Twenty-Nine Failed Offshore Trust Cases? What the Decisions Say

On 13 August 2025, a subscriber newsletter carried a list of twenty-nine court decisions presented as failed foreign asset protection trusts, under the heading that domestic trusts are superior. Within a year the same author's count had been a chart of forty-five, then twenty-one, then three articles by other people, and then — asked to name a single decision — one case.

We have read all twenty-nine. Every one of them appears in our case-by-case review, with links to the decisions, so you can check the analysis instead of taking our word for it. This piece does not re-run all twenty-nine. It points at the entries where the gap between the summary and the decision is widest, at two claims in the same newsletter that deserve more attention than the list, and at one fact that matters more than any of them: the forty-five-case chart came down in August 2026, and this list did not. It is still in the archive, under the same byline, dated and numbered and citable.

The number that will not sit still

Take the sequence on its own, before any individual case.

Twenty-nine, in the newsletter of 13 August 2025, described there as "a comprehensive list."

Forty-five, in a chart titled "45 FAPT Cases Gone Wrong" carrying a 2025 copyright line. Written notice that it contained duplicates, non-trust cases, and cases the structure won went out on 18 November 2025. It was declined the same day, and the chart was republished in January, March and May 2026.

Twenty-one, after the flaws were set out publicly — published as "Failed FAPT #21." More than half of the forty-five simply went away, with no note of which entries were withdrawn or why.

Three articles by other authors, on 10 August 2026, the day the chart came down. One of them is described as twenty-eight failed foreign trusts and identifies nine cases, none of which is stated to involve a foreign asset protection trust.

One case. Asked to name a single decision in which a properly formed trust — independent trustee, funded before any claim arose, settlor not in control — failed on the merits, the case offered was FTC v. Affordable Media.

Counting is not the same as reading. A claim that arrives at a different number each time somebody checks it was never resting on the decisions.

The chart came down. This list did not.

This is the part that matters most, and it is not about any individual case.

On 10 August 2026 the forty-five-case chart was removed from LinkedIn. The accompanying statement was explicit about what would happen next:

At your request, I have removed that chart from my past postings. If you find any posts that I missed, you should email me directly.

This is one he missed.

Newsletter #450 is the direct predecessor of the chart. It carries the same defect — the same non-trust cases, the same summaries that describe facts the decisions do not contain — and it is still in the LISI archive under his byline, dated 13 August 2025, numbered, and citable. It was still retrievable the day before this was written.

That matters for a practical reason rather than a rhetorical one. A chart on a social feed scrolls away. A numbered newsletter in a subscriber archive is what practitioners cite. It is the version that gets found by an advisor researching the question in two years' time, and it is the version a reader is most likely to treat as authoritative, precisely because it looks like scholarship rather than marketing.

Removing a graphic while the article version stays in an archive does not correct the record. It relocates it.

Where the summary and the decision part company

A one-line summary is doing a lot of work in a list like this, because almost nobody clicks through. These are the entries where the line and the decision are hardest to reconcile. The full treatment of each is in the review.

Five entries involve no foreign asset protection trust at all.

• Chadwick v. Green (his #6) — no trust. Offshore annuities and a Panamanian bank account he controlled personally.
• FTC v. Fortuna Alliance (#11) — no trust. Corporate funds in an Antiguan bank account in the company's own name.
• U.S. v. Plath (#24) — no asset protection trust. Offshore credit-card accounts.
• The Jerome Schneider matter (#20) — no asset protection trusts. Sham offshore banks and corporations.
• Fortney v. Kuipers (#12) — the transfers were domestic, despite a summary saying assets were moved offshore.

A list of trust failures that contains no trust is not evidence about trusts. It is evidence about people who moved money and got caught, which is a different subject and one on which we agree with him.

Four more do not describe a trust being defeated — on his own one-line summaries. No reading of the underlying decisions is needed to see this; the summaries do it themselves.

• SEC v. Brennan (#21) — described as a "bankruptcy fraud conviction." A conviction is not a finding about a trust.
• Indiana Investors v. Fink (#28) — a Cook Islands trust "frozen by TRO." A temporary restraining order is an interim order preserving the status quo, not a judgment against a trust.
• Gilmore v. AsiaTrust (#29) — a court "asserted jurisdiction over offshore trustee." Jurisdiction is the power to hear a dispute. It is not assets recovered.
• U.S. v. Butselaar (#19) — a tax attorney jailed for hiding money offshore. No trust appears anywhere in the description.

A case the structure won, filed as a loss. Riechers appears under divorce, summarised as offshore trust assets being included in the marital estate. The court accepted the Cook Islands trust as legitimate and disclaimed jurisdiction over its corpus. That is the outcome an offshore trust is bought to produce.

Entries whose own wording does not support the heading. The summary for Eulich v. U.S. says the debtor was "threatened with jail until assets repatriated." He produced the documents, was purged of contempt, and no assets were ever repatriated. "Threatened" is the tell: the sentence describes a threat, not a failure.

Cases where the offshore barrier was never tested. In Barbee v. Goldstein the trustee and protector consented to winding the trust up, so nothing was tested against a refusal. In SEC v. Solow the Cook Islands trust was settled by the debtor's wife and never tested at all; the contempt addressed his own post-verdict transfers to her. In SEC v. Bilzerian the contempt was for refusing a sworn accounting, and the only asset actually reached was U.S.-situs real estate — the offshore corpus was not.

And the case that was finally named. In FTC v. Affordable Media the settlors were their own trust protectors, held the power to force repatriation, had already withdrawn over a million dollars, and tried to resign as protectors only after the FTC identified the role. It is a decision about a settlor who never let go of the controls. It is also a Cook Islands case, so it cannot demonstrate a domestic trust failure either.

The jail entries give the game away

This is the most revealing thing in the newsletter, and it is not in the list — it is in the author's own aside about the Harnack matter:

No, a FAPT didn't "work" if the debtor had to sit in jail for many years and is still sitting in jail. FAPT proponents seem to count these as victories. No, these are failures!

Read what that concedes. The assets were never recovered. The creditor did not get the money. The court did what a contempt power lets it do — it acted on the person, because it could not reach the property.

That is a real and serious cost, and nobody should pretend otherwise: a client who ends up in contempt has had a catastrophic outcome, and our own writing on Marriage of Harnack and In re Lawrence says so plainly. But it is a fact about a debtor who kept control and refused an order, not a fact about the jurisdiction. Those debtors were not lawful planners who funded early and stepped back; they were people fighting a judgment they already had.

Filing that under "the trust failed" describes the opposite of what happened to the trust.

"Only one bad DAPT case"

The newsletter's case for domestic trusts rests on a scarcity claim: that there are only a few DAPT decisions and only one of them — Huber — is bad for DAPT planners, and that the Huber court got it wrong.

Two problems.

There is a second one, and he analysed it himself. The same publication carries two newsletters about United States v. Huckaby — one by Jay Adkisson under a title stating that a Nevada domestic asset protection trust failed to protect California real estate, and one that is the same author's own analysis of the case. In Huckaby a federal court held that whether the land could be reached was governed by the law of the place the land sits. California Probate Code voids self-settled spendthrift provisions, so the government's judgment lien reached the property. No misconduct was needed to get there — which is precisely what makes it a harder case for domestic planning than a contempt order against someone hiding assets. Our register of these decisions is at DAPT Facts.

Few cases is not a track record. "Only one bad case" and "a far superior track record" describe an absence of litigation, not a record of wins. A structure that has rarely been tested and one that has been tested and held are not the same claim. The Hybrid DAPT has been described as undefeated; the useful question is how many reported decisions have ever tested one.

And the standard is not applied evenly. An adverse domestic decision is "1,000,000% wrong." An offshore contempt order against a settlor who kept control is treated as dispositive. Both cannot be right.

The claim with no case behind it

The newsletter's conclusion, stated twice:

for a resident of a non-DAPT state or a lesser DAPT state, the absolute best asset protection technique is and always will be to use a Hybrid DAPT.

"Is and always will be" is not a statement about case law. No decision establishes it, none is cited for it, and it is the sort of claim that cannot be established by any decision — it forecloses the possibility of contrary authority in advance.

Set against it is the one question that actually separates domestic from offshore, and it does not turn on drafting quality: if a U.S. court orders the trustee of a Nevada trust 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. Three further constraints apply regardless of how well the deed is written — fraudulent-transfer law, the ten-year lookback for self-settled trusts under 11 U.S.C. § 548(e), and a home state's freedom to decline another state's protective statute on public-policy grounds.

The bottom line

Offshore trusts can fail, and we publish the decisions where they did — including the ones that are bad for our own argument. That is what a register is for, and what a chart is not.

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 between these structures, do not accept either side's number — ours included. Ask for the citations. Read the decisions. Then ask what the trustee does when a judge gives an order.

The forty-one questions we have put about these lists remain unanswered. If they are answered, we will publish the answers in full and unedited.

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The list discussed here was published in LISI Asset Protection Planning Newsletter #450 (13 August 2025), a subscriber publication of Leimberg Information Services, Inc. Short passages are quoted for the purpose of criticism and comment; the newsletter is not reproduced. Blake Harris Law competes with the author's firm, and discloses Blake Harris's interest in Atlas Trust Company. We will correct any factual error on this page promptly — write to us and we will publish the correction.