Over The Top: WSJ Editorial Exposes Massive Fraud in Abuse Claims Against Boy Scouts

Lawyers at the trough, making phony abuse claims

The abuse industrial complex has found a new target it would seem. After grabbing nearly $4 billion from the Catholic Church over the last three decades, contingency lawyers are now looking to score big bucks from the Boy Scouts in its pending bankruptcy proceedings.

But as a stunning editorial in the Wall Street Journal explains, the Boy Scouts' bankruptcy has set off a virtual feeding frenzy among low-life lawyers to bring thousands and thousands of clearly phony claims.

An orgy of dishonesty

When the Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy last year, the organization believed it would be facing about 1,700 sex abuse claims based on pending and threatened claims. But since then, according to the Journal, tort lawyers have turned to Wall Street litigation funding sources to hire third-party brokers to conduct online saturation marketing campaigns, and the number of claims suddenly ballooned to 95,000, an increase of nearly 5,500%.

The fraud is simply off the charts. According to the Journal:

• Forensic evidence suggests that "attorneys likely didn't even read what they filed."
• One plaintiff's attorney allegedly "signed 890 'proof of claims' in a single day – one every 32 seconds, assuming eight hours. Another looks to have signed nearly 800 blank forms, allowing others to fill them in later." Thousands of proofs of claim were never even signed by a claimant.
• An investigation found that "11,676 claims appear to be duplicates. More than 7,000 do not identify a perpetrator. Some 4,700 do not identify any affiliation with scouting. More than 1,500 have already been the subject of litigation.
• "A review of public information also found claimants who had been convicted of tax fraud, forgery, identity theft, false insurance claims, and child molestation."

Fraud only begets more fraud

Regular readers of this site know that fraudulent abuse claims against the Church are rampant. Some priests have resorted to suing their accusers. Recently, more priests are calling out the "sex abuse racket" for what it is after many years of quietly accepting it.

The lesson here: Fraud only begets more fraud, and it will not stop until someone finally shines a light upon it. We applaud the public scrutiny of the fraud in the Boy Scouts' bankruptcy. But it's now high time for bishops to finally speak out as well to put an end to these ongoing injustices.

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Have you read it yet? Read about the rampancy of false accusations against priests in the new book by David F. Pierre, Jr. of TheMediaReport.com, The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church … available at Amazon.com.