Apparently, some people will do just about anything to avoid paying child support, including adopting radical anti-government ideology that they say exempts them from the requirement to do so.
In what Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, calls “a new trend,” a growing group of both bona-fide radical-right extremists and opportunists merely seeking a vehicle to help them avoid paying taxes, child support and other debts are forming a tenuous but burgeoning alliance. The former group has genuine and deep-seated antipathy toward government policies and what its members regard as unwarranted intrusion on their personal freedoms. Potok describes the latter as “dabblers” willing to pay lip service to what is called the” sovereign citizens” movement as nothing more than an expedient to relieve them of lawful payment obligations.
Whatever their personal motivations might be, Georgia law enforcement agencies are paying increasing attention to the group as a whole. Sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents are focusing particularly closely on the practice of squatting, whereby people in the movement are using phony deeds to claim ownership of foreclosed and other properties and then cite ideological precepts that criticize what they say is government interference with their property rights.
A number of the squatters have been arrested. DeKalb Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney John Melvin says that his office has connected those arrested thus far with 17 illegally obtained properties across Georgia with an estimated market value of about $10 million.
Related Resource: www.abcnews.go.com “Anti-Government Sovereign Citizens Taking Foreclosed Homes Using Phony Deeds, Authorities Say” August 23, 2010