Kurt Eichenwald Followed Trump’s NFT Breadcrumbs To A House In Cheyenne Noted For ‘A Rogues Gallery Of Criminals’

I can’t say as how this is surprising, but still, with all the other lawsuits and charges of illegal doings swirling around Donald Trump, you would have thought he would have been a bit more circumspect regarding his NFT trading cards company. You would have thought and you would have been wrong. Apparently the man not only doesn’t have an honest bone in his body, he doesn’t have a lick of common sense either.

Trump’s trading cards are made possible via a licensing agreeing with a company called NFT International LLC.  Everything Trump does is a licensing agreement. He’s the brand, the licensor pays for the brand, produces whatever the product is bearing his name and likeness, Trump Steaks, Vodka, University, whatever. Trump gets money up front and a slice of revenue on the back end.

So it is with the trading cards. The difference is that the licensor, NFT International, is quite a piece of work. This is from Kurt Eichenwald’s substack page, The Threats Within:

But the fun really starts with unraveling NFT International. It is spread out all over the place. Anyone who purchases one of the Trump Trading Cards (and perhaps feels like they have been scammed – which they have) would obviously reach out to NFT International through its contact listing on the Collecttrumpcards.com website. The address they will receive is 6300 Sagewood Drive, Suite 427, Park City, UT. But that’s not where NFT International really is. In fact, there are no offices there. Rather, the address provided to purchasers as the contact site for NFT International is a mailbox at a UPS Store in a strip mall. A nice strip mall, but a strip mall, nonetheless.

So where is NFT International? Not even close to Park City. Instead, according to its partnership registered (in Delaware of course), it is registered 480 miles away in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at the address 1712 Pioneer Avenue.

When I saw the Pioneer Avenue address, my mouth dropped. I know that address. I have seen it before. It is connected to some of the sleaziest entities to be found in this country, including international criminals.

NFT International was set up by Wyoming Corporate Services, a company that registers shell companies. Wyoming Corporate says it acts legally but has no idea who is running the secret entities that it registers. “We recognize that business entities (whether aged, shell or traditional) may be used for both good and ill,” the owner of Wyoming Corporate Services, Gerald Pitts wrote in an email to Reuters in 2011.

And then Eichenwald notes, as we do here on a daily basis, “Oh, but it gets worse. So much worse. The final address of NFT International – along with scores of other companies – is 2710 Thomes Avenue, Cheyenne, Wyoming. And here it is.”

And this is where we get to the “rogues gallery of criminals.” This unprepossessing little dwelling is home to forty companies established by Pitts. Of those forty companies, over a dozen have been named in civil lawsuits charging failure to pay taxes and/or securities fraud and trademark infringement. So of course it makes sense that Donald Trump would be doing business here, right? These are his kind of folks.

The companies registered by Wyoming Corporate at 1712 Pioneer, ending up with the final address at 2710 Thomes Avenue, includes a number operated by a rogue’s gallery of criminals. They have included a New Jersey company (strangely called New York Machinery) that sold military car and tractor trailer parts to the Defense Department. While NYM contracted to and confirmed it had sold the military parts conforming with Pentagon specifications, it didn’t. Instead, in more than three dozen military contracts, according to court documents, it provided parts produced by a Turkish company owned by Hace Galip Dedekarginoglu – also the owner of NYM.

This is right up Trump’s alley. And of course, there’s more. Eichenwald writes of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, a jewel of a man who was once ranked “eighth most corrupt official in the world” by Transparency International, a watchdog group. He was sentenced to prison for eight years in California in 2004 for money laundering and extortion. He had a scam which used shell companies and offshore bank accounts to hide stolen Ukrainian government money. Do you love it?

And here’s another star in the crook firmament. Ira N. Rubin. Rubin used front companies, 18 of them, at least, to conceal his role as a credit card processor. He got sued in 2006 by the Federal Trade Commission because he took a fee from customers’ bank accounts for a credit card and then the cards never got delivered, but he kept the fee.

So you have to admit, none of this is surprising. In fact, it is vintage Trump. What would be surprising if if we found Trump dealing with only people of impeccable credentials and sterling reputation. That would be the heart stopper. Not this.

And here’s the cherry on the sundae.

I am. Because I had every confidence that his cultists would fork over their cash. He usually just lies and tells them he is going to spend it fighting election fraud, or on his endorsed candidates. At least they got something this time. Sort of. pic.twitter.com/M6XrR3QIPw

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) December 16, 2022

Maybe he did.  Who knows? As was stated when this entire thing got going, this is Trump’s way of doing an end run around federal election law. Maybe this was yet another successful Trump grift. Or, maybe this troll just can’t resist the opportunity to take a dig at the libs, while right-wing media goes bonkers trying to figure out a favorable spin to Trump’s audacious move, which so incensed so many MAGAs.