My life in the secret world of international financial fraud
I thought I knew it all • The
Underground Network •
Moving up the food chain
• Finding Mr. Goodbar
• Through the looking
glass: Annie in Wonderland •
In the Trader's confidence
- game • The worm turns
• A maze of half-truths and
outright lies • Pack Rats
Rule! • Getting
straight answers • Getting
it together • Coulda',
Shoulda' • Something for
everybody
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The worm turns
Now it was time for my investors to reap the
benefits of my financial acumen. Well, maybe not quite yet. There seemed to be
a problem with the due date. Instead of the original 6 week turnover, it was
going to take just a wee bit longer. Uh,... no - another delay reared its ugly
head. Uh-oh - there was a problem with one of my older deals that had the Trust
officers all riled up, so they were freezing the investor funds until the
problem was straightened out.
And on it went.
I was told that my business partner was making too
many waves, that the investors were causing problems with their complaints, that
the Trader was taken ill from all the stress, that all the problems stemmed from
the bad deal I had brought into the Trust a few months previously, and so the
months went by with no profit disbursements, no returned funds.
My partner and I begged, pleaded, made compromises,
made promises, crawled on our bellies like a snake. Anything to get the
investors' money back, all to no avail. We were terrified. The
Trader kept making promises and excuses and threats and more promises, We had
to buy into all of it - we had to believe - anything to the contrary was
too horrible to contemplate.
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A maze of half-truths and
outright lies
My gross ignorance of international banking procedures
and documents was my undoing.
The bank stamps and receipts were forged. I did not
have any money sitting in a Trust sub-account. The government official with
whom I spoke was working with the Trader, but not on High-Yield Investment
Programs. The Trader did not belong the CIA. The Trust was not a government
sponsored Trust in partnership with a major world bank. There were no
government projects being funded by the Trust. The only trust was what I
had placed in the Trader, who had stuck me plumb in the middle.
The last time I heard from the Trader he said that
the [foreign] government was running an investigation. The investors might be
sued and thrown in jail, lose their investments, and have to pay a penalty
because of their attempts to retrieve their funds. All these problems are
making him so ill that he might have to be hospitalized and even die... After
that he was gone, gone, gone.
We had been led in, out, and around a maze of
half-truths and outright lies for months. At last we had to acknowledge
defeat. I, for one, expected the absolute worst. Fear had placed its cold fist
in the center of my being. It would be a long, long time before I felt warm
again.
We finally called the FBI.
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Pack Rats Rule!
The Special Agent in Charge at the FBI asked me to
write what he called a narrative. He said that this should be an account of
everything that had happened from the beginning. He said that he only wanted
the facts, no elaboration, no conjecture, and especially no emotion. Ok-a-ay...
It took me a few days to get my act together, but I
finally gathered up the nerve to start writing. The truth is that I really didn't want
to relive the nightmare. Once I got started, I discovered that I had kept
every single piece of paper that had anything to do with any deal I had taken
on. It turned out that there were all kinds of notes, phone numbers, addresses,
fax numbers, and file after file of bric-a-brac that I had collected over my
years in the Underground Network, and especially since I had started working
with the Trader.
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Getting it together
I called the Special Agent and got an extension on
the narrative. I started all over again from scratch. First I organized every
item that even vaguely pertained to the Trader into chronological order. Then I
began to write.
By the time I finished, I had two narratives: the
first was the sequence of events and included every document that backed up the
those events. The
second was a money trail report, and included all the documents to back that
up. All in all, both reports added up to well over 100 pages of Items of Proof,
Index, Reference, and text.
The Special Agent, and later the Prosecution, said
it was the best narrative they had ever seen. It not only proved beyond a
shadow of a doubt that I had been duped by the Trader and his cronies, but it
served to cause warrants to be issued on all 3 of the swindlers involved.
(Instructions for writing an effective narrative can be found in
The Fraud Victim's Manual©)
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Coulda', Shoulda'
I could have avoided every last bit of what happened
had I only stopped believing and implicitly trusting
what the scammer was telling me long
enough to pose the right questions to the right sources - starting with my
 own
common sense. I should have listened to my own personal Jiminy Cricket when I
heard his tiny voice saying that something was fishy. That's easy to say now,
of course.
At the time, it was almost impossible to decide who
was telling the truth.
As long as I had been in the Underground Network I
had been told that everything about Trade Programs was "a deep, dark secret
and that no one will ever admit that those transactions are possible."
And more: that "bankers don't want you to know
about trade programs." That "the FBI lies about their existence because
the government doesn't want people to know about all the profits." That "the
CIA is involved: that's where they get their funding..."
Getting straight
answers
Sure enough, I couldn't get a straight answer from
any banker. Some admitted to high-rollers with special trading dispensations,
others didn't know what I was talking about. Some said it was possible, and
some flatly denied the possibility. Hell, many didn't know the first thing
about a Letter of Credit or bank guarantee. It sure sounded like a lot of
beating around the bush to me.
To make matters worse, financial dictionaries
alluded to or flat out verified what the Trader was telling me. So who was I
going to believe? Hmmm, let's see... I couldn't get a straight answer from
traditional sources. On the other hand, the Trader was my pot of gold, my
Sutter's Mill, my sunken treasure. Wow. Tough choice.
Well, look what it got me and just about everyone
else I ever heard of in the Network - a pig in a poke, and Annie almost in the
pokey.
I was very, very lucky. I did not die of a heart
attack as so many deal hunters do. I did not lose my precious husband. Most
deal hunters are divorced. I was recognized by the authorities as a victim.
Others have not been so lucky and have had to spend time in jail, sometimes
foreign jails, until everything was sorted out.
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Something for everybody
Outside the Underground Network, I have friends who
have been taken for thousands of dollars in just a matter of hours in quick
scams. For instance, I remember all the delivery trucks that used to drive by
the small business I had in downtown Long Beach selling "leftover" steaks.
Right. Short the restaurants a steak here and a steak there, and pretty soon
the drivers would have 30 or 40 steaks to sell at half-price. There is literally
one scam available for every person on earth, even if it means taking food out
of a child's mouth.
While doing research for Fraud Aid I found so many
crooked web sites that scam victims must be piling up in epidemic proportions.
Scam artists may not carry the Bubonic Plague, but they are rats just the same
and the damage they wreak is just as dreadful.
I found that the Web is rife with scam information
and warning sites from all sorts of law enforcement agencies, attorneys, and
other services. But not one of them addresses scam victims, only
the scams. That isn't right.
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There is no scam without a victim.
How on earth is the victim supposed to deal with
having been scammed, or worse, being caught in the middle of one with no
apparent way out?
Well now there's Fraud Aid, and it shows the way.
"Fraud victims are not
helpless, they're just made to feel that way."-
Annie McGuire
The Fraud Victim's Manual©
The best online fraud victim resource and guide. Period.
The
fraud victim's song
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