Misleading Use of the Term "Exchange" in Connection With Sales/Investment of Structured Settlement Payments 2017

by Structured Settlement Watchdog

Income Stream Exchange, The Annuities Exchange, Settlement Exchange are some of the websites that purport to be structured settlement exchanges but wholly mislead consumers because they are not true exchanges.

Two interpretations of exchange

1. An exchange is a marketplace in which securities, commodities, derivatives and other financial instruments are traded. The core function of an exchange is to ensure fair and orderly trading, as well as efficient dissemination of price information for any securities trading on that exchange. Exchanges give companies, governments and other groups a platform to sell securities to the investing public.  Such exchanges and its participants are regulated.

2.  a verb meaning to change something for something else of a similar value or type:

This shirt is too small – can I exchange it for one in a larger size?

Before we left the meeting, she and I exchanged phone numbers (= I told her mine and she told me hers)  [ source: Cambridge Dictionary]

 

• If you merely operate a storefront, peddling the rights acquired by one company or a group of related companies or brands, it is not an exchange.
• It is clear that when you sell structured settlement payment rights through any of these scam labeled exchanges that you are not changing something for something else of a similar value or type.

Some examples of the websites and/or entities being marketed as settlement exchanges or structured settlement exchanges:

• The Annuities Exchange,started by Michael Borkowski, formerly of Access Funding and its "reincarnation" Reliance Funding, with those entities and Borkowski personally, each a Defendant in multiple law suits stemming from the Baltimore City lead paint victim exploitation that came to the fore after the death of Freddie Gray and the award winning coverage by Terrence McCoy in the Washington Post.
  
• Income Stream Exchange,  started by convicted felon T Allen Dyer  (a/k/a Todd Dyer) AFTER having already served jail time for various financial crimes. including fraud and a Ponzi scheme) and was recently sentenced to 15 years in jail for additional financial crimes. After scathing news appeared about him in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2015 (also reported by me here), Dyer emailed me to tell me that he no longer has an interest in the website (being marketed as an exchange, an unregulated exchange). Yet despite a travel ban prior to sentencing, Dyer pleaded to the judge to be able to go to California to consult on Income Stream Exchange.   
  

It's bad enough that there is no licensing requirement or regulatory oversight dealing with how consumers and investors are solicited, but to insinuate an structured settlement exchange and what that implies to both investors and consumers is ludicrous.