I’m being sued for $795m in a US federal court in Wyoming, under a law designed to take down the Mafia. The man suing me is a fugitive British fraudster called Iain Clifford Stamp, who says I caused him to lose $120m by exposing his tax fraud scheme.
This is a strange story, even by the standards of Tax Policy Associates.
Stamp1 used to sell British homeowners a way to magically eliminate their mortgages. It didn’t work, and the High Court said his scheme had “every appearance of deceit, of abuse and contempt of Court”. 2 The FCA froze his assets, and when he ignored the order, a judge sentenced him to 12 months in prison for contempt. Stamp fled to Northern Cyprus.
He’s now selling British people US tax refunds they aren’t entitled to (we described that scheme in May). Stamp says the IRS accepted $600m of refund claims but froze the money after people involved read one of our articles, and he says that cost him $120m.
The English courts have barred Stamp from bringing claims without permission. So he’s suing me in Wyoming instead.
His court filings appear to have been written by AI, and are full of invented cases, misrepresented judgments and extraordinary allegations. The lawsuit is absurd, but the fraud behind it is serious.
Stamp’s schemes have real victims. His mortgage scheme left vulnerable people thousands of pounds out of pocket, and many defaulted on their mortgages. His US scheme is now extracting thousands of dollars from some of the same people, unwittingly dragging them into an international tax fraud.3
And in bringing this lawsuit, Stamp appears to have admitted, in documents filed under penalty of perjury, exactly how that fraud works.
The claim
Stamp filed a $438m defamation4 claim with the court on 6 August.5
The plaintiffs were Stamp, a Wyoming company called MLITR Research LLC (which trades as “Ecclesia Law” and sends me legal threats), and OSN Foundation, a Panamanian “private interest foundation”.6
Here it is:
The document reads very oddly, a sign that it’s AI generated. That’s confirmed by the reliable Pangram AI detector.7
The lawsuit has its own website, also AI generated, with a damages calculator that goes up to $567m. The site’s only outbound link goes to the platform selling Stamp’s tax scheme.
The Wyoming court’s response
There’s a long and inglorious tradition of forum shopping: people trying to sue in the jurisdiction they think is going to be most favourable for them. This is a particularly extreme form of forum shopping, because Stamp is British and I am British, and the obvious (and probably only) place he can sue me is in an English court. But the courts have barred Stamp from suing without permission, so he’s been trying very hard to find somewhere else.
At one point Stamp tried to sue me in the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court (as a war criminal). After the ECHR and ICC unaccountably failed to take up the case, Stamp decided to set up a company in Wyoming and sue me there.
Why Wyoming? Probably because Wyoming is one of only ten states with no anti-SLAPP statute (see the Institute for Free Speech’s 2025 report card).
The tiny flaw in this is that neither a company nor a foundation can appear in a US federal court without a lawyer, and we doubt any lawyer would go near Stamp’s case.
So on 6 October the Wyoming court (on its own initiative) ordered Stamp to explain why the case shouldn’t be dismissed:
Here, it does not appear that the Court has subject matter jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a)(2).
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Plaintiffs MLITR Research LLC, and OSN Foundation shall file their own Complaint or a joinder in Plaintiff Clifford’s Complaint through Wyoming licensed counsel on or before October 16, 2026, or they will be dismissed from this case.
Here’s the court’s “order to show cause”:
Stamp’s answer: Neidle is a racketeer
Stamp’s brilliant idea for getting around the order was to turn his defamation claim into a RICO claim.8
RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, created to go after the Mafia. RICO created both criminal offences and civil rights of action: anyone “injured in his business or property” by racketeering can sue for three times the loss. The great news for Stamp is that it’s federal law, so a RICO claim gets you into federal court even if there’s no US party.9
And that’s what Stamp did. On 13 October he amended his complaint to drop the companies and add a RICO claim, taking the total to $795m.
It is, inevitably, again AI generated.
The small difficulty Stamp has is that there is zero basis for suing a journalist under RICO.
RICO requires that the defendant helped run an “enterprise” with a “pattern of racketeering activity”. The defendant has to commit at least two crimes from a list in the statute (mail fraud, wire fraud, extortion, murder etc). A careful reading of the statute will reveal that journalism is not on that list.
Stamp claims that I published an article which was the “catalyst and signalling mechanism” for a criminal enterprise. Supposedly I conspired with a bunch of people who I’ve never met, spoken to, or had any dealings with:
Stamp admits he has no evidence, but thinks people reading an article suggests a conspiracy by the author.
Stamp plays the same trick a few paragraphs further down. He’s suing Amy Sanger, a former colleague, in a separate case in New York over who owns about $900,000 of gold, silver and cash. Stamp tells the court he believes I’m funding Sanger’s lawyer:
Again he has no evidence, because I’m not. I have zero desire to help Sanger, and have never had any contact with her or her lawyer.
Stamp’s “reasonable inference” rests on her lawyer being expensive and three of her old companies having missed their annual filings in Colorado. That’s not a “reasonable belief”, it’s a guess, and not a very good one.10
The complaint admits Stamp’s fraud
Stamp’s US tax scheme isn’t unusual: the IRS has been warning about it since 2009, and promoters are regularly sent to prison.
The unusual element is that Stamp has now incriminated himself in his own court documents.
His court filings claim that, when a British individual borrows under a loan, their “signature credit energy” means they are owed income by a US bank. This is gibberish, but Stamp often says it, and would presumably claim he believes in it.
The problem is that he then says his trusts file a form telling the IRS that a bank withheld US tax from the borrower:
“the 98-series foreign grantor trusts — armed with HDC standing under UCC §§ 3-203 and 3-302 — file the corrective Form 1099-OID in the stead of the investment bank nominees. … The trust lists the nominee bank as the payer (attaching its specific EIN and CUSIP identifier) and the trust’s own 98-series EIN as the recipient, reporting the OID income and the associated federal tax withheld (Box 4).”
Obviously, that did not happen. The information being put down on the form is false, and I think Stamp must know that it’s false.
Stamp makes clear he expected to take a cut fromthe phoney refund claims:
“When Defendants’ conduct froze the recoupments, Plaintiff lost approximately $120
million in equitable trust property he was entitled to direct and receive — property he intended to shelter in the OSN Foundation for the benefit of the ROS Ecclesiastical Trust”
His declaration, under penalty of perjury, adds that his own trust’s IRS transcript “confirms $4,477,610”, and gives the trust’s taxpayer identification number.
Stamp appears to have done the prosecutor’s work for him.
Is Stamp misleading the court?
Aside from Stamp’s unreasonable “reasonable beliefs”, there are numerous points where his court filings contain statements that appear to be untrue:
- Stamp says that a case called SEC v Wyly supports his position, and “affirmed that foreign grantor trusts operate under private international law and are recognised as distinct taxable fiduciaries”. The judgment says nothing of the kind. The term “private international law” doesn’t appear anywhere in it. The court held that the offshore trusts in question were taxable to their American grantors, and rejected the purported independence of the foreign trusts. Stamp has cited a case in which a US court found that two businessmen used offshore trusts to perpetrate a massive securities fraud and conceal hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the US tax authorities – and is claiming it shows his own offshore trust arrangements are legitimate.11
- Stamp cites another case – “Newsome v. Penobscot 391 F. App’x 783 (10th Cir. 2010) – which doesn’t appear to exist at all.1213
- Stamp swears in his court filings that he is appealing the UK contempt ruling.14 Southwark Crown Court told us in August 2026 that it could find no record of an appeal.
- Stamp’s Wyoming complaint swears that he is “an individual residing in the United Kingdom”. The same complaint says he has been forced into “constructive exile”. 15 Those two statements cannot both be true. He makes the same two contradictory claims in his New York filings.16 His website,17 his videos,18 his “referral” to the International Criminal Court19 and his own affidavit to Southwark Crown Court20 all say he is in Northern Cyprus, keeping out of reach of his prison sentence. I don’t know where he is,21 but all these statements cannot be simultaneously true.
- The lawsuit includes a declaration from Stamp’s associate, William Kimball.22 There is a curious inconsistency in where Kimball claims to live. His sworn declaration from October 2026. says he is a “Wyoming resident”. His filings include a notification from the IRS sent to him at an address in Denver, Colorado. In the New York case earlier this year, his filings gave a New Hampshire business address and included a notarised New Hampshire driving licence.23 That’s consistent with his LinkedIn account (which appears to be actively maintained), and says he works in Portland, Maine.
- The complaint says the IRS “validated” Stamp’s scheme. It also says the IRS froze every dollar of it. Both can’t be true.
- Stamp’s ridiculous damages claims depends on him personally having suffered $120m of loss (because it’s him and his companies who is suing). So he told the court he holds MLITR Research LLC as “bare trustee” – someone who holds property for the benefit of somebody else. But, in the same document, he said he holds the “beneficial and equitable interest” in the company. These statements can’t both be true. And other documents contradict them. William Kimball’s declaration on the same date says that he is the 100% owner of the company – suggesting he, not Stamp, is the bare trustee. And, just the day before, Stamp published documents showing completely different ownerships.24
It’s impossible to say what is a mistake, what is a lie, and what is an AI hallucination.25
My response
Stamp’s website says I’ve been served with the Wyoming claim. That’s not true, and the court documents are clear that I haven’t been.26
Cross-border service of a civil claim isn’t straightforward,27 and I don’t know if Stamp and his AI will ever figure out how to do it. I can’t, however, completely ignore a $795m claim, so I’ve instructed Laura Prather of Haynes Boone, one of America’s leading First Amendment litigation specialists.28 Laura helped write the Texas anti-SLAPP statute, and is the only American on the European Commission’s expert group on SLAPPs.
What happens next?
The court will decide whether the case survives the order to show cause, probably in the next few months.
Stamp should, however, hope that his case does not survive. Once we start making applications to the court he should expect the case to become expensive for him.
Thanks to everyone who’s supported our Stamp investigation, and particular thanks to Laura Prather.
I didn’t ask Laura to review this report – she has many better things to do with her time. US legal content is courtesy of I and V, for which many thanks.
Some documents, images, and videos (c) Iain Stamp and his various entities, and used here for purposes of criticism and review, and in the public interest.
The British fugitive, his $600m US tax fraud, and its 3,000 victims
Liberty Rock’s claim that a magic cheque can pay your tax
Inside a fake tax refund factory
The bizarre UK group selling US tax fraud to hundreds of Britons – and prosecuting its critics
Finance Monthly fabricated an interview with me
Herran Finance – another fake bank at Companies House
Footnotes
Stamp says he changed his name by deed poll to Iain Clifford in 2024, and objects to the name Stamp. In his words: “I absolutely renounced the name ‘Stamp’ in favour of Iain Clifford via a formal Change of Name Deed in 2024.” This appears to have been an attempt to escape the FCA’s restraint order. He told Southwark Crown Court that the order “applied to [IAIN CLIFFORD STAMP], a Person, a Cestui Qui Vie Trust and does not apply to I, Iain Clifford”. The judge’s response: “it is gibberish, and has no proper or recognised meaning in law or otherwise (and, for that matter, common sense)”. See FCA v Stamp [2025] EWCR 6 at paragraphs 35 and 44. The court orders, the FCA’s proceedings and our previous reporting all use “Stamp”, so we’ll continue to do so for consistency. ↩︎
Stamp & Ors v Capital Home Loans Ltd & Ors [2024] EWHC 1092 (KB), 9 May 2024. Over 200 near-identical claims were struck out as totally without merit and an abuse of the court. Stamp’s subsequent £5m libel claim against openDemocracy, over its article on the scheme, was struck out as totally without merit a month later: [2024] EWHC 1574 (KB). A general civil restraint order followed on 25 July 2024 and remains in force until 24 July 2027. This means Stamp cannot bring any claim in an English court without applying for permission which, on past form, he is unlikely to receive. ↩︎
This is a theme. Stamp makes a millions from his schemes, but it’s all at the expense of clients. Stamp used to be a more conventional financial services professional, and twice lost investors’ money in dubious circumstances. At some point after losing his regulatory authorisation, he started selling, and perhaps believing, “sovereign citizen” conspiracy theories like his failed mortgage scheme. ↩︎
Alongside libel, the original complaint pleaded four other torts. “False light” is a US tort with no UK equivalent: publishing something that portrays a person misleadingly (but which isn’t defamatory). Tortious interference means wrongly disrupting someone else’s contracts. Negligent misrepresentation and intentional infliction of emotional distress are pretty much what they sound like. The Wyoming Supreme Court has never recognised false light as a tort at all, and has held that a business can’t bring such a claim anyway: Bextel v Fork Road LLC, 474 P.3d 625 (Wyo. 2020). The other three were hopeless on the facts pleaded: nobody relied on anything, nobody’s contract was broken, and publishing articles is not “extreme and outrageous” conduct. ↩︎
The complaint itself says $132m to $288m, plus up to $150m of punitive damages. The court’s summary was: “up to, and potentially more than, $438,000,000”. ↩︎
MLITR Research LLC, Wyoming Secretary of State ID 2025-001789709, registered in October 2025 at 30 N Gould St Ste R, Sheridan. That is the address of Registered Agents Inc, a bulk registered-agent business. The Wyoming Secretary of State’s own record is available through its business entity search. The company’s letterhead says: “Ecclesia Law is a trading style of MLITR Research LLC, Wyoming, USA.” ↩︎
Pangram scored the original complaint at 92% AI and the amended complaint at 90% – a few human-written paragraphs dropped into a sea of AI slop. Pangram is the only reliable AI-detector we’re aware of. A 2025 University of Chicago working paper by Brian Jabarian and Alex Imas, Artificial Writing and Automated Detection, tested four commercial and open-source detectors and found Pangram “achieving a near zero” rate of false positives and false negatives (nothing else came close). Pangram also publishes a list of other third-party evaluations, including a 2026 peer-reviewed study at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a University of Maryland study. ↩︎
I expect he discovered this route using AI – certainly, if you ask an AI how his claim could be amended to survive the court’s order, and make sure you’re very loose with the facts, it will suggest turning it into a RICO claim. ↩︎
A US federal court can only hear a private dispute of this kind in two situations. The first is where the claim arises under federal law (“federal question” jurisdiction, 28 U.S.C. § 1331). The second is where the parties are from different places: citizens of different US states, or a US citizen on one side and a foreigner on the other (“diversity” jurisdiction, 28 U.S.C. § 1332). Two foreigners suing each other don’t qualify, and adding a US co-plaintiff doesn’t fix it: Grupo Dataflux v Atlas Global Group, 541 U.S. 567 (2004). ↩︎
A declaration under 28 U.S.C. § 1746 is equivalent to a sworn affidavit, and so a knowingly false statement is perjury under 18 U.S.C. § 1621. Stamp’s statements are made “on information and belief”, which means he is swearing to what he believes rather than to what he knows. That’s fine. What’s not fine is swearing to a belief with no basis: Rule 11 requires every factual allegation to have evidentiary support, or at least to be likely to have it after a reasonable opportunity for investigation. ↩︎
In the same section Stamp also cites a pending/undecided case – Melanie Clarke v Deutsche Bank. This is a bizarre attempt by a UK borrower to sue their lender in the US on the basis of Stamp’s sovereign citizen theories. There’s a pending application to dismiss the claim. Stamp thinks the fact it hasn’t been dismissed yet is helpful to his case. It isn’t. ↩︎
It’s cited in the memorandum for the “effects test” of personal jurisdiction. We can find no case of that name in any court. The case that begins at page 782 of that volume, and runs across page 783, is Matias v Sears Home Improvement Products, an Eleventh Circuit race discrimination appeal. ↩︎
There are other less serious citation problems:
“United States v. Bescond, 4 F.4th 63 (2d Cir. 2021)” is cited in the original complaint (paragraph 18) and again in his October memorandum for the proposition that he is not a fugitive. 4 F.4th 63 is Cebollero-Bertran v Puerto Rico Aqueduct & Sewer Authority, a First Circuit case about the Clean Water Act. The real Bescond decision is reported at 24 F.4th 759.
“United States v. Tammy Fu, 752 F.3d 188 (2d Cir. 2014)”, cited in the original complaint (paragraph 19) and the memorandum for the proposition that the English court’s order has no force in the US. 752 F.3d 188 is a page in the middle of City of Pontiac Policemen’s & Firemen’s Retirement System v UBS AG, 752 F.3d 173, a securities case. The real Tammy Fu is here.
“Harrison, 196 F.3d 1538” is cited in the memorandum for the proposition that he can represent himself. We can find no case at that citation. The real case, Harrison v Wahatoyas, L.L.C., is reported at 253 F.3d 552 (10th Cir. 2001). This is a particularly telling error because the case is correctly cited in the court’s order Stamp was responding to (see page 2). ↩︎His declaration of 13 October says: “I am appealing Order 34/2023 in the UK Court of Appeal (Case Refs: 202504306 B3 / 202504307 B3).” The original complaint (paragraph 17) says the order “is under active appeal in the UK Court of Appeal (Criminal Division)” and that a “Perfected Skeleton Argument (7 July 2026) advances five grounds of appeal”. His website is more specific: “On 8 June 2026, the Single Judge, the Hon. Mr Justice Goose, granted a formal extension of time and directed the appeals to proceed to the full Court of Appeal”. ↩︎
The original complaint of 6 August 2026 says at paragraph 12 that “Plaintiff Iain Clifford is an individual residing in the United Kingdom”, and at paragraph 65 that he has suffered “constructive exile, separation from his family, and global humiliation”. The amended complaint of 13 October repeats both claims: paragraph 14 (“an individual residing in the United Kingdom”) and paragraph 52 (“constructive exile and global humiliation”). But on the same date he swore a declaration, under penalty of perjury, saying “I am an individual residing in the United Kingdom”. ↩︎
In GoldSilver LLC v Sanger and Clifford (S.D.N.Y. 1:25-cv-08704) Stamps’ filings are said to come from Portsmouth (see e.g. his letters of 7 June and 2 October 2026). Judge Buchwald’s order of 28 August 2026 records that he “lists a United Kingdom address in his filings”, and in the same order quotes his website: he “lives in constructive exile in North Cyprus facing an unlawful UK bench warrant”. The Portsmouth address is not the Hampshire address on his 2024 deed poll. ↩︎
His page on the European Court of Human Rights, published in July 2025, says: “I have been forced to leave the UK and reside in North Cyprus”, under a heading “Constructive Exile”. ↩︎
In a video published in March 2026 he says: “I’ve had to, you know, move to North Cyprus to avoid the 12-month sentence that flows from Order 34 2023”. The linked clip runs from 0:40 to 1:22 of the original. ↩︎
Stamp’s supposed ICC referral, dated 30 July 2025, gives his “Current Location” as “North Cyprus (in constructive exile)”. ↩︎
The sentencing judgment, FCA v Stamp [2025] EWCR 8 (30 July 2025), records an affidavit from him dated 21 July 2025 in which “he says has been forced into exile in ‘North Cyprus’”, and adds: “Previously, Mr Stamp had said he was in Indonesia; more lately, he says he is in the north of Cyprus.” ↩︎
The emails he sends us from his Gmail account carry UK timestamps: +0000 until 25 March 2026 and +0100 from 30 March, which tracks the UK clock change on 29 March exactly. Northern Cyprus would show +0200 and then +0300. That tells us only what time zone his device is set to, and of course it’s possible he’s living in Northern Cyprus (or somewhere else) but his devices remain on UK time. ↩︎
Kimball appears to be a real person, but exactly who he is, and what he is up to, is not clear. He filed an extraordinary document with the Southern District of New York which can only be described as gobbledegook: “I maintain an active, fully restored Centralized Authorization File (CAF) status with the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (CI) Division under Practitioner CAF Number 0317-31787R, as finalized via IRS Notice CP547. This official reinstatement serves as an absolute administrative confirmation of the systemic legality, mathematical accuracy, and structural soundness of the fiduciary ledger adjustments executed under my authority.”. Naturally it shows every sign of being AI-written. ↩︎
GoldSilver LLC v Sanger and Clifford, S.D.N.Y. 1:25-cv-08704, documents 14-1 (an IRS Form 3949-A giving an address in Stratham, New Hampshire) and 15-4 (an IRS verification form notarised in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, in January 2026). ↩︎
Stamp’s website published drafts of Stamp and Kimball’s declarations. In those drafts, Kimball swore he was the “55% owner”, and Stamp swore that the company’s members were “William Kimball, 55%, and Kieran Deether, 45%”. ↩︎
Certainly, aspects of the website seem entirely fictional. The website’s “letter before claim” appears to be hallucinated: it is a different document from the actual letter before claim Stamp sent me (which is about ten times longer). ↩︎
Stamp’s own “certificate of service“, filed the day after that page went up, says the documents were filed with the court, and only the court. Rule 4(l) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires proof of service to be filed with the court. ↩︎
A US claim is normally served on a defendant in England under the Hague Service Convention, through the Foreign Process Section at the Royal Courts of Justice, or by one of the other routes in Rule 4(f) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Stamp asked the Wyoming court in August for permission to serve me by email and by Royal Mail instead. The court has not ruled on that request. ↩︎
Chambers USA ranks Laura in Band 1 nationwide for First Amendment litigation. She received the inaugural American Lawyer Media Lawyer of the Year award in 2019. ↩︎
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