Despite the publicized $359 million settlement with the FTC, Jesse Willms is doing just fine financially—and he has a new yellow Lamborghini to prove it. One reason for his quick return to prosperity is that he was never actually going to pay the advertised settlement amount; the financial judgment was suspended, as long as he surrendered his assets. In reality, Willms likely never had that much cash. Most of what he took in (that wasn’t spent in Vegas) went right back out to pay affiliates and distributors. After he settled his tax debts, Willms turned over a total of just $991,000 to the U.S. Treasury, according to the FTC’s enforcement division. “People like Jesse Willms, we’ve found, like to spend their money,” Decker told me. “That makes it very difficult to get enough money to make injured consumers whole.”

But the other reason for his continued prosperity is that he remains very good at making money on the Internet. Although Willms wrote in his one substantive e‑mail to me that the FTC suit “represents the biggest challenge I have ever had in my life”—one that made him contemplate “closing down my business and going back to school”—some of his acquaintances claim that Willms seemed barely perturbed as his second fortune looked likely to disappear. “Right when he got sued by the FTC, I went to a bar downtown, and he was there,” one former employee told me. “I was talking to him, and he seemed totally oblivious to the whole thing. It was bizarre.”

With the deftness that has characterized his entire business career, Willms left diet products behind and pivoted into information services. His major ventures today provide consumers with driving records, criminal records, and vehicle-history reports (just as Carfax does) across dozens of different pages, notably carhistory.us.org, dmv.us.org, vehiclehistory.com, and vehiclehistoryrecord.com. In fact, anyone looking for these services would have a hard time avoiding him: as of November, if you searched vehicle history on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, ads for Willms’s sites were among the first things you would see. By the looks of it, Willms offers a terrific deal—just $1 for a vehicle-history report, compared with $39.99 for one from Carfax. Because of this, Willms’s lawyer claims that the sites have received “several hundred thousand positive comments related to the product.”

When I looked into the sites, however, I also found hundreds of online reviews accusing them of being scams. In many of these reviews, customers complained of looking through their credit-card statements to find that, instead of being charged $1 for their report, they were charged for what turned out to be a “volume discount” subscription program that gave them 25 reports a month (you know, for those of us who like to query the history of our own cars nearly every day) for anywhere between $119.40 and $199.50, billed out over the course of a year. None of the customers seemed to have had any clue they’d signed up for this, and most reported difficulty getting their money back. “I got my refund ONLY after filing a complaint with the BBB,” one wrote. (Willms’s lawyer said that rates of refunded charges remain low, that the company has made “substantial efforts to improve customer satisfaction,” and that it “provides an immediate refund to any unsatisfied customers.”)