UPDATED 22:29 EDT / NOVEMBER 15 2018

BLOCKCHAIN

Acting attorney general linked to company that promoted a time travel cryptocurrency

Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker has been linked to a company that among its various offerings was pitching a time travel cryptocurrency.

Whitaker (pictured below), appointed to replaced Jeff Sessions by the Trump administration Nov. 7, sat on the advisory board of a company called Worldwide Patent Marketing from 2014 until the company was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in 2017.

The company primarily pitched itself as offering ways for inventors to bring their inventions to market but primarily failed to do so, fraudulently raising tens of millions in the process. Worldwide Patent Marketing did, however, bring some products to market, and the list is so bizarre that they couldn’t be made up.

Alongside somewhat more mainstream products such as a “masculine toilet” with a specially designed bowl for “well-endowed men” and underwear pitched with a tagline of “how are your balls feeling today?” Worldwide Patent Marketing was also pitching Sasquatch dolls with a video claiming that “DNA evidence collected in 2013 proves that Bigfoot does exist.”

Then there was the time travel cryptocurrency. Called Time Travel Technologies, the product was described as “a theoretical time travel commodity tied the price of bitcoin.”

180927-oag_matt_whitaker_official_port

How far, or to what point in the future, the time travel cryptocurrency progressed is not clear, since the FTC subsequently shut the company down for fraud.

Exactly how involved Whitaker was in the company is currently open to conjecture. A number of members of the advisory board say they never agreed to be on the board or were tricked into doing so.

That said, Fox News reported that Whitaker made a phone call on behalf Worldwide Patent Marketing and threatened the owner of a scam reporting site over a negative review it published. This suggests that he was not only a willing advisory board member but a willing participant in the company’s activities.

Whitaker denies any involvement in fraudulent activities at the company. The Justice Department noted that “any stories suggesting otherwise are false,” but it has yet to detail publicly his precise involvement with the company or the time travel cryptocurrency.

Image: Goodfreephotos/ Dept. of Justice

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.

  • 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
  • 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.

Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.