Debunking Misinformation Spread by Steven J. Oshins

Blake Harris Law is committed to transparency in the asset protection industry. Attorney Steve Oshins has misrepresented foreign case law on multiple occasions and, as of the publishing of this article, is currently misrepresenting asset protection case law. This article is here to debunk misinformation being spread by Attorney Steven J. Oshins.

We have had to press to get him to correct inaccurate information, and some of it has come down. As of publication, other misleading material is still posted.

A chart titled "45 FAPT Cases Gone Wrong" circulated for roughly eight months as evidence that offshore asset protection trusts fail. Blake Harris Law put the inaccuracies to him directly. He responded by saying the list "came from multiple sources" — sources he has not identified — and that he had not read all of the cases on it. Our firm did the research instead: what we found, case by case.

He removed the chart from LinkedIn on 10 August 2026, after it had circulated for roughly eight months. Then the list became 21 cases, and then three articles by other authors.

This page sets out that record with its sources, and publishes the 39 questions sent to Steven J. Oshins about it. He has not answered them.

One thing first, because it matters more than anything below. This is a narrow subject. Mr. Oshins is a well known figure in domestic trust planning with a sizable following. Nothing here disputes that. The question is whether specific published descriptions of identified court decisions match what those decisions actually held — which is checkable, by anyone, against the decisions themselves.

What reading all 45 decisions found

We did the unglamorous thing: we obtained every available decision cited on the chart and read it. The case-by-case review is published entry by entry, with links to the opinions, so the analysis can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Duplicates. Morris v. Wroble and Morris v. Morris are the same Merry Morris dispute. In re Brooks duplicates Sattin v. Brooks, 217 B.R. 98 (Bankr. D. Conn. 1998). On the chart, each pair appears under the same category — Contempt of Court and Bankruptcy Fraud respectively. Two disputes, four entries.

Eight entries with no foreign asset protection trust in them. SEC v. Cook concerned money in offshore bank accounts and entities the defendant controlled personally — not a trust with an independent trustee. Chadwick v. Green involved no trust at all. In FTC v. Fortuna Alliance the FTC's own account of the money it recovered describes it as transferred from an offshore bank in Antigua, and mentions no trust. U.S. v. Plath involved no offshore asset protection trust. The Jerome Schneider matter concerned sham banks. In re Omegas Group, 16 F.3d 1443 (6th Cir. 1994), is a constructive-trust dispute in which the Sixth Circuit reversed the decision below. In re Cyr, 602 B.R. 315 (Bankr. W.D. Tex. 2019), concerned a domestic Texas trust created by the debtor's in-laws. In Fortney v. Kuipers the transfers were domestic.

Three of those carried descriptions the decisions do not support. The chart's own one-line entry for SEC v. Cook says the settlor lost control of his offshore trust assets, when there was no trust. Its entry for In re Cyr describes offshore trust transfers, when the trust was domestic. Its entry for Fortney v. Kuipers says assets were moved offshore, when the transfers were domestic.

Two could not be located at all. In re Steering Committee and In re Tinsley, despite extensive research. We have not written about them, because writing about a decision you cannot read is the problem, not the solution.

And two are cases where the offshore structure worked. In BB&T v. Hamilton Greens the court held a hearing and denied contempt, finding the debtor could not compel the foreign trustee. In FDIC v. Lewis the court denied repatriation and left the trust intact. Two wins for the structure, filed under failures.

Two more are genuine adverse outcomes that the chart still describes inaccurately. In re Colburn, 145 B.R. 851 (Bankr. E.D. Va. 1992), denied the debtor his discharge under 11 U.S.C. § 727(a)(4)(A), the false-oath provision, because he did not disclose the trust. The trust was settled under the laws of Bermuda, and the decision turned on what the debtor did not disclose rather than on anything a foreign trustee did. Riechers v. Riechers, 178 Misc. 2d 170, 679 N.Y.S.2d 233 (Sup. Ct. 1998), declined to set the trust aside. It held it had "no jurisdiction over the corpus of the Cook Islands Riechers Family irrevocable trust". Then it awarded the wife "one-half of the value of the marital assets placed in the Cook Islands Trust by the defendant as of December 1994, to wit: $2,000,000". Both are conduct and forum outcomes, not jurisdiction outcomes, and neither is a win for the structure.

The number kept shrinking

This is the part that matters most, because it is a pattern rather than a single error.

It started at 29. The chart had a predecessor: a list of twenty-nine cases published in a subscriber newsletter in August 2025, which is reviewed here and remains in the archive. The count went up before it came down.

45 became 21. After the flaws were set out, the list was reduced to 21 cases — published as "Failed FAPT #21." More than half of the original list simply disappeared. No correction accompanied it, and no explanation of which entries were withdrawn or why.

21 became someone else's homework. On 10 August 2026 the chart came down. The same day, readers were directed to three articles by other authors — McCullough Law, Derren Joseph / HTJ Tax, and Paul Deloughery / Sudden Wealth Protection Law. We redlined all three line by line and published the markups.

All three carried the same defects, and all three have since moved. We redlined each of them line by line. Since then, two of the three have moved. The Derren Joseph article now carries our corrections inline, with the original list left standing above them. The Paul Deloughery article was rewritten on 29 August 2026: new title, ten decisions, and outcomes attributed to what the people involved did rather than to the existence of an offshore trust. That is the same conclusion our own review reaches, and we credit the author for making the change. The McCullough article is gone altogether. The current state of all three, and what we take from it, is set out in the case-by-case review.

The question that remains open is the simplest one, and it opens the list below. Name one decision. A properly formed trust: independent trustee, funded before any claim arose, settlor not in control. Failed on the merits. Not a contempt sanction against a settlor who kept control, and not a case with no trust in it. One case. It has not been answered.

A proposition supported by 29 cases, then 45, then 21, then three other people's articles, was not a proposition established by counting.

His own account of the chart

Two statements, in his own words, four days apart in the record.

On or about 8 August 2026: "Those 45 cases came from multiple sources. I agree that some of them aren't actual trust cases. I haven't read them all."

But on 18 November 2025, replying the same day to a private email about the newsletter, he wrote: "I don't believe that anything I say or write is misleading. I am not misrepresenting anything by listing the cases where FAPTs didn't work."

One point of sequence, in fairness to him. The November 2025 email came before the chart existed, so it cannot be treated as notice that the chart was wrong. By his own dating the chart was made around December 2025. The email was answering the earlier newsletter list instead, and the four decisions it cites all appear in that newsletter.

The chart was then republished in January, March and May 2026, and came down on 10 August 2026. The post carrying the comments that identified the errors was later deleted. Nobody who relied on the chart in that period appears to have been told that some entries do not belong.

That sequence is the subject of the sixth question below, and it is the one we would most like answered.

The awards that a chatbot conferred

Two of the recognition banners on his homepage are not recognitions. Each opens a PDF, and each PDF identifies itself as "a copy of a conversation between ChatGPT & Anonymous". One of them asserts the title "Most Influential Asset Protection Attorney."

No organization conferred those titles. No peers were surveyed.

The transcript's own opening line is that "there isn't a single universally agreed 'most influential' asset protection attorney." Pushed, it named him anyway.

So it is not right to say the model refused. It said no single answer existed, then gave one anyway when pressed. And on the one measure in that same document that ranks impact on case law, it places him fourth of six.

Both banners sit on the homepage among five genuine honors, in the same styling, where a visitor has no way to tell which is which.

The full analysis, with the screenshot, is in when a chatbot confers the award.

The structure being recommended instead

The alternative on offer is the domestic asset protection trust, and specifically the Hybrid DAPT — a design in which the settlor is not an initial beneficiary but can be added later by an independent party.

It has been described as undefeated. That invites a simple follow-up: how many reported decisions have tested one?

Untested and proven are not the same claim. "No cases against it" is exactly what you would expect of a technique too new, and too rarely litigated, to have generated any.

More importantly, one fact does not change with drafting quality. Ask it directly: if a U.S. court orders the trustee of a Nevada DAPT to turn over the assets, does the trustee comply, or is the trustee prohibited by law from complying? A domestic trustee sits inside the court's contempt power and complies. That is the whole distinction, and it is jurisdictional rather than a matter of how well the deed is written.

Three further constraints apply regardless: fraudulent-transfer law reaches transfers intended to hinder or delay creditors; federal bankruptcy law reaches self-settled trusts on a ten-year lookback under 11 U.S.C. § 548(e); and a non-DAPT home state may decline to honour another state's protective statute on public-policy grounds.

The risk he has already acknowledged

The conflict-of-laws problem is Waldron v. Huber, 493 B.R. 798 (Bankr. W.D. Wash. 2013), in which a bankruptcy court indicated that the law of the settlor's own state — Washington, which has no DAPT statute — governed rather than the Alaska law the trust chose. He argues at length that Huber was wrongly decided, calling the result "1,000,000% wrong."

Set that argument aside, because it does not matter to a client. What matters is what he says next, in the same newsletter:

in a settlement conference it moves the needle substantially in favor of the plaintiff. And in a court case it is very possible that the judge buys into that result.

That is an accurate description of litigation risk, and it is his own. A structure whose defence is "the leading adverse case was wrongly decided" still has to be litigated in front of a judge who may follow it. Being right on the law and losing the motion are not mutually exclusive.

United States v. Huckaby makes the same point from the other direction. A federal court held that whether land held by a Nevada trust could be reached was governed by the law of the place the land sits. That was California, whose Probate Code voids self-settled spendthrift provisions. The judgment lien reached the property, and no misconduct was needed to get there. Our register of these decisions is at DAPT Facts.

The part clients are not told

The Hybrid DAPT's whole design is that the settlor is not a beneficiary at the outset but can be added later. The newsletter's own parenthetical explains how that is supposed to hold up:

the settlor is almost never actually added if the structure is well-planned

Read that as a client. The protection works to the extent that you genuinely never get the money back. If you are added, the self-settled problem you were avoiding returns, and a court weighing substance over form can conclude the realistic expectation of benefit existed from the start. If you are never added, you have not protected your wealth. You have given it away.

And if you are never added, any access you still have has to come informally, through a spouse or a family member who is a beneficiary. Courts read exactly that arrangement as evidence that the transfer was never genuine.

That is a real trade-off, and it may be the right one for some people. But it is a different product from the one implied by "the absolute best asset protection technique is and always will be," and a client is entitled to hear it in those terms before signing.

Our side-by-side of what the court record actually shows for both structures is at APT Facts.

What Still Needs Correcting

Some of the material has come down. Other items had not, as of a check on 10 September 2026:

• The two AI-derived award banners are still on his homepage. They read "Named 'Most Influential [Asset Protection Attorney] Overall Today'" and "Named 'Most Influential Estate Planning Attorney in Nevada'". Each links to a PDF that is a transcript of a conversation with a chatbot. No organisation conferred either title, no peers were surveyed, and the result cannot be replicated — a different session returns different names. Our full analysis is in when a chatbot confers the award. At a minimum these should state that the source was an anonymous chatbot session.
• The 45-case framing persists downstream. The chart itself came down, but the same case characterisations continue to circulate through the LISI newsletter treatment and the three articles readers were directed to, two of which have since been revised or removed by their own authors.

He also sells a domestic structure of his own. Anyone weighing it should read the risks first: the Hybrid DAPT and why it fails.

Correcting the Record

The standing offer. Blake Harris has offered to appear jointly, on any platform, at a time of Mr. Oshins's choosing, to work through the case law one case at a time. The offer stands, it is open-ended, and it has not been accepted.

Disclosure, and the offer to appear

Disclosure. Blake Harris discloses his interest in Atlas Trust Company on this website, on LinkedIn, and publicly, because a reader weighing a recommendation is entitled to know what the person making it stands to gain. Question 38 asks the same of him: whether he or any family member holds a financial interest in a Nevada trust company. It is a question, not an assertion — we do not know the answer, and the answer may well be none.

The offer. Blake Harris has offered to appear jointly, on any platform, at a time of his choosing, to discuss the case law. The offer stands and is open-ended. It has not been taken up.

The questions

Sent on behalf of Blake Harris, Esq. and Jeffrey Verdon, Esq. Unanswered as of publication. Reproduced in full, and unaltered, so that our summary of them cannot be the only version available.

They are a snapshot of the record on the date they were sent, and two things have moved since. The three third-party articles referred to in the seventh and eighth questions have all changed — one now carries our corrections inline, one was rewritten so that it no longer presents its cases as offshore trust failures, and one has been removed. Question 8 in particular describes an article as it then stood; it does not describe the page as it reads today. We are leaving the questions as sent rather than editing them after the fact, and noting the change here instead.

The First Nine

1. Do you still hold the position that foreign asset protection trusts fail? If so, name one case you have personally read in which a properly formed trust — independent trustee, funded before any claim arose, settlor not in control — failed on the merits. Not a contempt sanction against a settlor who retained control, and not a case with no trust in it.
2. On the 45 FAPT list, Morris v. Wroble duplicates Morris v. Morris, the same Merry Morris dispute, and In re Brooks duplicates Sattin v. Brooks. Why were these counted as four cases rather than two?
3. The following entries on the list involve no foreign asset protection trust: SEC v. Cook, In re Cyr, Fortney v. Kuipers, Chadwick v. Green, FTC v. Fortuna Alliance, U.S. v. Plath, the Jerome Schneider matter, and In re Omegas Group. In three of them, your chart's own one-line description states facts the decision does not contain: your entry for SEC v. Cook says the settlor lost control of his offshore trust assets, when there was no trust; your entry for In re Cyr describes offshore trust transfers, when the trust was a domestic Texas trust created by the debtor's in-laws; your entry for Fortney v. Kuipers says assets were moved offshore, when the transfers were domestic. What was the basis for including these on a list of foreign asset protection trust failures?
4. Two entries are cases in which the foreign structure was tested and held up. In BB&T v. Hamilton Greens, the court held a hearing and denied contempt, finding that the debtor could not compel the foreign trustee. In FDIC v. Lewis, the court denied repatriation and left the trust intact. On what basis were these described as failures? And In re Colburn concerned a Bermudan trust and was decided on a false oath under 11 U.S.C. § 727(a)(4)(A). On what basis is it on a list of Cook Islands, Nevis and Belize defeats?
5. After Mr. Harris illustrated the flaws in your "45 Cases Gone Wrong" list, you reduced the list from 45 cases to 21 cases ("Failed FAPT #21"). In other words, more than half of your original list simply disappeared. What happened to those cases? What changed in your analysis? Which cases did you determine no longer supported your position, and why?
6. On or about August 8, 2026 you wrote: "Those 45 cases came from multiple sources. I agree that some of them aren't actual trust cases. I haven't read them all." You removed the chart on August 10. In your November 18, 2025 email, however, you wrote: "I don't believe that anything I say or write is misleading. I am not misrepresenting anything by listing the cases where FAPTs didn't work." Do you still hold that position today? If so, what prompted the removal of the chart? Why did it remain published between Mr. Harris's November 18, 2025 notice and that date? And why do references to the list remain on your profile today?
7. On the day you removed the chart you directed readers to articles by McCullough Law, Derren Joseph / HTJ Tax, and Paul Deloughery / Sudden Wealth Protection Law. Before doing so, had you read the decisions those articles cite? Blake Harris Law has redlined all three line by line and published the markups. Do you accept that a lawyer is responsible for the accuracy of what he disseminates to the public, whether he wrote it himself or directed readers to someone else's work?
8. The Deloughery article is described as a list of 28 failed foreign asset protection trusts. Blake Harris Law's review finds that the article identifies nine cases, none of which is stated to involve a foreign asset protection trust. What accounts for the difference?
9. Do you still hold the position that domestic asset protection trusts are the safer choice? You have written that Hybrid DAPTs are undefeated. How many reported decisions have tested one? And if a U.S. court orders the trustee of a Nevada DAPT to turn over the assets, does the trustee comply, or is the trustee prohibited by law from complying?

On the composition of the list

10. In re Steering Committee and In re Tinsley could not be located by Blake Harris Law despite extensive research. Can you provide the citations?
11. Setting aside the duplicates, the entries that cannot be located, the eight involving no foreign trust and the four in which the structure held, how many of the forty-five remain?
12. When you assembled the chart, what was your process for verifying each entry against the decision?
13. Which sources did the entries come from?
14. In In re Omegas Group, 16 F.3d 1443 (6th Cir. 1994), the Sixth Circuit reversed the decision below. Was that reflected in your entry?

On contempt and what it establishes

15. A contempt order addresses the debtor's conduct and credibility. It does not establish that a foreign trustee was compelled to distribute or that the corpus was reached. Do you accept that distinction?
16. In FTC v. Affordable Media, 179 F.3d 1228 (9th Cir. 1999), the settlors were their own trust protectors with the power to force repatriation, had already withdrawn funds, and sought to resign as protectors only after the FTC identified the role. Does that decision speak to jurisdiction or to retained control?
17. In In re Lawrence, 279 F.3d 1294 (11th Cir. 2002), the trust was funded roughly two months before an anticipated $20.4M arbitration award, and the settlor retained powers to appoint trustees and to exclude and reinstate beneficiaries. Which of those facts concerns the jurisdiction rather than the drafting?
18. In SEC v. Bilzerian, the contempt was for refusing a sworn accounting and the only asset reached was U.S.-situs real estate. Was the offshore corpus ever reached?
19. In Eulich v. U.S., the debtor produced the documents and was purged of contempt. Were assets ever repatriated?
20. In Barbee v. Goldstein, the trustee and protector consented to winding up the trust. Was the offshore barrier tested on its own terms?
21. In SEC v. Solow, the Cook Islands trust was settled by his wife, no order ran against the Cook Islands trustee, and the SEC attacked the funding transfers in a separate action against her. The contempt addressed his own post-verdict transfers. What does that establish about foreign trusts, as opposed to about transfers made after a verdict?
22. In FTC v. AmeriDebt, the trusts were created within two months of civil investigative demands and the contempt was for concealing other assets. The same question applies.

On category

23. The divorce cases on the list — Riechers, Westrate, Breitenstine, Marriage of Harnack — are marital property divisions with remedies against a spouse personally. Did any of those courts bind a foreign trustee?
24. The bankruptcy cases — Brennan, Colburn, Portnoy — turn on disclosure misconduct. Is a denial of discharge for false oaths a finding concerning a trust?
25. Post-claim and post-judgment transfers are vulnerable whether the recipient is an LLC, a spouse, a domestic trust or a foreign trust. What do the fraudulent transfer entries establish about foreign jurisdictions specifically?
26. The tax and criminal matters — Thompson, Butselaar, Schneider — are prosecutions involving concealment structures. What do they tell a lawful planner about a properly formed trust?
27. In a March 2026 post you agreed that most of the cases are bad facts cases. If the outcome turns on the debtor's conduct, what does the case establish about the offshore trust itself?

On your own published materials

28. Your March 2026 infographic presents eleven decisions as debtors who chose jail. One of the eleven is Chadwick v. Green, which involved no offshore trust. What was the basis for its inclusion in your list?
29. The same infographic's caption for Eulich v. U.S. states that the debtor was threatened with jail until documents were produced. How does that caption support the heading?
30. You have written that there are only two possible best asset protection techniques. What case law establishes that?
31. Your published case-law criticism has been directed at foreign structures rather than at the domestic structures you recommend. What accounts for that?

On the record since November 2025

32. You were given written notice on November 18, 2025 and replied the same day declining to correct the list. You then published the list again in January, March and May 2026. What changed between the notice and those posts?
33. The post carrying the comments that identified the errors was subsequently deleted. What was the reason?
34. The chart circulated for roughly eight months. Was anyone who relied on it notified that some entries do not belong?

On public statements

35. Your website presents a "Most Influential Asset Protection Attorney" honor. The document identifies itself as a conversation between ChatGPT and Anonymous. It cannot be reproduced, and the same conversation opens by stating that there is no single most influential asset protection attorney and ranks you fourth of six on impact on case law. What is the basis for presenting it as an honor?
36. You have written publicly that there is a great deal of intentional misrepresentation of case law in this field. Which publications did you have in mind?

On disclosure

37. Do you or any family member hold a financial interest in a Nevada trust company? Mr. Harris discloses his interest in Atlas Trust Company on his website, on LinkedIn, and publicly.

On engagement

38. Mr. Harris has offered to appear jointly with you, on any platform, at a time of your choosing. Under what conditions would you accept?
39. Rather than respond in the comments on Mr. Harris's post, you captured the post and responded on your own page. What informed that choice?

The bottom line

None of this is a claim that offshore trusts cannot fail. They can, and our own case register publishes the decisions that went badly, including the ones that went badly for our side of the argument. That is the point of keeping a register rather than a chart.

What the record does not contain is a reported decision in which a properly formed, timely funded foreign trust with an independent trustee — where the settlor was not in control — was defeated on the merits. That is a bounded statement about the decisions our attorneys have read. It is not a guarantee, and it is not a prediction about anyone's case.

If you are choosing a structure, do not take either side's count. Ask for the citations, read the decisions, and ask what the trustee does when a U.S. court gives an order. Those three steps settle more than any list will.

The questions above remain open. If they are answered, we will publish the answers here in full, unedited.

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Fair-report note. This page discusses published materials and identified court decisions, and quotes correspondence. Statements attributed to Mr. Oshins are quoted from his own published posts and emails, with dates; dated copies are held on file. Blake Harris Law competes with Mr. Oshins's firm and discloses Blake Harris's interest in Atlas Trust Company. Question 38 asks about a possible financial interest; it is a question, and no such interest is asserted or known. We will correct any factual error on this page promptly — write to us and we will publish the correction.