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Legal Name Fraud

rynner2

rynner2

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Why are these Legal Name Fraud billboards appearing in Cornwall?
By CGBen | Posted: June 07, 2016

These bizarre advertising boards are appearing all over the country - including here in Cornwall - and no one knows why.
You may have even seen one yourself. There's one in Truro next to the railway station. Here it is.

lgvio23012.jpg


They read: "Legal Name Fraud. The Truth. It Is Illegal to use a legal name". There's no explanation, information about where they've come from, or suggestion of who's responsible.

It's even been seen scribbled in chalk on the promenade in Penzance.
Why is anyone's guess.
It's all very odd.

As is this website, legalnamefraud.com, which appears to have something to do with it.
But even then, the content makes little sense.

Like this bit, for example: ""A rose (legal name) by any other name is but a rose (legal name) in different clothing, it remains the rose (legal name contract) regardless -the legal name is that rose- all other "clothing" (upper case, lower case, mixed case, arabic letters, western letters etc.) is how the illusion-al reality dresses it up to make you think it's different, but it is still that rose/legal name contract."

Get that? No?

The website claims that "After you were born 'they' registered your birth, a 'legal-entity' was then created".

Who "they" are is anyone's guess. The government? The illuminati? Space aliens?
Maybe they just mean your mum and dad?

Anyway, there are also several videos on YouTube about the billboards, including this one made in January.

In it a man with a northern accent mentions that "a few hundred more" signs will appear up and down the country over the coming months - which they have.
It's actually pretty sinister (especially the bit about Aldi).

In the 'about' section of the legalnamefraud.com website, it says: "This website, is what do we do about the CHANGE we want to see in the world, knowing that WE are the change that we want to see, leaves us with the knowledge of responsibility of DOING (or not). Understanding the psychology of change.

"I/ME/Us/We have set up this website called http://LegalNameFraud.com and it currently has a psychology focus, being about how to help others move over from using the name to being free with no legal name… any ideas are welcome of course,we can discuss the process of change here and find out what works and what is just pure theory."

So there you have it. Legal Name Fraud.
Don't say we didn't warn you.

(I've not looked at any of the videos mentioned, just in case...)

http://www.westbriton.co.uk/Legal-F...ing-Cornwall/story-29371192-detail/story.html

 
Oh, dear.

Looks like more Freemen on/of the land. It's all based around a likely groundless belief that we have common or natural identies that are distinct from the legal entities we use to enter into contracts with other organisations and to define our rights and obligation vis-à-vis the state. There's a thread on the subject somewhere.

It gets very obscure and then you discover that it's all born of a desire not to pay for parking tickets, library fines or television licences.

See here:
http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/freemen-on-the-land-lawful-rebellion.48724/
 
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They must have saved their money by not paying taxes and not renewing their licenses. How much would a billboard advert cost? It can't be cheap....
There was a "freeman" here in my area in Canada about a year ago who rented a house, didn't pay any rent, tried to declare the house a sovereign nation. They misinterpret laws and copy the bad info and spread it among themselves. They are considered a pretty decent domestic terrorist threat in the USA. Also high risk to law enforcement because they refuse to identify themselves in traffic stops and love their guns.
 
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I've seen them in several places, including in my home town in Cheshire. Was about to google it until I looked on here just now, spooky!
 
Yea i saw a big one down the road from me yesterday, I wondered what it was for
 
It might be a bunch of anarchists using the current Brexit fervour to further their ideas.
 
These posters are also to be found all over Scotland too.

I already suspected Freemen on the Land.

And perhaps also the Scottish Sovereigns, who similarly maintain this intriguing plurality of names/individuals/identities, and emphasis upon what they term 'admiralty law'
 
Confirmed sighting of one of these in Edinburgh. I came away wondering if it was some elaborate "art" "happening" or prank.
<Sean Bean Voice> The festival is coming </Sean Bean Voice>
 
One thing's for sure, if they try to use any of that 'natural man controlling the strawman as a legal fiction when entering into a contract' bollocks when they are presented with the bill for that (very...very expensive) billboard space, then they are in for a big old shock - the people who own those sites are ruthless in the pursuit of their own interests.

I've realised that although generally speaking I seem to end up somewhere left of centre on most issues, I have views on personal responsibility which would be easily recognisable in someone quite a long way into the opposite side of the political spectrum - and nothing I've read about these tossers convinces me that they are doing anything but inventing for themselves an elaborate way in which to avoid their responsibilities, and in the process prostituting some noble and age-old ideas.
 
Spookdaddy said:
One thing's for sure, if they try to use any of that 'natural man controlling the strawman as a legal fiction when entering into a contract' bollocks when they are presented with the bill for that (very...very expensive) billboard space, then they are in for a big old shock - the people who own those sites are ruthless in the pursuit of their own interests.

I've realised that although generally speaking I seem to end up somewhere left of centre on most issues, I have views on personal responsibility which would be easily recognisable in someone quite a long way into the opposite side of the political spectrum - and nothing I've read about these tossers convinces me that they are doing anything but inventing for themselves an elaborate way in which to avoid their responsibilities, and in the process prostituting some noble and age-old ideas.
Click to expand...

Exactly right. I have similar feelings about people who pirate films, music, games etc and offer up noble-sounding justifications about freedom and the evils of the copyright industry, when all it boils down to is not wanting to pay for stuff.

It's amazing the intellectual tangles people will get into trying to justify themselves.
 
The mystery of the 'legal name fraud' billboards
By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine

Scores of posters have appeared around the UK warning of "legal name fraud". What does this mean and who is paying for the adverts?
The message is spelled out in bold capital letters. "LEGAL NAME FRAUD," it says. Then below: "THE TRUTH." And finally: "IT'S ILLEGAL TO USE A LEGAL NAME."

The first time I saw the 10ft by 20ft billboard near my flat in Kilburn, north-west London, I stopped and stared, completely baffled. What was a legal name, exactly? Surely to say it was illegal was an obvious contradiction in terms? And who on earth was behind the advert?

I'm not the only one to have been left puzzled. A quick Google search revealed similar posters have appeared in Birmingham, Dundee, Essex,Gloucester, Grimsby, Guildford, Lincoln, Liverpool, Plymouth, Reading, Southport, Teeside and Truro, and in each the local press has reacted with varying levels of bemusement.

A Facebook page dedicated to posting photos of the billboards includes dozens more. Another website has more than 120 images of "legal name fraud" posters.
But no-one seems to know what message were these adverts actually attempting to get across.

A further web search took me to a site called legalnamefraud.com, which outlines a theory that when your birth was registered, a legal entity - your legal name - was created. But the legal entity "Jane Smith" is distinct from the actual physical person Jane Smith, the website says.
When your parents registered your birth on the certificate, it insists, they unknowingly gave the Crown Corporation ownership of your name. "Simply thus, all legal names are owned by the Crown, and therefore using a legal name without their written permission is fraud."

Does this interpretation of the law have any validity? "Absolutely not. Absolutely none at all," says barrister, law blogger and lecturer Carl Gardner says. "It's a kind of brew of pseudo-legal ideas. It's the equivalent of thinking Harry Potter is science."

The website includes numerous quotes by "Kate of Gaia" as well as articles and videos by her. It links to another website, which gives her full name as Kate Renee Thompson and provides a Canadian email address.

Gardner says legalnamefraud.com's arguments are similar to those of the "Freemen-on-the-Land" movement - a group of individuals who argue they are bound by laws only if they consent to them, often in the hope of escaping debts and criminal charges - and the related "Sovereign Citizen" movement. In 2012 a Canadian judge issued a 192-page judgement dismissing Freemen-style arguments.

The same year, Keith William Thomson - who, it was reported, preferred the name Katherine - from Guelph, Ontario, was described as a a "self-proclaimed" Freeman following an appearance in a Canadian court. In 2010 Thompson reportedly used a Freeman-style defence when charged with a parking offence.

When I emailed Kate of Gaia, she replied asking to be addressed as "JANE DOE-755" and urged me to "google legal name fraud and read the essays like millions of others did....be a real journalist vs. a talking B-B.C. talking pair-rot" (sic). She didn't reply to my enquiry about who funded the billboard posters.

A search on Whois.net, which lists the registered owners of websites, doesn't reveal any information about legalnamefraud.com. On the similarly named legalnamefraud.org, however, the owner is listed as "Dohm Teewatt" at an address in Quebec, Canada. A Dohm Teewatt Twitter page includes lots of posts about "legal name fraud". An email address is also provided by Whois.net, but when I sent it a message I received a reply from a "D-ohm T-Wat" consisting of nothing more than Kate of Gaia's email address.

None of this means that Kate of Gaia paid for the billboard posters - which must have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. It's also not clear why they appear across the UK when she appears to be based in Canada.

There are several videos on YouTube about the billboards, including one made in January in which a man with a north-of-England accent says there are "definitely another couple of hundred on the way".
Other videos narrated by the same voice appear to have been shot in Lancashire, including one which identifies the town as Preston. Although the voice appears not to belong to "Kate of Gaia", the videos were posted using the name Jane Doe-755, suggesting at least some level of co-operation. Another video posted by Jane Doe-755 appears to be narrated by an English woman.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) confirmed to me that it had received seven complaints about the posters on the basis that they were ambiguous or misleading.
"Some questioned whether it would lead law-abiding people into thinking they've committed fraud or a crime by having a name," a spokesman said.

However, the ASA said it did not consider there were grounds for further investigation. While it acknowledged the advert "may appear somewhat confusing to consumers and it wasn't initially clear what it was for or what it means", its message "was not particularly harmful, misleading or likely to cause widespread offence, and unlikely to cause consumers confusion regarding their own name".
For this reason, the ASA had not made contact with the advertiser and cannot shed any light on their identity.

I also drew a blank when I rang Primesight, which owns many of the billboards. A spokeswoman told me that client confidentiality prevented her from disclosing who had paid for the advertising space or how much they had been charged.

Regardless of who funded it, the campaign has won attention for a hitherto fringe theory. David Allen Green, the legal commentator and solicitor at Preiskel & Co LLP who blogs as Jack of Kent, says it is "complete tosh" and warns people against relying on it in court.
He adds: "It is nothing about law, and it is not harmless. Taking this daftness seriously can be legally dangerous. If people try to use such things to avoid their legal obligations they can end up with county court judgments or even criminal convictions. You may as well walk into court with a t-shirt saying 'I am an idiot'." :p

Next time I pass that billboard near my flat, I won't feel any less perplexed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36499750
 
I'm wondering if it's a campaign for a TV show...reason I wonder is the billboard I shot today normally advertises Sky TV shows...always has....I've never seen anything but on that bill board until today.

photo.JPG
photo.JPG
 
The concept of legal identity versus actual is quite a bizarre one when one gets into thinking about it ie one can have actual existence without legal existence, and vice versa.

Still very dumb to spin that out into tosh to try and avoid legal obligations.
 
OneWingedBird said:
one can have actual existence without legal existence, and vice versa.
Click to expand...

Like when someone can't produce documents like a birth certificate, for example? If this happens, as when I read recently about a girl who was accidentally registered at birth as a boy and was unable to marry her fiance until it was corrected, the person still has their legal rights and responsibilities.

For example, a person in Britain who couldn't produce any documents at all, say as an illegal immigrant, will still be treated by the NHS in an emergency and would certainly be arrested and prosecuted if they broke the law. The person still exists even if they can't prove it. ;)
 
There's a Twilight zone or something episode about this idea. In the future, if a person breaks the law they are sentenced to be 'ignored' for a set time. They can't receive medical treatment or use public transport or interact with other people. They usually die of neglect. Anyone trying to help them is also punished.

Not so farfetched really: under early English law, the condition of 'outlawry' sometimes arose when a person broke the law and did not respond to summons to stand trial. An 'outlawed' person could have their property confiscated and their personal right to protection from the law was removed. Think Robin Hood!

The danger of this condition was that anyone could kill an outlaw because he was no longer a person. He had no rights, like the Twilight Zone character. (I'm using male pronouns here because outlawry applied to men over14. Women already had so few rights that they had a condition called 'waiver' instead with the same effect.)

This state of affairs came to an end with the Magna Carta in 1215. Nobody* in England was henceforth legally either below or above the law.

*Even that word, 'nobody', no-body, symbolises the embodiment of the person. The 'person' is an individual, who may carry objects about their person and has personal rights and entitlements. The person is their body.

So, in early times when a body might be all a person had, punishments might be wreaked upon it such as branding or nose-slitting.
Also, a person's dead body is still treated in accordance with its former rights as an individual. It may not be concealed in order to prevent its burial, and must be disposed of respectfully and if possible in accordance with its late owner's religious belief.

Even a small part of a dead body, say a piece found after a disaster like an air crash, has the full entitlement to the respect given to its former owner when alive. Could tell you some stories about that. :eek:

OK, I'll shut up now. ;)
 
escargot1 said:
There's a Twilight zone or something episode about this idea. In the future, if a person breaks the law they are sentenced to be 'ignored' for a set time. They can't receive medical treatment or use public transport or interact with other people. They usually die of neglect. Anyone trying to help them is also punished.
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That rings a bell - did the person have some sort of temporary brand on their forehead?
 
Peripart said:
That rings a bell - did the person have some sort of temporary brand on their forehead?
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I think so, was it installed by a machine?
 
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Not sure - the bell it rang was pretty faint!

Still very unclear about this "legal name" stuff. It does sound like a bunch of barrack-room lawyers who have decided that they've found some ingenious legal loophole (which they haven't, because they're not as clever as they'd like to think), when all they want is to be exempt from laws they don't like.
 
Like when someone can't produce documents like a birth certificate, for example?
Click to expand...

I was thinking more that births aren't registered until a few weeks later, so the person doesn't legally exist until that point.
 
I think we do have a thread around here somewhere about a society in India for people who have been declared legally dead, usually by family members so they can inherit.

The people can't get themselves reinstated because their existence isn't recognised to challenge their legal death.
 
I mentioned a Kipling story elsewhere. I think he wrote a story about this kind of society of the dead as well. Though I think that might have been more people who were declared dead, due to medical reasons.
 
I might be able to shed further light on this. As has been said above, the billboards are related to the Freemen or 'Your Strawman' movement (such as seen here).
Having known a self-professed Freeman for some years (who tirelessly tried to covert me too), I vaguely understand that the objective is to establish a kind of artisan / craft-based economy. Should a Freeman receive a windfall of 'traditional' monies - usually inheritance - it is mostly frittered away into furthering the Freeman cause. So, it would appear that a Freeman has encountered some funds to erect these billboards. Ironically, the Freemen are essentially anarchist-individualists and generally resistant to wider cooperative endeavours. I would go further and say Freemanism almost embodies a pathology.....

Freemen are interesting - judging from my own experiences. They tend to be highly characterful, stubbornly eccentric, creative individuals - unemployable by nature (my partner used to refer to my Freeman friend as "that impossible man") - who live within borderline-schizophrenic states, very prone to hypergraphia (a constant drive to write missives, diaries, tracts, etc.) and persecution complexes that self-aggravate due to constant refusals to compromise.
The same sort of mentality, albeit on a lesser scale, is seen in the anti-TV-licence / anti-BBC culture (which also overlaps with Freemanism). This can be savoured on the ol' YouTube:
 
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Xanatic* said:
I mentioned a Kipling story elsewhere. I think he wrote a story about this kind of society of the dead as well. Though I think that might have been more people who were declared dead, due to medical reasons.
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There was another story by Kipling with people who were considered to be 'dead' - 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes'.
 
egregor said:
I might be able to shed further light on this. As has been said above, the billboards are related to the Freemen or 'Your Strawman' movement (such as seen here).
Having known a self-professed Freeman for some years (who tirelessly tried to covert me too), I vaguely understand that the objective is to establish a kind of artisan / craft-based economy...
Click to expand...

Exactly my experience. One of my closest friends i one. And that is him to a tee.
 
oldrover said:
Exactly my experience. One of my closest friends i one. And that is him to a tee.
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It's a long-shot, but is your friend a male with the ("legal name") initials I.G.? I noticed your location, and my Freeman friend moved to a remote part of Wales awhile ago. Our very last conversation was about his flooded bathroom: he would use kitchen-roll or scraps of paper in the loo rather than toilet roll. It'd always block up his toilet. I thought his choice of loo paper might be due to economical reasons, but he had a wonderful conspiracy theory that all domestic toilet roll contains powdery white poison put there by the authorities to mess up the respiratory functions and genital regions of the stay-at-home. Toilet paper in workplaces, schools and colleges is apparently made differently: it's more "papery" and holds together without fragmenting into noxious powder. He said this industrial-quality workplace toilet paper is unobtainable to the ordinary unemployed man-in-the-street. So, domestic supermarket-bought powdery toilet paper is apparently a capitalist ploy to sub-consciously induce people to stay at their places of work where the toilet paper is superior. Wherever he is now, I hope he has good toilet paper.
 
Oh my God. What an insidious plot.

No, my friend and yours are two different people. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if they knew each other. I believe my friend is well connected with others who share his views.
 
egregor said:
It's a long-shot, but is your friend a male with the ("legal name") initials I.G.? I noticed your location, and my Freeman friend moved to a remote part of Wales awhile ago. Our very last conversation was about his flooded bathroom: he would use kitchen-roll or scraps of paper in the loo rather than toilet roll. It'd always block up his toilet. I thought his choice of loo paper might be due to economical reasons, but he had a wonderful conspiracy theory that all domestic toilet roll contains powdery white poison put there by the authorities to mess up the respiratory functions and genital regions of the stay-at-home. Toilet paper in workplaces, schools and colleges is apparently made differently: it's more "papery" and holds together without fragmenting into noxious powder. He said this industrial-quality workplace toilet paper is unobtainable to the ordinary unemployed man-in-the-street. So, domestic supermarket-bought powdery toilet paper is apparently a capitalist ploy to sub-consciously induce people to stay at their places of work where the toilet paper is superior. Wherever he is now, I hope he has good toilet paper.
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:rofl::rofl::rofl:
In my experience, most workplaces buy the cheapest, nastiest toilet paper they can get away with.
If he will put all kinds of unsuitable stuff down the loo, he can only expect a flood.
 
Mythopoeika said:
In my experience, most workplaces buy the cheapest, nastiest toilet paper they can get away with.
If he will put all kinds of unsuitable stuff down the loo, he can only expect a flood.
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Exactly! Workplace loo roll is cheap stuff that tends to smear rather than wipe. Yep, his theory easily fragments... just like the toilet paper he loathed...
 
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