Untangling fraud

LANDER — Patricia Nelson has been cutting hair at Profiles Hair Salon in Riverton for more than 20 years. Like many small local businesses, she’s the owner-operator; she’s invested in her business by purchasing the building and spends her days cutting and blow-drying right alongside the other hairdressers in the salon. 

Recently, she came into work and found an unusual piece of mail. It came from the Fremont County assessor’s office, and it said that she had just 15 days to respond. 

The documents inside listed a registered agent for Billecom LLC, Yohann Billereau, at her address – a company and a person she had never heard of. 

“Nowhere on it has my husband or [my] name, and we’ve owned the building for 22 years,” Nelson said. “The only thing that had our name on it was the envelope.” 

She consulted Fremont County Assessor Tara Berg, who explained to her what was going on: someone had used her address to falsely register for a business. 

The registration documents were signed by a woman named Lovette Dobson, whose name crops up over and over again in Berg’s records of these fraudulent filings. 

Some of the names that are seen repeatedly on false filings are real people and some probably aren’t, but they’re universally almost impossible to track down. 

When Berg calls the number on file, she’s either directed somewhere else or told that the person answering the phone doesn’t have to disclose anything about the business. 

“I was just so shocked,” Nelson commented. “There’s 180,000 of them at North Gould in Sheridan, and they don’t have to answer to anybody,” Berg said. “I don’t think anybody realized the magnitude of this…They’re getting away with it, and they’re using local people’s addresses.” 

False filings 

Wyoming often prides itself on being business-friendly, and it has some of the most open business filing regulations in the country. Despite its small population, Wyoming has the second-highest number of registered entities in the nation, behind only Delaware. 

But some Wyoming residents, like Nelson, are starting to feel the negative impacts of the gaps and loopholes in those regulations. 

Earlier this year, Berg testified to the Wyoming Legislature’s Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee about the issues she’s encountered. 

Some of what she’s unearthed, such as finding hundreds of businesses registered to a single address in Lyons Valley, is actually perfectly legal in Wyoming. Other things she, county assessors across the state, and the secretary of state’s office have found are like what Nelson encountered: A business falsely registered to a Wyoming address, entirely unknown to the Wyoming citizen who actually lives or works there. 

There’s little on the front end of the filing process that requires anyone to prove anything. 

A person simply fills out the paperwork, sends it in and has a Wyoming-registered business. 

In theory, some of these documents have to have a public notary’s signature — but since that isn’t verified, it’s easily faked. 

The argument in favor of keeping Wyoming’s regulations as they are — or keeping any changes as minimal as possible — is that being as inviting as possible to businesses is beneficial for Wyoming’s economy. 

There are many attorneys and Certified Public Accountants in Wyoming who serve as legitimate registered agents for real businesses and value the ability to protect their clients’ privacy and see the positives of welcoming those businesses to register here. 

Meanwhile, county assessors such as Berg are required to assess any business holdings or equipment in the state for taxation purposes — and they spend hours or days digging, only to find a series of deadends. 

Wyoming state statute outlines the penalty for “willfully or knowingly” filing false documents with the secretary of state’s office: a $2,000 fine, or “not more than two years in prison.” 

In Nelson’s view, the penalty is too light to actually deter fraud. 

“It’s a slap on the wrist,” she said. “They’ve got nothing to lose.” 

‘They’re all our constituents’ 

“I’m elected by the people of Fremont County to represent them,” Berg commented. “The magnitude of this affects people who don’t even know they’re being affected…They’re all our constituents.” 

Recently, Berg discovered a disturbing new variation on this fraud in Lander. 

A business wasn’t just registered to the address of an elderly Lander resident; it listed her as the registered agent. She worked with the woman and her family so they could submit the appropriate paperwork to let the secretary of state’s office know that this was fraud. 

But these things can be hard to catch, and it’s possible that there are other Fremont County residents whose names are listed as the registered agents for fraudulent businesses they’ve never even heard of. 

“There are real impacts to our citizens,” Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander) pointed out. “They’re hurting our people.” 

“People used to come in here and say ‘I’m afraid of title fraud.’ I used to say, ‘That doesn’t happen here,’” Berg said. 

She doesn’t have that kind of confidence anymore. 

Long before Berg testified, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray and his office started tracking down business fraud in the state. But like Berg, the secretary of state’s office has few statutory resources available to it. Only the legislature can change the state statutes that govern what’s required on the front end and what recourse is available when possible fraud is discovered. 

“In Wyoming, if you [act as a registered agent] as a profession, if you have more than ten clients you have to register,” Case explained. 

Currently, companies that are registering dozens of businesses have found a way around this, circumventing the higher level of scrutiny legitimate registered agents such as attorneys are subject to. 

The Elections, Corporations and Political Subdivisions Committee appointed a working group earlier this year, consisting of legislators (including Case and Rep. Pepper Ottman, R-Riverton), Berg, representatives from industry, and others. The secretary of state’s office and this group brought forward several proposed pieces of legislation to help combat these issues, some of which will advance to the legislative floor in 2025. 

It remains to be seen whether all – or any – of these will pass. 

Burden of proof 

“We had to prove we owned it, and they had to do nothing,” Nelson explained. 

When she first called the Wyoming secretary of state’s office, she said, the young man who answered the phone told her that the issue wasn’t under the office’s purview and she’d have to hire a lawyer. 

She went to see Berg, who clarified that the issue at hand – someone having falsely registered a different business at her address – was actually relevant to the secretary of state’s office and explained the process she would have to go through to prove that it was a false filing. 

Nelson had to fill out a sworn affidavit and provide the secretary of state’s office with information proving she owned the business. 

In her opinion, though, the onus shouldn’t be on her. She owns the property, and has been an established local business for over two decades; why should she have to prove that the business’ registered agent isn’t there instead of them having to prove that they are when they fill out the paperwork? 

“It’s just a scary thing, that you could walk in and say ‘I own your farm, I own your business’ … To me, there ought to be a paper trail,” she remarked.

“This is wrong – stop it on the front end,” Berg agreed. 

Nelson and Berg aren’t the only ones who have suggested there should be some kind of requirement for proof a person is affiliated with an address when he or she files the paperwork. 

The concept isn’t too far off from existing requirements in other arenas, either. 

To get a Wyoming driver’s license, you need to demonstrate proof of residence; to open a bank account you similarly need proof of address, a regulation explicitly intended to prevent identity theft and fraud. 

A statewide issue 

Berg has been receiving phone calls from around the country, assessors in other states tracking fraud back to Wyoming. 

The other day, a call came in from New Jersey, tracing a business that supposedly was in a historic New Jersey neighborhood that doesn’t allow rentals – with a registered agent listed in Wyoming.

“It’s big and it’s broad,” Berg said. 

She only knows of two instances of these fraud cases in which someone’s land was actually taken over: one in Albany County and one in Sublette County. Laramie County may be seeing some title fraud, as well, but to Berg’s knowledge that investigation is still ongoing. 

Not every assessor in the state has the time, staff, and depth of community knowledge to be able to track these down. 

With Fremont County’s small population and her deep familiarity with its residents, Berg often can recognize names and addresses well enough to realize when something’s off. And although she’s now short-staffed, when she started looking into the issue her staff was able to take the time to help go down the rabbit hole of calling a number that redirects to an office that redirects to another. 

Although fraudulent business filings are cropping up across the state, an overwhelming number of them are registered to a single address in Sheridan, on North Gould Street. 

Sheridan and Fremont Counties have started tracking both genuine registered agents and cases of fraud and helping people learn what to do if someone has falsely registered a business at their address. 

Among the pieces of legislation that will move forward from the committee to the next legislative session is one draft bill to allow county treasurers and assessors to request information about businesses and registered agents from the secretary of state’s office and another that would hold these companies to the same standards as attorneys and CPAs who serve as registered agents. 

Case noted that these are minor changes, simply building on what already exists to hopefully begin to give the secretary of state’s office and county officials a little more capacity to investigate and prevent fraud. 

“We can have a balance with this [remaining business-friendly] that doesn’t put our taxpayers in a position of having to defend their property,” Berg remarked. 

“It’s not like you’re taking five bucks away, you’re taking somebody’s property,” Nelson commented. “We need legislation to stop this…Something needs to change — like yesterday.”