Peter of England, and the WeRe "Bank" Scam

Credit: Peter of England's Facebook Page

Peter Smith, a.k.a. Alan Peter Michael Smith and, most famously, as Peter of England, is either insane, or else a very clever scammer. His audacious (one must admit) scam is to open his own "bank" -- the so-called "WeRe Bank".

The idea behind the WeRe "bank" is the old 'banks create money out of thin air' story, only this time Peter took it one step further and added, 'then so can I!'. Essentially, you send him a promissory note for 150,000 pounds, thus "creating" assets in the WeRe "bank", and in return receive a checkbook for your new "account". You can now, according to Peter, pay all your debts (esp. mortgage and council taxes) in WeRe checks.

This would make some economic (if not practical or legal) sense if the promissory note were real - that is, if you actually took out a loan for 150,000 pounds, got the money, and used it to pay your other creditors, although why you would use a shady character like Peter of England to do so and not a reputable institution is another issue. Peter's selling point, however, is that the mere fact that you signed a promissory note creates 150,000 pounds even if you never pay back a penny. So it is a "promissory note" that from the start you promise not to pay.

There seems to be a small flaw here somewhere - to wit, Peter "forgot" that the only reason real mortgages or other loans are treated as having value is because the lender actually pays the money back over time. The mortgage crisis (which the likes of Peter love to go on and on about) was caused, inter alia, by the fact that mortgages were given to people who the banks should have known would not be able to pay them back. Once that became clear, those mortgages became worthless, as bad loans.

If Peter's 'banks create money magically' theory were true, there would have been no mortgage crisis, since whether or not the lender actually pays back the mortgage would have been irrelevant. What's more, even if Peter were correct and the banks did create money for nothing, scamming everybody, it would still be morally wrong to do the same - just like the fact that some people make money by extortion or blackmail hardly justifies one doing it.

After all, doesn't it logically follow from Peter's own two claims:

1) 'The banks are scamming you'
2) 'I, Peter of England, can do the same thing the banks do'

that

3) 'I, Peter of England, am scamming you'?

In other words, it's a something-for-nothing scam of the usual type, which is seen on his own forum, the aptly-named (in its something-for-nothing intention) get out of debt free (GOODF) forum. Needless to say, as the quatloos! thread on the subject (150 pages!) notes, it doesn't work. Peter's shady past and lack of license to run a bank aside, the WeRe "bank" has no assets except for the worthless "promissory notes", nobody accepts the worthless "checks", and those who attempted to pay anything with them in the real world found out it doesn't work in short order, as the "checks" bounced.

Peter has a different explanation for why it doesn't work. Naturally, it's all an evil conspiracy involving everybody in the world except Peter and his "clients". Here is his latest Facebook post (see above for a link to his Facebook page), about the REAL MEANING(tm) of the recent meeting between American leaders and 'president Xi' (that is, Xi Jinping of China):

Roman Number Xi (XI) = 11 = President Xi

President 11 = President XIAIIB = Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank = Solomonic Kabbalistic Numerology encoded as follows:

-A = Aleph but can be Tav so 1 or 22

B = bet 2 or 21so 

AIIB = 22112 for "Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank" read as follows: This is a direct numerological clone of the 11 Symbol of Twin Towers, 11 Downing Street, Armistice Date of WW1 11/11/11

...and so on (and on and on, as one can see in his Facebook page).

When he is not discovering the REAL MEANING(tm) of everything, he is threatening his perceived enemies (the banks, most of the world's famous people, Quatloos! posters, etc.) with everything from lawsuits to arrests and summary executions for being part of the worldwide conspiracy that keeps the people in chains, presumably by not allowing them to magically eliminate their debts by saying Shazam! - or whatever the magic words that make you debt-free are supposed to be. There is some disagreement among the GOODFy, or perhaps GOOFy, community, whether those words are 'Magna Carta', 'accepted for value', 'unilateral contract', 'X of the family Y', 'wet ink signature', 'flesh and blood person, not a strawman individual', or something else.

One wonders if Peter is a scammer pretending to be insane, or truly insane. The evidence, I think, is inconclusive: on the one hand, he took a lot of naive people's money for nothing; on the other hand, he has a long record of similar (and even less logical) statements, all of them having the paranoid's mark of, as Aldous Huxley put it, 'living in a world of terrifying significance', where everything has deep, secret meaning, in this case 'Solomonic Kabbalistic Nuremological' one, whatever that is.