Forum shopping in Wyoming – by Dan Neidle (UK)
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.
Stamp 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”. 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.
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 defamation claim with the court on 6 August.
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”.
The document reads very oddly, a sign that it’s AI generated. That’s confirmed by the reliable Pangram AI detector.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the interests of brevity, only the first 40% or so of my original article has been published here.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Dan Neidle is the founder of Tax Policy Associates Ltd based in London. See also:
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