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Who is Lovette Dobson and why is her name on a stunning 70,000 business filing documents? In New York, she’s listed as CEO on 450 of them. (Take that, Elon!)  

She has virtually zero public profile. Is she even a real person?  

Inc. senior writer Sam Blum takes readers on a remarkable journey to figure out who Dobson is (and if she exists) and into the seriocomic world of business formation across the United States. What starts in Wyoming, thanks to its boom in new business filings, ends in Houston, Texas, on the phone with “perhaps the most prolific signatory of corporate paperwork in the entire nation.” Read on to discover:  

This story received a huge response when we published it, and it’s quickly become an evergreen as people search for any clues that give them insight into this mystery woman.  

Got a business mystery you’d like Inc. to solve? Can’t promise these kind of results, but we’d love to hear from you. Email me anytime at [email protected].  

In the anonymous paperwork of LLC registrations, scam victims are desperate to find a real person to help them. Sometimes all they have is Lovette.

BY SAM BLUM, SENIOR WRITER 

Over the past few years, a Wyoming government official named Tara Berg has been monitoring a quiet and disconcerting trend. Though she’s an assessor for Fremont County (population 40,000), Berg has assumed the unofficial role of a watchdog overseeing a flood of new business registrations across the state. 

In 2024, Berg says, a staggering 40,000 businesses were registered in Wyoming in the fourth quarter alone—this after a 42 percent rise in filings in 2023. Wyoming is the least populous state in the country, known for its vast, rugged landscape and ample wildlife. It has only 584,000 residents. 

“We don’t have that many new businesses,” Berg says of the wave. 

Wyoming’s impact on the history of U.S. capitalism is undeniable: The American version of the LLC as a financial concept was invented in the state in 1977, and has been used as a way to shield business owners from certain tax and debt liabilities ever since. There are more than 20 million limited liability companies, or LLCs, operating within the country presently, according to most reliable estimates. Wyoming’s 2024 boom in LLCs would appear anomalous. For comparison, when 62,000 businesses were registered in New York City across eight quarters from Q4 2021 to Q3 2023, it qualified as a record. 

Tara Berg’s job consists of estimating the property and asset values of businesses to determine their tax obligations. In recent years, her purview has expanded to investigations: She’s bombarded with claims that unknown LLCs are swooping into towns and using residents’ addresses without their permission. 

In one email to Berg’s office, the owner of an excavation company claims her address is being used by an LLC she’d never heard of. The fraudulent business was organized by a company called Incfile, and signed off by someone named Lovette Dobson. “Please see the attached documents which show a Lovette Dobson using our street address,” the email says. “We have never heard of this company or Lovette Dobson.”

Back at my desk in New York, I had also come across Dobson’s name while researching Bitcoin mining operations in Wyoming; the state is a popular draw for crypto, in keeping with the state’s tradition of loose regulations around business formation. For reasons I can’t explain, the name jumped out at me. It’s an innocuous name, but its association with Wyoming crypto conjured up a certain mystique: This person could have been a character in a movie, a schoolteacher, a friend, a parent. She seemed approachable like a neighbor but still enigmatic and distant. A recurring figure in a bewildering sea of corporate bureaucracy. 

The minutiae of establishing a business is relatively boring and involves filling out forms, paying fees and interfacing with the secretary of state’s office in whatever state a company chooses to incorporate or organize. Often, when someone opens a business, a third-party company will handle the scut work by serving as that company’s organizer, incorporator, or registered agent. A registered agent will provide an address for the business to receive legal notices in its home state, whereas an organizer handles the headache of filing paperwork. 

So it’s curious that among the millions of LLCs in the U.S., around 45,000 have been organized across 10 states by the same person: Lovette Dobson. This person has also incorporated 26,000 businesses as corporations, and has at one time been listed as CEO of 450 companies in New York State, according to business records compiled by OpenCorporates.

Lovette Dobson is perhaps the most prolific signatory of corporate paperwork in the entire nation. To be sure, she is the most prevalent name in OpenCorporates’ sprawling database: “We had a look at the 10 most common names in the U.S. and found that none even came close to matching Lovette Dobson’s apparent empire,” Jackson Torchia, a community manager at OpenCorporates explained over email. The name closest in terms of sheer volume, David Smith, is associated with 54,000 companies—nearly 20,000 fewer than Lovette Dobson. 

But despite the prevalence of her name, Dobson herself was elusive. I couldn’t find a LinkedIn profile, or a bio on her supposed employer’s website. To be sure, there’s very little public information about Dobson online, aside from a couple private social media accounts that are buried deep in a Google search under mountains of business filings.

Googling her gave way to a breadcrumb trail. Dobson appears in a couple news stories about LLCs being taken out in small business owners’ names without their consent in Wyoming. Dobson is also on the paperwork of a fraudulent LLC in Arizona that stole $10,000 from an elderly woman. She was the organizer of a company based in Florida accused of orchestrating a scam targeting a shipping company. In 2022, a class action lawsuit from New York mentions Dobson as the incorporator of an LLC taken out fraudulently in a victim’s name. In the complaint, lawyers say the plaintiff “has no idea who ‘Lovette Dobson’ is or whether this person is real or fictional.” 

Even at a glance, Dobson’s signature accompanies regulatory filings, articles of incorporation, and annual reports for tens of thousands of companies. Her name is on the initial Form S-1 that brought Playboy Enterprises, the parent company of Playboy magazine, public via SPAC in 2021. She also filed the paperwork for Tesla.Sexy LLC, the company opened by Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old helping Elon Musk tear through the federal government as part of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. 

How could one person push so much paper? And why? I had a nagging suspicion that she might not even even exist. 

If anything, the prevalence of one person on so many filings illustrates the Wild West brand of capitalism that has made the U.S. economy flourish. But it’s also a brand that accommodates corporate deception as a byproduct. It’s very easy for business owners to remain anonymous in certain states. Indeed, there’s an entire industry set up to help people establish businesses. Inevitably, and unknowingly—for the most part—they also help bad actors to establish what appear to be legitimate companies. Unpacking who Lovette Dobson is provides a good example of how the system has worked for decades. 

For nearly 20 years, Lovette Dobson has been an employee of Bizee, a company that helps entrepreneurs establish businesses. (For most of its existence, the company was called Incfile, and it was featured on the Inc. 5000 in 2023—the same year it changed its name to embody a more modern brand image.) It’s a smaller player in the registered agent industry, which is dominated by companies you may have heard of, like ZenBusiness and the publicly traded Legalzoom. Bizee offers many services, including organizing and incorporating businesses according to various state requirements. It can also serve as a registered agent through a subsidiary, Republic Registered Agents, which provides an address in all 50 states, according to co-CEO Nick Siha. 

Bizee’s website says it has “helped over 1 million entrepreneurs start their businesses” over a 20-year period. The cost of setting up an LLC varies by state. There’s an initial filing fee and various other charges that typically add up to a few hundred dollars. In some states, it’s unclear who many of those business owners are—but this isn’t illegal. The legal landscape is a patchwork of state laws that offer varying degrees of anonymity for owners. The prospect of anonymity remains alluring for many business owners—some of whom have incentive to remain in the dark.  

Because it’s so easy to open a business through a third party, companies like Bizee are regularly targeted by an international underbelly of alleged scammers looking to set up shop in the U.S., the company’s co-CEO, Nick Siha, explains. 

Registered agents have been increasingly investigated over waves of international crime and money laundering, as many businesses—especially in Wyoming, Nevada, and Delaware—take advantage of the fractured legal landscape. Last year, WIRED published an investigation on Registered Agents Inc., a Twin Falls, Idaho-based company that former employees said has gone to extreme lengths to conceal the identities of its clients by establishing more than 30,000 businesses under fake names. A 2022 report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Washington Post determined that the sparse regulatory environment in states like Wyoming and Delaware allowed certain registered agent companies to “help open America to oligarchs and scammers.” 

Bizee is aware of the risk and employs a fraud team that tries to ferret out illicit activity, but the process can feel like whack-a-mole. It’s “not an exact science, because the more sophisticated we get, the more sophisticated [criminals] get. They start using VPNs,” Siha explains to me over the phone. This means that Dobson’s name has been associated with various fraudulent enterprises throughout the country, even if all she’s doing is signing the paperwork according to state laws. Her name is often the only thing scam victims have to go on as they try and figure out what is happening. 

I spoke with a Michigan man who recounted an LLC scam that slipped through Bizee’s detection. In 2022, Adam found that his elderly father’s address and name had been fraudulently used to open an LLC for a phony IT business. Scammers allegedly gained remote access to Adam’s father’s computer by selling him monitoring software disguised as anti-virus protection. 

“They used that to access all of his Google passwords, take over his email, and then go about filing stuff to start a business in his name,” says Adam, who asked for anonymity  to avoid being targeted by more scams. The group didn’t steal money from his father—aside from making him pay $500 for the monitoring software—but Adam believes they intended to use the LLC and address to make their scam look like a legit business. 

Adam eventually got his father’s fake LLC dissolved, but only after a vexing journey into customer service. He had to threaten legal action against Legalinc—which is owned by LegalZoom—to swiftly move things along. 

A Legalinc customer service rep told Adam the company was available to answer legal notices for his father’s scam LLC. To dissolve it, he would have to contact Incfile, the former name of Bizee—the company’s organizer. Eventually, the articles of dissolution, signed by Michigan’s secretary of state, were emailed to him by an individual listed as the organizer: Lovette Dobson.

Adam was puzzled about the organizer, which was the only identifiable name on the LLC’s paperwork aside from his dad’s. Naturally, he researched it and found a number of the articles from Wyoming that mention Dobson. 

“Has she ever been deposed?” he asked over the phone in January. “I’ve tried looking up birth records … any kind of record of an existence of somebody with that name, and I can never find anything.”

It took me a while, but I eventually made contact with Lovette Dobson. Calling her felt like I had found Batman after years of searching, even though it had only been a couple months. Bizzie had arranged for us to talk, and I got through to her at the company’s Houston office. 

Dobson, a mother of three, had a soft Texan accent and was polite in the way that someone who spends a lot of professional time on the phone is polite. She understood why I was calling. 

“We do thousands of filings a month. We get orders upon orders every single day,” she told me. 

Dobson’s name goes on every single filing through an automated process that involves templates tailored to each state’s rules. She’s aware there’s a kind of negative mythos attached to her name. “When somebody is scammed or going through a fraudulent mishap and they see my name on [the paperwork], they automatically think that I have something to do with it.” 

Scam victims often assume that Dobson is an officer of the companies she’s organized. Some state rules only contribute to the confusion. In New Mexico and Wyoming, for instance, a company’s directors don’t need to be listed on business filings. And in Wyoming, registered agents don’t have to know who they’re filing paperwork for at all. If Dobson, as the organizer, is the only person whose name is on a document, it might appear to some people as if she’s running the company. That’s how it appeared to Adam, from Michigan. 

In fact, OpenCorporates records show Dobson as the listed CEO of 450 companies in New York State, the vast majority of which are now inactive. Dobson says listing her as CEO is inaccurate. “If you look at the paperwork, it clearly states that I am the organizer. This is the paperwork that we put together on somebody’s behalf.” 

New York State’s rules back up Dobson’s reasoning. The state’s Division of Corporations doesn’t keep the names of any principal business owners in its records. “We don’t know who owns what,” a state official told me. That is scheduled to change when the state’s LLC Transparency Act goes into effect in 2026, requiring all LLCs to file beneficial ownership paperwork with the state. 

Bizee’s fraud team goes through filings to look for discrepancies between physical and IP addresses, differences between names on IDs and credit cards, and a multitude of other criteria that could be red flags, she says. When Bizee encounters fraud, it dissolves the LLC or corporation, which costs a fee, payable to the state. Dobson says Bizee pays for it. 

“I’m totally transparent,” Nick Siha says. “This is a legit company. I fucking killed myself the last 20 years trying to build it.”

In many instances, a fraudulent LLC is just one layer of some criminal operations. “We’ve talked to victims of other types of identity crimes and other identity credential misuse, and then they find out later that they’ve had an LLC created, and they often don’t even know,” Eva Velasquez, CEO at the Identity Theft Resource Center, explains. “I don’t think anybody has a really good handle on the scope and the scale [of LLC fraud].” 

Tara Berg, the Wyoming county assessor, is trying her best to understand how big it can get. “This is not an assessor’s job, necessarily,” Berg told me. Yet, Berg’s office has little choice but to confront the issue, which has swept the state in recent years as Russian oligarchs and North Korean operations attempted to take advantage of the laissez-faire legal environment. 

Registered agents in Wyoming don’t have to disclose who owns an LLC. The state also promises low taxes and fees to lure prospective business owners, many of whom are based abroad. “It’s great that we have low filing fees, but we’re not protecting the Wyoming citizens who truly operate here,” Berg said. 

In a presentation Berg gave to the Wyoming State Legislature last year, she laid out some alarming statistics: Since late 2022, at least 551 businesses have used the same address in the town of Lander (population: 2,500). The man living at the address serves as a registered agent for a company called Wyoming Discount Registered Agents. When Berg’s team asked him questions, they were stonewalled. 

“None of the businesses were his, none were physically located at his property despite the fact that this address is listed as the principal office,” Berg’s report says. “He is only providing a WY address for the agency. He also referred to the business as his ‘side hustle’ to one of our employees.”

When it comes to businesses using false addresses, Berg noticed a theme: “Initial investigation has shown a majority of these being … organized by INCFILE.COM LLC,” the report says. 

State regulators are moving to deal with the issue, according to Chuck Gray, Wyoming’s secretary of state. “We requested a bill requiring third-party filers who file 10 or more documents with the secretary of state’s office on behalf of another entity to verify they are real people,” Gray told me after I emailed his office. The measure now sits before Wyoming’s House of Representatives after passing its Senate. 

“We have also markedly increased complete, in-person audits of commercial registered agents from previous administrations, resulting in a number of active investigations and findings to ensure compliance with Wyoming law,” Gray’s email continued. 

Regulatory remedies are still lacking. The Enablers Act, introduced to the U.S. Congress in 2021, seeks to provide greater transparency by requiring registered agents to disclose who their clients are in an effort to combat money laundering. The congressman who introduced the bill, Democrat Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, lost his seat in 2022. 

It’s also unclear what will happen with the Corporate Transparency Act, a piece of bipartisan legislation passed by Congress in 2021 meant to crack down on shell companies. While a federal judge in Texas recently stayed an injunction of the CTA—allowing its enforcement to continue under the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)—the White House under Donald Trump has so far indicated that such regulations are largely on the chopping block. Previously, companies had a deadline of filing beneficial ownership information statements for CTA compliance by March 21. That changed earlier this week, when the treasury department announced that it won’t be enforcing the CTA. In February, the White House paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits businesses from engaging in bribes in exchange for preferential treatment from foreign officials.

Looser oversight at the federal level means enforcement will likely boil down to the states. It also means that, in the absence of any legally enforceable transparency in the long term, you will likely see Lovette Dobson associated with more businesses that have no traceable owners. And it will continue to be entirely legal.