Introduction - There once upon a time before 9/11 was a guy who used a pen name of W.G. Hill. He wrote a series of articles and books explaining how to operate offshore anonymously and not be found, tracked etc. Perhaps up until the late 1990?s these strategies worked. Today they are extremely out of date. W.G. Hill is not a scam his work just became out of date.

Selling his works today without a disclaimer stating they are seriously out of date is less than ethical. People buy these books as a roadmap through the offshore world and they are anything but that. The offshore world has changed a lot. There are a lot of people who like to read about the offshore world and never do anything about it. For them this book or any other book is fine.

Taking any action based on a book is a bad mistake since the information in books is by definition going to be written at least 18 months previously with 24 to 30 months a more likely time frame. Thus you can be reading out of date material.

Same applies to websites. There are a lot of websites offering offshore solutions that are out of date. For example do a search for Sparbuch. A Sparbuch account was an anonymous Austrian passbook bank account. To operate it you needed the passbook and a pass code. If you used it in Austrian special ATM machines it would allow up to $20,000 a day in transactions all without ever giving any ID. In Dec. 2000 FATF told Austria they were going to be added to the blacklist if they did not drop the Sparbuch accounts. They did so promptly. Now today, in the year 2007 you can still see people selling the Sparbuch accounts on the net. If Austria Banks were allowed to have such accounts many other countries would also. If the ones being sold were real anonymous Sparbuch Accounts, Austria would be violating its agreement with FATF and be on the blacklist. This goes to show you that websites can be greatly out of date (giving them the benefit of the doubt) or the alternative is much worse.

Just in passing W.G. Hill was a big advocate of the Sparbuch account. Selling information, books and reports that has subject matter greatly out of date is less than ethical. Imagine some fellow buys the W.G. Hill reports, books etc learns about Sparbuch accounts and then searches for them on Google, sees sellers and places an order and of course it would be impossible for his order to ever be filled. See how scammers work? Would it surprise me if there were a connection between the sellers of the W.G. Hill literature and the sellers of the Sparbuch accounts? No.

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Smythe Bradley is an expat living in The Republic of Panama. He has published many articles on offshore banking in panama, panama visas and residency, as well as many other expat issues.