’s not commonly depicted as interacting with humans beyond the level of an ordinary dog, but the rest definitely fall in that in-between area that Scooby-Doo and Muttley do. I purposefully didn’t include anything from the 1990s on, and there are probably some more obscure examples which I missed.
@Jenora: I thought Chuck’s story was better written than 95% of what Vox cheated onto the ballot. It had a plot, moved along swiftly but logically, had a beginning, middle, and end, and the characterization was good. I mean, I could have done without quite so much butt-pounding, but that’s Chuck. And it was a legit love story before the buttsex happened. I think Vox also thought gay porn and interspecies porn was double plus ungood, and gay interspecies porn triple plus ungood — even though all of those had been happening in SF for some time. Manly Men have been rescuing and boinking shapely non-human women since at least Burroughs’ “Barsoom”, and all the many, many cat-girls through the decades. That’s just in English-language books, not even counting anime.
I’d forgotten the Peugeot ad till you mentioned it.
@magnesium: I could really use some easy money, and scamming conservatives looks so damn easy and profitable. Sadly, I have morals and a conscience.
@BTD: He doesn’t even believe married white women should have the vote, so no points for guessing how he is about LGBT+
@Love Is All: I think general opinion is running about 50/50 on that scenario.
How big of a movie can you make for $1M these days anyway? Maybe if everyone volunteers and you shoot it on an iPhone, but a superhero flick, no way. Special effects take money, or time even if someone does them gratis. I know people can do amazing things with software now, but a mil isn’t going to allow for anything that an audience used to Marvel extravaganzas won’t laugh at.
That movie sounds like something the villains from ‘Mystery Science theater 3000″ could use to finally break the mind of the host.
The Far Right and Alt Right are known for their money scams, ponzi schemes and MLMs. That’s how those people make their daily living.
Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy Devos’s family made billions off of… get this … AMWAY.
And Amway is huge in China, India and other developing countries that Devos actively worked at stopping immigration from. So fleecing the struggling poor and emerging hard working middle classes of those countries, taking advantage of their desperation which makes them easy targets for scams, while at the same time closing doors on them when they want to come to the country of AMWAY, America.