Last year Whistleblower told the story of Advanced Health Scan, an investment deal that consumed millions of investors’ dollars without opening the promised body imaging clinic in southern California. Now comes word from Alabama that one of the former top dogs of the company, Daniel A. Caterino, will be returning to familiar quarters - behind bars. My conversation with this fast-talking gentleman last year was memorable, not only for its many tangents, but for Caterino’s assertion that he had found God and therefore his criminal past had no relevance to the current furor over what looks like a scam at worst, entrepreneurial incompetence at best. In a video for investors last year, Caterino held up a Bible as he counseled angry investors to just give him more time to make the business work. After pleading guilty in May, Caterino will have 30 months in an Alabama prison to brush up on his Scripture. For my more complete story, click here.

Last month, a Whistleblower reader sent me on a quest. Rachel from cardholder services has called this guy, as she has zillions of other people, and he wanted her to stop. You can’t tell where she’s calling from with your caller ID, and once you get a live person, he or she won’t tell you either. She has even called people at the FTC, who so far haven’t been able to stop Rachel, or her sidekicks Heather and Michelle.

A reader named Bill claimed to have found Rachel, after he followed the recorded directions, got a breathing human and badgered the person to give him a callback number. That connected him with a credit repair company called DHC Financial Services Group LLC at 5300 Recker Highway in Winter Haven, Florida. That’s right, Florida, Whistleblower readers.

The company pitch: “Our mission is provide each and every client with a financial plan that will eliminate your debt 3-5 times faster than your current payment practices, without having to make any larger payments than you currently are. We guarantee to show each client an initial savings of $2500 in interest and finances charges overall or the service is free.”

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Mark Miernicki, the guy in the picture above, contacted Whistleblower as part of his vigorous campaign to hang onto the house he has lived in for 17 years. I told his story in my Sunday column (I’m only getting around to telling blog readers about it now because I was out of the office Monday and Tuesday - hence the deafening silence on the blog. Whistleblowers need a break sometimes, too). This story was my introduction to that exotic financial “product” called a negative-amortizing loan, sometimes described as a “pick-a-payment” or “payment-option” adjustable rate mortgage. Unlike conventional mortgages, in which you pay a bit of the principal each month, the principal in these loans actually goes up each month. The FDIC fact sheet on these kinds of loans warns of a syndrome called “payment shock.” “Your payments may go up a lot–as much as double or triple–after the interest-only period or when the payments adjust.”

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My colleague and fellow reporter Tim Harlow offers this tale of a cell phone debt collection scam, in which she unwittingly handed over her credit card number to an impostor:

Deb Smith of Bloomington isn’t the kind of person to give away her credit card number to strange callers. But early Sunday morning before she’d even downed her coffee, the caller sounded so legitimate that she did, only to learn just hours later that she fallen prey to a scam.

It started when a man purportedly acting as a representative of T-Mobile called her college-age son Nick’s cell phone around 7:45 a.m. and threatened to cut off service if he didn’t pay his bill of $128.05 immediately. He handed the phone to his mother, who gave the man her credit card information.

“Life’s been crazy recently and I thought perhaps I forgot or didn’t pay the full amount the previous month,” Smith said. “I thought, let’s get this taken care of.”

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