"[Wohl] pitched investors on a scheme to use fake news stories to manipulate political betting markets for profit."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jacob... censored*-up-to-game-political-betting-sites
The Daily Beast: Will Sommer 05.01.19 8:00 AM ET
"A conservative activist familiar with Wohl’s operations told The Daily Beast that Wohl had claimed in the past that he could profit by manipulating political betting markets. A phone number listed on ACPI’s now-deleted Facebook page has also been the source of bizarre claims about Wohl and Burkman in text messages to reporters at The Daily Beast and other outlets, apparently in an attempt to fool reporters and generate fake news stories about them."
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https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/jacob-wohl-bolt-intelligence/
Jacob Wohl is tied to at least 5 fake intelligence firms
The Daily Dot: Claire Goforth 2019-05-01 01:51 pm | Last updated 2019-05-02 09:03 am
"It was previously known that Wohl was affiliated with three fake intelligence companies—Potomac Intelligence, SureFire Intelligence, and Arlington Center for Political Intelligence. Bolt Intel and Bolt Intelligence, which may be synonymous, are new."
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"The FBI Appears to Have an Active Criminal Investigation Into Jacob Wohl’s Surefire Intelligence"
The FBI Appears to Have an Active Criminal Investigation Into Jacob Wohl’s Surefire Intelligence
Law and Crime: by Colin Kalmbacher | 1:05 pm, April 2nd, 2019
"The Young Turks journalist Ken Klippenstein recently filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents pertaining to Surefire Intelligence. The FBI, however, declined to provide those records, and the excuse used by the law enforcement agency to justify their denial suggests a criminal probe is currently underway."
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Ultimately, I think one of Wohl's main goals at this point is to see how high he can trend on Twitter without having a named Twitter account (probably some kind of betting market involved there) and to see how much traffic he can direct toward his puppet-master projects just by getting his name in the news by any means possible.
Several times recently when Wohl has come up in the news, a Twitter search on his name returns sometimes hundreds of retweets an hour of a petition against Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar or hit-pieces on The Hill Reporter or Michael Avenatti, etc. Bot-farms and troll-armies are real, sadly.
I don't actually believe he is as inept as if often reported. I think it is all part of the plan. I suspect he plans to get caught. It gives him much more free coverage than when no one is thinking about him. He has enough lawyers around him (Burkman and his father most directly) to know exactly where the line is on criminality vs civil complaints. I also don't think he is as "dumb" as if often portrayed, particularly when misspellings and poorly worded grandiose claims in his documents and schemes are pointed toward as evidence. It has long been suspected that certain email scams are successful because, not in spite, of these tactics: they are more likely to draw in gullible individuals, possibly who are convinced they will have the upper hand in the con because the target thinks the con artists are too dumb/ignorant/etc.
There's a reason Nigerian scammers are so obvious in their emails
Business Insider: Libby Kane May 28, 2014, 10:25 AM
"According to new book "Think Like A Freak," a follow-up to the popular "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the scam's obviousness is its chief selling point."
"... it's in the scammers' best interest to minimize the number of false positives who cost them effort but never send them cash. By sending an initial email that's obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets. If you trash their email, that's fine. They don't want
you, someone from whom there's virtually no chance of receiving any money. They want people who, faced with a ridiculous email, still don't recognize its illegitimacy.
As Herley tells the book's authors, "Anybody who doesn't fall off their chair laughing is exactly who they want to talk to."
