One woman's 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 money coming out of the Trust.

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. Basically, 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.

A maze of half-truths and outright lies

My gross ignorance of international bank 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.

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. (Frankly, 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.

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 story and included every document that backed up the story. The second was a money trail report, and included all the documents to back that up. All in all, both reports added up to 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^©)

Coulda', Shoulda'

I could have avoided every last bit of what happened had I only stopped believing and stopped implicitly trusting 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.

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 can be 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.

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 best online fraud victim resource and guide. Period.

The fraud victim's song