Iain Clifford Stamp told his followers the IRS owed them millions. Not because they had paid US tax, or because they had US investments. But because they had once signed mortgages, loans and credit-card agreements here in the UK.

Stamp says his organisation filed claims for 3,000 people, worth $600 million. The IRS froze the money. Stamp now says that was our fault — and says he will sue us for $120 million.

Stamp is a British fugitive, currently in Northern Cyprus, sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment for contempt of court after refusing to comply with FCA proceedings.

He previously ran Matrix Freedom, a mortgage-elimination scheme which failed catastrophically at the High Court. The scheme was described as showing “every appearance of deceit, of abuse and contempt of court”, and left hundreds of Stamp’s “clients” thousands of pounds out of pocket and often in default on their mortgages.

The latest scheme has created thousands more victims, who’ve paid large fees to Stamp, in return for becoming unwitting participants in a US tax fraud.

The claims of free millions

The man in this video claims that everybody – in the UK and across the world – is owed huge tax refunds from the United States tax authority, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS):

“Did you know that you are actually owed back taxes on every mortgage, every loan, and every credit card you’ve ever had, going back to the age of 18?

Think about that for a second. I’m 56 years old. That means I’m owed back taxes going back 38 years. The longer you’ve had those loans, credit cards, and mortgages, the more tax you’re owed. So imagine getting all of that back in one lump sum. How life-changing would that be?

Before you assume this sounds too good to be true or some kind of loophole, it’s not. This is lawful. This is legal. All the elites and wealthy people of the world know exactly how to do this. I guarantee they’re doing it every single year.”

The video is part of a sovereign citizen movement led by a man called Iain Clifford Stamp, currently living in Northern Cyprus as a fugitive following a UK conviction for contempt of court.

Stamp charges his followers thousands of pounds in “donations” to make these claims, and says the average is between two and three million dollars, and over your lifetime you could claim $100m:

Well, my final thoughts are based on those that are already doing this, about the average is around somewhere between two and three million dollars is what you can recoup of taxes.

…

So if you’re if you’ve got another 20, 30 years on the monopoly board, then or maybe 40 years, 50 years, however many years you’ve got to play the play the game out and multiply that two to three million by how many years left?

…

It could be for a lot of people, it could be over $100 million that we’re talking about.

Stamp says his “Republic of Old Souls” organisation made claims in 2025 totalling $600m:

“Well, in 2025, we had IRS confirmed wages and tax transfers in excess of $600 million, and those recoupments were due to be funded to our membership between September of 2025 and now.”

And here’s Stamp’s explanation for why it works:

“You see, the birth certificate construct, an artificial player piece acting as a banker under the Bills of Exchange Act 1882 has made a deposit of energy.

The signature is the conduit of the energy transfer from the living man or woman through the birth certificate construct, a banker that is making a deposit, issuing a security promise to pay in the future that has no entitlement, no lawful standing to recoup that signature energy back to the birth certificate construct.

So if you’re going to recoup abandoned signature credit energy, which is taxes, you have to put a new piece on the monopoly board that is clean, that can operate as a nominee, as it says in the IRS Publication 1212. And if that entity, which is an artificial entity as a grantor trust, files a 1099-OID, it is making a claim that the signature, the creator of the signature, the living man-woman is the true beneficiary of the taxes that are being paid, at the moment, to the United States Treasury. On their ledgers, they are keeping those taxes.”

Stripped of the pseudo-legal language, Stamp’s claim is this: when you sign a loan agreement, a secret tax asset is created; that asset can be claimed from the IRS through a grantor trust using Form 1099-OID. Every part of that is false.

Form 1099-OID is not a magic refund form. It reports a specific kind of interest-like income on real debt instruments. It does not turn a mortgage signature, credit-card agreement or birth certificate into a US tax refund. There is no such thing as “signature credit energy” or a “birth certificate construct”. A loan is money that you owe, not an asset.

We think most people would realise that these claims are nonsensical. The IRS does not hand out vast tax refunds to British citizens because they once signed a mortgage, loan agreement or credit-card application.

Some people, however, fall for this. Sometimes because they’ve fallen down a “rabbit hole” of internet conspiracy theories, and become unable to tell fact from fiction. Often because they are desperate; often in debt, and willing to believe anyone who offers a way out; sometimes because they are very vulnerable and with a history of mental illness. We’ve spoken to nine people who’ve seen family members fall under Stamp’s spell. There’s a common pattern: thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of pounds paid in “donations”; debts mounting; relationships strained or broken; and the victim becoming more committed to the scheme, despite the promised riches never arriving.

The reality – it’s just tax fraud

The scam Stamp is selling is well known. It exploits a vulnerability in the way the IRS processes a particular US tax form, the “1099-OID”. If you complete a form apparently showing that you suffered US tax, then the IRS will sometimes mail you out a cheque, even if in fact you never paid any US tax at all.

A real 1099-OID refund scenario looks like this:

Diagram connections

  • From Company issues $10,000 bond to investor for $9,500 cash to A year later, company redeems bond, paying investor $10,000 (Label: None)
  • From A year later, company redeems bond, paying investor $10,000 to Company withholds $150 tax from this (i.e. 30% of the $500 OID) and pays to IRS (Label: None)
  • From Company withholds $150 tax from this (i.e. 30% of the $500 OID) and pays to IRS to Company gives investor 1099-OID showing $500 OID and $150 withheld (Label: None)
  • From Company gives investor 1099-OID showing $500 OID and $150 withheld to Investor files tax return with 1099-OID and claims credit/refund of the $150 (Label: None)

What Stamp is doing is this:

Diagram connections

  • From UK resident borrows $10,000 to Stamp fabricates 1099-OID for resident’s trust showing $10,000 of OID and $10,000 of tax withheld. No tax was actually withheld (Label: None)
  • From Stamp fabricates 1099-OID for resident’s trust showing $10,000 of OID and $10,000 of tax withheld. No tax was actually withheld to Stamp files tax forms showing the trust had $10,000 of income and overpaid tax (Label: None)
  • From Stamp files tax forms showing the trust had $10,000 of income and overpaid tax to IRS ‘refunds’ the $10,000 to the trust (Label: None)

This will sometimes appear to work – the IRS may actually send you a cheque. The one shown here is probably genuine:

But there is an obvious problem: if you complete a form saying that you suffered US tax when you didn’t, then you’ve committed fraud.

It’s a fraud the IRS are very aware of. They publish an annual “dirty dozen” list of tax scams, and the 2009 list explicitly called out a 1099-OID fraud that perfectly describes the Stamp scheme:

Filing False or Misleading Forms The IRS is seeing scam artists file false or misleading returns to claim refunds that they are not entitled to. Frivolous information returns, such as Form 1099-Original Issue Discount (OID), claiming false withholding credits are used to legitimize erroneous refund claims. The new scam has evolved from an earlier phony argument that a “strawman” bank account has been created for each citizen. Under this scheme, taxpayers fabricate an information return, arguing they used their “strawman” account to pay for goods and services and falsely claim the corresponding amount as withholding as a way to seek a tax refund.

These schemes are so persistent that the IRS continues to issue warnings about them, most recently including them in its 2026 list. And the US authorities do more than issue warnings; they aggressively prosecute 1099-OID promoters. In May 2024, a promoter was sentenced to five years in jail for running a scheme remarkably similar to Stamp’s:

As part of this fraud scheme, Sellers also promoted the use of IRS Form 1099-OID to fraudulently report to the IRS debts - including mortgages, student loans, credit card debts, and court judgments -as income, along with 100% withholdings of that “income” in informational returns to overcome the IRS’s internal controls and induce the IRS to issue refunds that were not owed. The proper use of the 1099-OID form is for companies such as brokers to report to the IRS income received by the purchaser of a discounted security. Sellers personally created and submitted to the IRS 1099-O1D forms that were fraudulent on their face. After submitting the fraudulent 1099-OID forms, Sellers’s co-conspirators prepared and submitted fraudulent returns seeking massive refunds, in one case exceeding half a million dollars on a single return. All these refunds were based on non-existent 1099-OID “income” and withholdings. The conspiracy resulted in the submission of at least 22 returns requesting fraudulent refunds totaling at least $3.4 million from the IRS.

There have been dozens of prosecutions over the years. While most of the frauds prosecuted to date involved US citizens, international borders do not offer immunity. The IRS has successfully extradited 1099-OID fraudsters from Trinidad and Tobago and from Canada to face trial:

Scheme Caused $14 Million Tax Loss, Enriching Defendant By More Than $600,000 A Canadian tax fraud promoter who was extradited from Canada and convicted at trial was sentenced today to nine years in prison for conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Annette L. Hayes. FRANZIE F. COLACO, 54, of Brampton, Ontario, Canada was convicted in July 2014 following a two-day jury trial. COLACO conspired with Ronald L. Brekke and others to promote a scheme known as “1099 OID” fraud. Under this scheme, tax filers use fraudulent Form 1099-OID forms to claim tax refunds equal to the value of the filer’s personal debt. COLACO promoted this scheme throughout Canada and encouraged Canadian citizens to request refunds from the U.S. government. U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour found COLACO responsible for more than $6.2 million in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service, and cited the “audacious nature of the scheme,” in imposing the lengthy sentence on COLACO. “This defendant promoted theft of U.S. tax dollars by convincing Canadians they could get rich at others’ expense,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Annette L. Hayes. “This is a fraud -pure and simple - and one that will not go unpunished.” The IRS flagged the vast majority of the 1099 OID filings as frivolous, but refund claims totaling approximately $14 million were paid to followers of Brekke and COLACO before the IRS detected the fraudulent nature of the returns. About two-thirds of those filing for money they didn’t deserve were Canadians who had never paid any income tax in the United States and were not owed any money by the U.S. Treasury. Those submitting the phony claims were told to quickly move the money to Canada where it would be more difficult for the IRS to recover the money. COLACO personally collected over $600,000 in fraudulent refunds under the scheme.

If you’ve read our report on Simon Goldberg’s group “Empower the People”, Stamp’s scheme will look familiar. But where Empower the People processed perhaps 80 claims and attempted to defraud the IRS of around $1 million, Stamp claims to have filed returns for 3,000 trusts, claiming $600 million.

(As an aside, Stamp and Goldberg despise each other. Both have published extensive materials and videos accusing the other of fraud. Of course both are right.)

Stamp appears to believe he is different from Goldberg and all the other cases because he’s added a trust, and invented a vocabulary of “signature credit”, “98-series” trusts and an “810 Algorithm”. He has not. If you file, or cause to be filed, a Form 1099-OID claiming fictitious withholding on a fictitious debt instrument, the form is false. And that’s what’s happening here: there is no withholding and no debt instrument – that makes it fraud. Attempts by defendants in tax prosecutions to run these kinds of sovereign citizen arguments have consistently failed.

We gave Stamp the opportunity to respond. He initially responded through “Ecclesia Law” – a Wyoming LLC that says it is a “a USA law firm operating exclusively under Attorney-in-Fact mandates” – sending us numerous nonsensical, repetitive and AI generated documents, of which this is typical.

Did Stamp really submit $600m of fraudulent claims?

It would be easy to dismiss this all as a fantasy. $600m is a huge number, and one of the largest 1099-OID frauds ever.

We had a long email exchange with Stamp in which he was adamant that he really did make $600m of claims. In the course of that correspondence, Stamp sent us what appears to be a genuine IRS wage and income transcript for the “Iain Clifford OID Trust”, used to make a $4.477m refund claim:

If, as it appears, the document is genuine, then this is remarkable piece of self incrimination – Stamp has sent us evidence that he committed US tax fraud – and at over $4m it would be one of the largest individual 1099-OID frauds ever. It is – obviously – not evidence that the IRS approved anything: IRS wage and income transcripts show data reported to the IRS on information returns; they do not, and cannot, show the IRS approved the report. So we can probably take Stamp at his word that he really did submit three 1099-OID records for Stamp’s trust, claiming about $4.477m of federal tax withholding. That claim is fraudulent on its face. Form 1099-OID is for original issue discount on real debt instruments; the IRS says the description box should identify the instrument by its “CUSIP” identification number. Stamp’s transcript instead says “ITEM DESCRIPTION: N/A”. The IRS has repeatedly warned that 1099-OID schemes are used to make false withholding claims and seek refunds based on fictitious “Treasury” or debt-discharge theories.

Stamp claims to have established 3,000 “grantor trusts”, all making similar claims, with the total amounting to over $600m.

Is that true? Are there really 3,000 grantor trusts, with average claims of around $200,000 each? We have no evidence, and Stamp repeatedly refused to provide it. However, Stamp’s communications with his members/clients is consistent with there being thousands of participants. More specifically, recent litigation in New York between Stamp and a former associate provides some support that the 3,000 grantor trusts exist, and identify that an individual called William R Kimball made the claims for the trusts. We discuss the litigation further below.

How we accidentally stopped the fraud

According to Stamp, the $600m fraud was stopped when somebody read our previous report accusing Stamp of fraud:

“In 2025, we had IRS confirmed wages and tax transfers in excess of $600 million. And those recoupments were due to be funded to our membership between September of 2025 and now.

And of course, none of them were funded because some of the saboteurs, in fact, all of the saboteurs within our organization were reading Dan Neidle’s blogs. Dan Neidle was calling me a fraudster. Dan Neidle saying that the recruitment program, the Clifford Protocol doesn’t work.

All of those things contributed and tortiously interfered with the contracts that our membership had with the US trustees. Or as you know, the US trustees sent in fraud identity reports to the IRS and canceled all of the recoupments.”

Stamp makes a slightly contradictory claim in his New York lawsuit (more below), where he says his former associate Amy Jo Sanger “filed fabricated identity theft reports”:

Ms. Sanger maliciously filed fabricated identity theft reports to the IRS. These false reports directly undermined 3,000 legitimate grantor trusts that William Kimball had lawfully filed tax returns on. These 3,000 trusts belong to the customers of PT ICS Remedy Consulting (Indonesia), which serves as my administrative and tax filing firm.

It must also be possible that there never were $600m of claims, or they were immediately rejected, and blaming us or Ms Sanger is more convenient for Stamp than admitting the truth.

The New York lawsuit – and what it reveals about Stamp’s operation

A live lawsuit in New York shows us where the money went, who was filing the tax returns, and how Stamp was operating after leaving the UK.

On the surface, it is a narrow fight about a precious-metals account. GoldSilver LLC, a precious metals investment company, says it is holding about $883,000 of gold, silver and cash in an account for something called the MTRXF Ministry Trust, and it asked the Southern District of New York to decide who is entitled to control it. This is an “interpleader” – someone essentially asking the court to adjudicate a dispute, rather than Goldsilver LLC take the decision itself, and risk being sued.

The account was opened in April 2025 in the name of “MTRXF Ministry Trust”, by a Colorado woman called Amy Jo Sanger (who said she was the settlor and trustee).

Stamp’s name is not on the trust documentation at all. He has not filed a conventional motion or witness statement with the court, but instead filed a document he describes alternately as a “statement of facts” and a “memorandum of law”. His case appears to be that Sanger was his bookkeeper who stole money from PT ICS Remedy Consulting, an Indonesian company controlled by Stamp, and placed it in MTRXF, her own trust. Stamp says that Sanger was trustee of another trust, the “OSN LLC trust” which had Stamp as settlor and Sanger as trustee.

Stamp’s evidence for this consists of an “expert report” from an uncredited firm he runs, and a witness statement from a US individual called William R Kimball who is authorised to make IRS electronic filings and appears to be the person making Stamp’s 3000 fraudulent refund claims. The “expert report” and “witness statement” just make a series of allegations without any stated basis, and are unlikely to be taken very seriously by the court.

Kimball’s witness statement says his firm, William Kimball LLC, provides professional tax administration and filing services. We can find no evidence that Kimball actually carries on such a business. We are reasonably confident (from the identity documentation provided to the court) that this is the same William Kimball who ran a small biotech company. We don’t know why someone with a legitimate business would be involved with Stamp – we wrote to several email addresses that we verified were used by Kimball, but received no response.

So all of this tells us several things.

  • Stamp is now operating through an Indonesian company, PT ICS Remedy Consulting which he controls and capitalised with $2.3m.
  • We now know who made the 3,000 claims – on Stamp’s account, it was William Kimball. If that’s true, he has exposed himself to criminal sanctions and, unlike Stamp, he’s living in the US.
  • Stamp’s “OSN LLC” trust document says all fees, donations, success fees and other income from MATRIXFREEDOM and I AM FREE, plus bank balances, intellectual property, code, platform design, and member and affiliate contact details, are trust property. The beneficiary is Iain Clifford. Until 2023, Clifford/Stamp was living in the UK – there must be a question whether he properly declared his income to HMRC.

One possible explanation is money laundering. Stamp appears to have made large amounts of money from Matrix Freedom and related ventures. The New York proceedings show money moving through an Indonesian company, a US citizen, a disputed trust and a US precious-metals account. We cannot know the full explanation, but this is exactly the kind of pattern that should attract scrutiny from banks, regulators and prosecutors.

Stamp’s response – a $120m lawsuit

Stamp has a very personal interest in the $600m of 1099 OID refund claims. He charges his members/clients “donations” – typically hundreds or thousands of pounds. But the real money would come if the claims were successful, as Stamp would have claimed a 20% “tithe” from any refunds actually received. In theory, a total of $120m.

When Stamp’s scheme collapsed (for whatever reason) his response was to blame our founder, Dan Neidle, and to threaten to sue him for $120m in Wyoming:

The email says it’s a “Final Ultimatum” demanding removal of all Tax Policy Associates’ articles about Matrix Freedom within three days, after which Stamp would “transfer” his libel claims to “Ecclesia Law, – a trading name of MLITR Research LLC” which would then “prosecute” Dan in Wyoming.

By March 2026, Stamp changed his mind and was threatening to sue in Texas:

As at May 2026, no court papers have been received. Given the formidable substantive and procedural obstacles to such a claim, we do not expect this to change.

The background of Iain Clifford Stamp

We published a detailed report on Stamp in 2024.

Stamp is a former financial services professional with a background of business failure and losing investors’ money in dubious circumstances. At some point after losing his regulatory authorisation, he started selling, and perhaps believing, “sovereign citizen” conspiracy theories. Stamp then founded an organisation called “Matrix Freedom”, selling pseudo-legal “remedies” to (very often) desperate and vulnerable people. These included a “mortgage elimination” scheme which charged clients £3,000 for template documents that (Stamp claimed) would make their mortgage disappear. Over 200 people brought claims in the High Court using these documents. Every single one was struck out, with the court saying:

” It is to all intents and purposes a ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme. Only it is nothing of the sort because the arguments that it relies upon, and which have clearly been made available to people to widely adopt, are so misconceived as to be fundamentally wrong. This deceit is all the uglier because the material that forms the building blocks of the claims (and the large group of claims) is a nonsensical and harmful mix of legal words, terms, maxims, extracts and statutes which are designed to look and sound good, at least to some. But they stand only as an approximation of a claim in law, a parody of the real thing.

…

The totality of claims that are the subject of this judgment have not revealed the full extent of the source, and nature, of encouragement and co-ordination that lies behind them but there is every appearance of deceit, of abuse and contempt of court, and it is a matter of time before a full picture of these comes to light.”

OpenDemocracy published an article on Stamp; Stamp responded by suing for libel. The claim was struck out because (amongst other failings), the pleadings were “so unreasonably vague and incoherent so as to be abusive”, and contained “the very same reliance on incoherent legal propositions that were the subject of serious and unequivocal criticism” in the mortgage case.

Stamp made a series of other claims, including against HMRC, which were dismissed as “wholly without merit”. All of this resulted in the High Court making a “general civil restraint” order against Stamp, which requires him to obtain the consent of the court before filing a lawsuit.

None of this stopped Stamp making very large amounts of money from selling his “get rich quick” schemes. In a leaked management meeting, Stamp’s team revealed that in its best month in 2022, Matrix Freedom made £500,000 from its clients. The organisation is now significantly larger, with many millions of profit made (and there’s more about this in the New York proceedings, see below).

As these schemes involve attempting to deal in mortgages and consumer loans, they require authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority which, unsurprisingly, Stamp does not have. By 2023, the FCA had obtained an all-assets restraint order against Stamp. He was arrested and interviewed at his home in Swanmore, Hampshire. He then fled the country – first to Bali, then to Northern Cyprus.

Stamp was required by a court order to disclose all his assets. He served a witness statement saying he had “no assets, bank accounts, shareholdings, directorships or investments.” This was a lie. The court found that he had at least six undisclosed bank accounts, a BullionVault precious metals account and crypto accounts, with which he spent over $24,000 on luxury goods (Cartier, Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga) and over $60,000 on travel and hotels. He was also an undisclosed director of ten companies.

The court found Stamp in contempt on all nine counts and sentenced him to 12 months’ imprisonment. He filed documents that were “nonsensical and difficult to understand” and “gibberish”, and didn’t show up for either hearing. His “attorney-in-fact”, David Ayerst, did turn up and was physically removed from the courtroom when he refused to leave.

Stamp says he has appealed to the Court of Appeal, but the documents we’ve seen suggest it’s unclear if he made a valid appeal application and, if he did, it is unlikely an appeal would be granted.

Stamp has a 12-month prison sentence waiting for him in England. He has an FCA criminal investigation hanging over him. His assets are frozen (in theory). And yet he continues to run the operation, now rebranded as “The Republic of Old Souls” — filing tax returns from Indonesia, threatening journalists from Wyoming, and posting videos explaining why it’s everyone else’s fault. He changed his name to “Iain Clifford” in August 2024 by deed poll; we will continue to refer to him as “Stamp” for consistency.

What happens now?

The reality for Stamp’s followers is that the promised millions are not coming.

Many will have paid thousands of pounds in “donations”. Some may have built their finances, relationships and hopes around the belief that the IRS owed them life-changing sums. But there is no secret tax asset. There is no “signature credit energy”. There is no lawful route by which a British borrower can claim a US tax refund because they once signed a mortgage, loan or credit-card agreement.

On Stamp’s own account, his organisation created 3,000 trusts and caused $600m of fraudulent refund claims to be filed with the IRS. He has publicly explained the scheme. He has identified the supposed legal basis. He has blamed us and others for the IRS freezing the money. And he has sent us what appears to be an IRS transcript showing a $4.477m fraudulent withholding claim for his own trust. It is very strange that someone would incriminate themselves so thoroughly, but that is what Stamp has done. Northern Cyprus may not be as safe as Stamp imagines – it has recently shown a willingness to deport foreign fugitives.

If William Kimball really made false US tax filings for 3,000 trusts, then his position is also extremely serious.

The position of Stamp’s clients is different. In principle, a person who knowingly submits a false tax claim can commit a criminal offence. But many of Stamp’s followers appear to be victims themselves: people persuaded by pseudo-legal nonsense, conspiracy theories and promises of impossible wealth. Some may have had little idea what was being filed in their name or in the name of a trust created for them. In theory they should take independent legal advice if any IRS forms were filed using their details, and do so with particular urgency if any refund money is actually received. We fear that few if any will have either the willingness or the resources to do that.

The tragedy is that the people least able to afford the consequences of Stamp’s actions are likely to suffer most. Stamp can reinvent himself, change his name, move jurisdiction, create new entities, and publish new videos blaming saboteurs. His followers are left with the losses, the broken promises, and the legal consequences of false documents filed in their names.

All this could have been prevented if action had been taken against Stamp before he fled the UK. Not mere sanctions for regulatory breaches (effective as the FCA appears to have been), but arrest and prosecution for defrauding his mortgage “clients”. The failure to stop him then led to the much larger fraud now, and the much greater number of victims.

The promised millions were never real. The fraud, the victims and the consequences are.

All videos © Iain Clifford Stamp / Matrix Freedom / Republic of Old Souls, and reproduced in the public interest, and as fair dealing for the purposes of criticism.

All other images and emails © their respective authors, and reproduced in the public interest.

Many thanks to K for extensive research, and to K, P and C for their US tax expertise.