Special Report

Bogus blogs, dodgy websites

A complex digital edifice of websites, blogs, and social media profiles has been concocted around businessman Thomas Salzano in an apparent bid to obscure his past.

• Jacob Adelman

  Staff Writer
• Published 

  Nov 23, 2021

If you were wondering whether to invest in real estate with one Thomas N. Salzano, and you hunted carefully on the internet, you might eventually learn about his business with the techy name Norvergence.

Much of what you learned wouldn’t be reassuring.

Like how the business was called a Ponzi scheme in a legal complaint. Or how Salzano marketed a bogus internet gizmo called “the Matrix Box.” Or maybe how regulators slammed him with a $50 million fine.

Unless, that is, your online search went off in other interesting directions.

Then you might land on the website for the similarly named Norvergence Foundation, where you would learn about that group’s abiding interest in the climate and its deep roster of international activists.

Your search might take you to the dozens of stories published by media outlets around the world with commentary by Norvergence or its chief environmentalist, a shadowy figure named George Stacey.

Or you might also come across the myriad “Thomas Salzano” personae — a dog trainer, a hairdresser, a ”famous” poet, a “renowned” photographer — who appear on their own websites and blogs scattered across the internet.

The real Thomas Salzano, 63, who is awaiting trial in New Jersey on fraud charges, did not respond to questions for this article about the Norvergence Foundation.

One possible reason for his silence: The foundation all but certainly does not exist. It and the Salzano sites appear to have been manufactured as part of a global ruse to blot out online remnants of the actual NorVergence Inc., the telecom firm.

Experts see the concoctions as one more example of a growing misuse of the web in which disinformation is spread to cover up past misdeeds.

Even as some lament the long memory of the internet or lobby for a “right to be forgotten” — the call to have some negative private information removed from online — those who can afford it are tackling the issue by simply flooding the internet with lies.

Increasingly, said Jane Lytvynenko, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy Shorenstein Center, unsuspecting people must navigate an online world in which “anybody can pay to manage their reputation.”

One need not even leave the Philadelphia area to find other attempts at online obfuscation surrounding businesspeople in unflattering situations.

As high-interest lender Joseph LaForte was building up his ill-fated Philadelphia-based business, Par Funding, Google searches for his name would have led to his advice for millennial investors in a Foreign Policy magazine knockoff or his profile on the collegiate-sounding website Academia.edu.

This all helped eclipse reports of his past convictions for running a $14 million mortgage scam and an unlawful offshore gambling operation.

Whoever is behind the Norvergence Foundation sites took it all several steps further, actively working to insinuate the group’s name into stories on independent news websites as a reputation booster.

In one case, a naive freelance journalist all the way in Saudi Arabia was hoodwinked into quoting the made-up environmentalist George Stacey in stories published by respected news outlets.

Phil Napoli, a professor who researches online disinformation at Duke University’s public policy school, compared the tactics with those of the Russian operatives who interfered with the 2016 elections by using bogus online identities to hire freelance writers for a fake left-wing news site.

No specific laws forbid posting deceptive content on the internet. But whoever is behind the manufactured websites could find themselves in legal trouble if securities regulators view the information as “an illegal misstatement of a material fact,” said Arthur Laby, a director at the Rutgers Center for Corporate Law and Governance.

“Bombarding the internet with a series of false or phony websites could violate securities laws if done for the purpose of obscuring other truthful online information that may be important to investors,” said Laby, who previously worked as a lawyer with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Kenneth Wisnefski, chief executive of an online-reputation management firm, WebiMax in Ocean City, N.J., said inventing decoy personae is something practiced in the darker regions of his profession.

While manipulating search results to accentuate the positive and play down the negative is common in his business, most of his peers draw the line at making stuff up, Wisnefski said.

“It’s clearly an attempt to have people’s opinions changed based on information that isn’t true,” he said.

After being contacted for this article by The Inquirer, Google suspended the business profile maintained with the search giant under the Norvergence Foundation’s name. The tech company also stopped links to websites connected to the group and to the Salzano personae from appearing as paid-for “Google Ad” results on its search pages.

“Where there’s been a violation of our policies, we’ve taken action,” Google said in a statement. “Overall, our systems are very effective at not only prioritizing relevant and reliable information across Google products, but also fighting spam and misleading or scammy content.”

A lounge, no offices

NorVergence lists its address as being on the sixth floor of a building in Guttenberg, N.J., a town across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The building, called Green Roof, contains 39 condos. A residents’ lounge comprises its sixth floor. There are no known offices in the building.

Green Roof’s developer is National Realty Investment Advisors, or NRIA, a real estate firm with a big Philadelphia footprint that’s being investigated by the FBI and federal and state financial regulators. Those investigations have yielded no charges.

Thomas N. Salzano, who until recently worked at the Secaucus, N.J.-based firm, was arrested this year by the FBI for allegedly using phony loan papers to try to extract more money from an existing NRIA investor.

NRIA depends on new investors to pay existing ones and fund its operations, since its real estate activities don’t — at least not yet — generate sufficient revenue, as The Inquirer has reported. The firm has raised nearly $560 million from more than 1,400 investors as of the fall, and has told regulators it plans to raise almost half a billion more.

An NRIA spokesperson did not respond to questions for this article. The company was not charged in the FBI case against Salzano.

Salzano’s actual position while at NRIA is one of the mysteries surrounding him.

The firm, which fired him after his arrest in March, has described him as an “independent contractor.” Others have characterized Salzano, who has been with the firm since its founding in 2006, as its leader.

In 2010, NRIA chief executive Rey Grabato posted a photo of himself with Salzano on Facebook. In the picture, Salzano’s arm is wrapped around Grabato’s shoulder. Grabato’s caption: “My boss.”

Whatever his role at NRIA, Salzano entered the company with baggage. Just two years before NRIA began its first line of business — building and renovating homes in Philadelphia for investors to rent out — NorVergence, the telecom firm, went bankrupt under Salzano’s watch.

The Newark, N.J.-based company peddled thousands of leases nationwide for a device it called the “Matrix Box” that was supposed to enable cheap phone and internet service.

The boxes didn’t work as advertised. Moreover, customers’ service fees and lease payments for the boxes weren’t enough to support the company. After NorVergence went bankrupt in 2004, it was found to have been almost entirely reliant on cash from new customers to continue serving existing ones.

It was the bankruptcy trustee tasked with recovering funds for creditors of the firm who called it a “Ponzi scheme” in court papers.

After NorVergence’s bankruptcy, Salzano was charged with engaging in unfair and deceptive acts by the Federal Trade Commission, eventually settling with the agency for the $50 million in fines. The fines were waived, as Salzano could not pay them.

In the meantime, a class-action suit naming NorVergence among its defendants was making its way through the courts. Former customers harmed by the company were invited to claim their share of a $400,000 settlement in 2017.

A year later, Salzano’s name appeared as a manager on the prospectus that NRIA sent to potential investors for a new fund whose holdings include the vast tract on Philadelphia’s Delaware River waterfront where part of a Foxwoods casino resort once had been planned. NRIA plans to build a “gated community” there of three apartment blocks with more than 1,000 rental units.

Salzano was also known to interact directly with prospective investors around that time, like the one he personally swapped emails with in the case leading to his arrest earlier this year, according to court documents. Salzano was charged with mail fraud and aggravated identity theft for allegedly forging a loan document to make it appear that a New Jersey project had been vetted by a bank.

But by then, fake websites and bogus social-media profiles were waiting for possible investors who may have turned to the internet to vet him and NorVergence.

“It is absolutely plausible that that’s the reason why someone in that position would have taken all the steps that appear to have been taken here,” said Marc Ambinder, a senior fellow at the Center for Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California Annenberg School.

FATbit Technologies of India

At some point, the pitch on the norvergence.com website changed. No longer a site to peddle the Matrix Box — the “the Long Awaited ‘Killer Application’ of Voice and Data” — it instead began extolling a commitment “to spreading awareness regarding global warming across the world,” according to snapshots of the site captured by the nonprofit Internet Archive.

Similar material appeared on websites for norvergence.net, .org and .biz.

The entire operation appears to be the product of FATbit Technologies, an India-based company headed by a man named Manish Bhalla. According to web-data tracker Whoisology, Bhalla administers norvergence.com, as well as thomasjsalzano.com, which purports to be the website of Thomas J. Salzano, a “world-class” bodybuilder.

Thomas J. Salzano is also the name of Thomas N. Salzano’s son. The younger Salzano said in an email that he was not aware that the websites using his and his father’s names existed.

FATbit also has touted its work for NRIA with an older version of the real estate company’s website posted on the Indian tech firm’s online portfolio. NRIA didn’t respond to questions about FATbit’s work for the company.

Reached by phone, a FATbit vice president requested that questions, including ones asking who hired it for its work on the Norvergence and Salzano websites, be submitted by email. The emailed questions, also sent directly to Bhalla in a LinkedIn message, yielded no response.

The thomasjsalzano.com site is one of at least five web domains registered over a little more than a week in April 2019 for various Thomas J. and Thomas N. Salzano personae. Others include the website of a “professional dog trainer” (at thomasnsalzano.net) and of a “famous backpacker” (at thomassalzano.org).

But those are just the actual web domains set up in the name of Salzano or his son. There are also Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo, Blogger, and Medium accounts in their names, as well as ones on lesser-known platforms like Apiway.ai and Klusstr.

On the Weebly blogging platform, hairstyling expert Thomas N. Salzano offers beauty advice like this: “To add little more bounce to your hairs, you need few hair clips to hold curls, and a hairspray.”

The Salzano Klusstr account, meanwhile, has an author photo of a young bearded man in the woods. It’s a stock photo that also illustrates hundreds of posts across the internet, from “10 Backpacking Tips for Wilderness Hiking” to “20 Types of Boyfriend You’ll Have in Your 20s” (”This guy is sex on legs.”)

More web domains, blogs and social media accounts joined the pack in the years since using variations on Salzano’s middle name — Nicholas, or Nick — which is how he was known at NRIA.

The Inquirer logged more than three dozen separate sites purporting to belong to Thomas or Nicholas Salzano figures.

A frequent profile image for sites supposedly belonging to “Nick Salzano” features a young man in a sweater over a button-up shirt. It is a copy of the website headshot of a London-based e-commerce consultant.

“Both men and women find wide shoulders coupled with slim waistline to be more beautiful, with most research showing that it’s the main part of our bodies,” one such post reads.

Nonexistent merchandise

For all the internet real estate given over to the varied Salzano personae, each appears content to passively broadcast advice in awkward English on hair care, bodybuilding, or travel photography from his own little corner of the web.

The Norvergence Foundation has a broader reach.

A press release from this past August purporting to mark the group’s two-year anniversary (”Norvergence Foundation INC is Now a 2-Year Old Environmental Baby”) would put its supposed founding in 2019, at a time when Salzano was part of NRIA’s efforts to raise money for its projects.

Reading the release, one might struggle to understand how the group spent its environmental infancy, if only because of its twisted syntax.

“NGOs and other standard society bunches are partners in administration,” Nichole Lutero, identified as the group’s chief executive, explains using an acronym for “nongovernmental organization.” “Yet additionally the main impetus behind more prominent worldwide participation through the dynamic activation of public help for peaceful accords.”

Other releases over the years announced that Norvergence was getting into the business of producing jute bags to reduce use of plastics, or — during the pandemic — manufacturing “low-cost face masks and sanitizers for the Americans.”

On the publishing platform Medium, Norvergence says it “has received a lot of appreciation in the last few months for its efforts in different cities of New Jersey,” even outside its home in “Guttenbery.”

The Inquirer asked leaders of environmental groups including Environment New Jersey, the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters, and NYNJ Baykeeper if they were familiar with Norvergence.

None had heard of it.

The jute bags, face masks, and sanitizer can’t be found for sale.

If Norvergence exists at all, it is seemingly only on paper, and only since April, about a month after Salzano’s arrest by the FBI. That’s when Norvergence Foundation Inc. was registered as a nonprofit in the state of Nevada, records show. Another entity, Norvergence LLC, was registered as a for-profit company the same day.

Along with Lutero, the Norvergence Foundation’s directors include Lena Budinska, a name nearly identical to that of Salzano’s wife, Olena Budinska.

The foundation successfully petitioned the IRS about a week later for the group to be granted tax-exempt status as a nonprofit.

Olena Budinska did not reply to a message sent via Instagram or to a letter sent to her Secaucus home. No phone number was available for Lutero and a letter sent to the physical address in Queens, N.Y., of someone by that name yielded no response.

The phone number for the Norvergence Foundation on its websites was out of service and a message left at the phone number specified on its application to the IRS yielded no response. An email to its website address was also not returned.

Matthew Rossman, who helps set up nonprofits as director of Case Western Reserve University law school’s Community Development Clinic, said organizations usually file for nonprofit status if they expect to receive income such as grants they don’t want to pay taxes on.

In the context of the fake websites, flimsy press releases and a nonexistent office address, as they were explained to him, Rossman said he wasn’t sure what purpose Norvergence’s business and IRS filings would serve.

“This all sounds like a Netflix series,” he said. “One that I’d watch.”

Fake identities, positive online reviews

Before Google suspended the Norvergence Foundation’s business profile, information from that account filled the information box — the so-called Knowledge Panel — that accompanied search results using keyword combinations including “Norvergence.”

The box featured among other things a string of laudatory reviews for the organization.

“Nice Work!” wrote one reviewer, Rajnish Kumar, who gave the group five stars. “We should support such type of NGOs as they are doing a great work for us.”

Kumar wouldn’t exactly have been an objective voice on the matter: A February 2020 Q&A with Norvergence on a European tech website identifies him as Norvergence’s marketing manager.

Kumar also provides another link to FATbit, the Indian company whose owner administers the thomasjsalzano.com and norvergence.com websites. A person named Rajnish Kumar has a LinkedIn profile that identifies him as an assistant team leader at the firm — in its online-reputation-management department.

Kumar did not respond to a LinkedIn message.

His positive reviews are one small contribution to a literally global effort to give substance to the nonexistent group.

Another person sharing a name with a FATbit staffer, Rohan Sharma, is identified in the tech publication as Norvergence’s editor-in-chief. The person pictured on the LinkedIn profile of FATbit’s Sharma can also be seen in photos and videos posted on Norvergence websites.

In the images, Sharma and other young men and women in Norvergence T-shirts pose with tourists visiting what appears to be Dharamshala, the city in northwest India where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.

The interactions are captioned on Norvergence’s websites as the group’s “environmental activities.”

Reached via LinkedIn, Sharma agreed to an interview, until he was told that the topic was going to be Norvergence. Then he stopped responding to messages.

Other team members named in the tech site article include Jamie Simpson, identified as a geological researcher, whose Twitter profile picture shows a woman gazing thoughtfully out a window.

That picture is also clearly a fake: It’s appeared on scores of unrelated websites going at least as far back as 2016.

The mysterious George Stacey

No one, however, appears to be a more energetic booster of Norvergence than one “George Stacey.”

Napoli, the disinformation expert at Duke, said it’s hard to imagine that Stacey is anything other than a “sock puppet” — a fake identity designed for deception.

In some websites and press releases, Stacey is described as female, in others as male. Website profile pages purporting to feature Stacey show a woman standing with raised arms in a grove of trees. The actual person in the photo is a policy analyst in Australia who posted the picture of herself on a blog in 2007.

On the tech website, Stacey is Novegence’s “acting CEO.”

In a post under the foundation’s account on the Medium content platform, Stacey is described as a “world-renowned environmentalist.” Or, rather, Stacey was described that way: After The Inquirer began asking questions about Stacey, the post was altered to remove all references to the purported environmentalist.

Another alteration was made to what was Stacey’s page on the Quora question-and-answer site. It was renamed to instead belong to Norvergence itself.

Googling ‘NorVergence’

In a recent search for information about NorVergence, the Newark, N.J. telecom firm run by Thomas N. Salzano before its 2004 bankruptcy, half of the results were for links related to the fabricated Norvergence Foundation. There was also a Google Ad link to a Norvergence Foundation site and a “Knowledge Panel” information box filled with planted content.

In July 2019, a person using the Stacey name sent a direct Twitter message to ESI Africa, a Cape Town, South Africa-based website covering Africa’s energy industries, according to ESI’s editor, Nicolette Pombo-van Zyl.

“I would love to be a contributing writer for your site and I believe that my content will resonate deeply with your audience and give them a whole new vision on the subject,” the message read.

Over the next year or so, the Stacey figure submitted at least seven articles either quoting Norvergence or with the organization as their author, on topics ranging from climate-change impacts in Vietnam to lowering carbon emissions from oil and gas drilling.

The articles arrived by email and ESI never actually spoke with Stacey. The pieces were submitted as op-eds, for which ESI does not pay.

Other publications based in Pakistan and California also published stories submitted by Stacey.

Two years ago, Stacey’s path crossed that of another journalist, a then-23-year-old freelancer in Saudi Arabia named Rabiya Jaffery.

She was early in her career, struggling to report on controversial topics like human rights and environmental justice in a region of tight media control and limited free expression, when she received a Twitter message from George Stacey in October 2019.

Stacey told Jaffery that Norvergence was seeking candidates for its new “journalism fellowship.”

In exchange for $120, Jaffery agreed to write a series of stories on climate-related issues impacting the Persian Gulf region and South Asia.

She was also asked to give Norvergence’s experts an opportunity to offer remarks for inclusion in her articles, a request she thought was “weird” but didn’t at the time seem harmful.

With her expected fellowship income, Jaffery was able to write for some higher-profile news sites than the niche publications that had previously carried her work, since they didn’t have to pay her.

One such publication was the Diplomat, a journal of Asian politics that’s published interviews with international government leaders and U.S. cabinet officials.

Jaffery’s articles as a “Norvergence fellow” there and in other outlets featured quotes from activists, scholars, officials, and — in every case — George Stacey, who was the only person at Norvergence to respond to her obligatory questions for the group.

“I did wonder at times, Is this the only expert?” she said. “‘How is this person an expert in everything?”

Also strange was that Stacey insisted on communicating only by email or Twitter message, never by phone.

She finally cut off ties with the group after she was invited to make up comments and attribute them to Stacey.

“I thought, I don’t know a lot, but I know this is not how journalism works,” she said.

Now Jaffery fears the harm that may have been done to her career.

“I already have all the odds stacked up against me being a freelance journalist living in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “The last thing I need is to lose my credibility because of someone’s really bizarre scam.”