When is a bank not a bank?

staff

Mon 07 May 2007

The prudential regulator has cracked down on a fake bank operating out of a Brisbane home. In the Brisbane Federal Court last week, two men, Donald Cameron and Darryl John Wheeley, were restrained from using the word bank after evidence revealed fake currency and cheques were being passed off as legitimate and the word bank had been used illegally. The phoney bank was called the Federal State Bank of Australia and is supposedly an institution of the so-called Independent Sovereign State of Australia.

Cameron is the self-styled Attorney-General and Chief Justice of that supposed country, as well as being the archbishop of the Church of Love and Peace, according to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). Fake currency and cheques, alleged to be valued at more than $500,000, were attempted to be used as payment for rent, printing, telephones, mortgages and legal fees. Fake cheques were presented by unsuspecting recipients to bank branches in Queensland, Sydney and Perth, none of which were honoured, APRA said.

A number of small business owners received the fake currency and cheques as payment for their services. Their debts remain unpaid. The court also ordered Cameron and Wheeley not to advertise, represent or state that they will carry on banking business, not to be involved in issuing any purported cheque or negotiable instrument drawn on the account of the Federal State Bank, and not issue any bill or note for payment. Cameron had previously failed to address an APRA demand that he stop using the words bank, banker, banking or any similar words or phrases. He was declared a vexatious litigant by the Queensland Supreme Court in 1996 and has a criminal record.