Kevin Trudeau's Secrets; Remington Steal

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This is the American Greet Podcast presented by CNBC, I'm Stacey Keech.

In this episode of American Greed, I lost 45 pounds in six weeks.

The money is given to you by the government, you never have to pay it back.

There are natural cures for virtually every disease out there.

Fat ball broke.

Kevin Trudeau will make you rich then.

Beautiful.

This book is a $29 value, I'm going to throw this one in, absolutely free.

Trudeau sells cures for whatever Asia, and he takes in hundreds of millions of dollars.

But when the US government accused his Kevin Trudeau of selling lies, he's a serial scammer

and that one scam tends to lead to the next.

He dares the feds to shut him down.

Do you want to put me in jail?

Let's go to court, baby.

Later, need money, Remington Financial Groups and Drew Bogdanov can set anyone up with

a loan for a price.

Whether you need a million dollars, three million dollars, nine hundred and ninety-nine

million dollars, it didn't matter.

It's making him millions, but most clients get nothing.

There was no way that once you got it and snared in the Remington net, you were going

to get out.

You're watching right now.

This is the book.

This is not a diet.

This is a cure.

There are, in fact, natural, non-drug and non-surgical ways to preventing cure virtually

every disease.

Kevin Trudeau, for two decades, he's a charismatic salesman, hawking self-help products to millions

across the country.

It's just this huge cult mentality, I mean, who became like a zombie, like just focused

on what Kevin had to say, and that's how I got sucked into it.

39-year-old Kansas City native Abe Hussein wants the life Trudeau's selling.

To get it, he's bought the products and cheered in the audience, opening his wallet again

and again.

Kevin was a master-replator.

He knew just what to say at the right time to give people to believe him and to keep

paying him money.

Hussein says he fell hard for Trudeau's endless pitches and it cost him big time, $30,000.

I fell for lies and scams.

These huge promises become an instant millionaire, they just weren't true.

But Trudeau has plenty of true believers.

Ed Foreman is a motivational speaker and former U.S. congressman from Dallas, Texas.

Foreman's known Trudeau since he was a 19-year-old, working for a Boston car dealership.

He was an enthusiastic standout.

He paid attention.

He was alert.

And I could tell that boy is going a long ways.

But even he admits that Trudeau's personality was bound to get him in trouble eventually.

He had it.

He had the drive and the inspiration to help people to believe in themselves.

And that kind of a person will end up as a great leader or probably imprisoned.

What they're going to do is they're going to escrow him.

In the 80s, Trudeau begins attending self-help seminars where he must be taking some

pretty interesting notes.

He soon ditches the car dealership with a quirky scheme to make fast cash, says U.S. Postal

Inspector Sylvia Carrier.

He was claiming to be Reverend Powers and he would put ads in a newspaper claiming

that for $10, he would grant your wishes.

We got many, many complaints on this.

But selling wishes for $10 is just part of the plan.

Now there are two parts of your memory that we're going to be concerned with.

He also rebranded himself as the world's foremost authority on memory improvement and releases

a series of audio tapes called Mega Memory.

It's not just memory training when you invest your time in money.

Trudeau is no memory expert.

He's recycling information he's found elsewhere.

This loose relationship with the truth leads to serious trouble in the 90s as even he will

later admit to Matt Lauer on the Today Show.

You're not a doctor, you're not a scientist, you're not a researcher.

In fact you're someone who spent a little time in prison for credit card fraud.

Correct.

Two years to be exact.

Trudeau tells his followers it's all a misunderstanding.

I transpose the last two numbers on my social security number and voila I got my credit card.

In reality the social security number Trudeau uses belongs to his mother.

Federal Trade Commission Attorney James Com says this flim plan is just a taste of what's

to come.

This is a serial scammer and that one scam tends to lead to the next.

That kind of zigging and zagging is emblematic of a kind of hardcore fraudsters.

After prison Trudeau relocates to Chicago and begins selling almost anything he can on

late night television.

Marketing director Peter Wink will work with Trudeau for two years.

It was very hypnotic, you know how to rile the crowd up and I'll tell you what, it works.

And he proved it.

But Trudeau's best trick is how he keeps his customers coming back for more.

There's always an offer in there or there's always some subtle message he's giving you

for something that's coming down the road.

This is a $20 value.

The products might be inexpensive but Trudeau is smooth talking his way to an estimated

$121 million.

Money was his drug, everything he does is about money and I'm not saying that necessarily

is a good or bad thing but I think that's his primotivator money.

Trudeau may connect easily with his fans but his relationship with the government is

something else entirely.

I've been sued, I've been investigated, I've been repeatedly harassed, virtually non-stop

since 1989.

In 1998 he's fined $500,000 by the Federal Trade Commission for claiming he can create

photographic memories and cure bulkness.

That serious trouble starts in 2003 after Trudeau hawks a miracle mineral called coral calcium

and implies that it can cure cancer.

The FTC says no way and takes Trudeau to court.

In 2004 he signed an FTC agreement promising to clean up his act once and for all.

The deal effectively bans Trudeau from the airwaves but they estimated $20 million he's

pocketed selling coral calcium pills probably takes some of the sting out.

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Explore Tina Counts and all of our ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com

slash Tina Counts.

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Kevin Trudeau is living his life in front of the cameras, but that public profile makes

him an attractive target for his enemies as friend and former.

Whether it's the FTC or whether it's someone else, they're always looking for someone

to nail.

That's their business.

And Trudeau's been nailed repeatedly by the Federal Trade Commission, most recently

signing a 2004 consent order which forbids him from making more infomercials.

The order has a huge loophole, says FTC lawyer James Cobb.

The 2004 order forbid him from doing infomercials, except for it carved out a piece for selling

books.

So Trudeau does just that.

He writes a book called Natural Cures They Don't Want You To Know About.

It's self-published in 2004 and retails for $29.95.

And then he claims that sunscreen causes skin cancer and argues AIDS is a hoax.

This is the book that the government and the drug companies don't want people to read.

Natural cures praise upon people who are suffering and desperate for a remedy, says former

business associate Peter Wink.

A lot of people don't have insurance and here comes a guy, Tau Day, that you know, you

can secure all these things and it costs you almost nothing.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Things are not a believer and he doesn't think Trudeau is either.

I used to say you drink a lot, you smoke all the time.

You do that.

And you're claiming natural health, said how does that work?

But apparently the crowd approves.

Trudeau's anti-government bad boy persona is a potent marketing tool.

The Federal Trade Commission said if I want to sell this book on television, that there's

certain things I cannot put in this book and if I did, they would in effect take these

books and burn the books.

Natural cures sells millions of copies and spends more than 26 weeks on the New York Times

best seller list.

Trudeau begins churning out a stream of best sellers over the next four years, all published

and sold from this nondescript suburban Chicago office complex.

If you need to lose 5, 10, 20 pounds, if you need to lose 50 or even 100 pounds.

But it's the infomercials for his 2007 book, The Weight Loss Cure, they don't want you

to know about, that will bring his troubles with the government to a boil.

I can attest it was the easiest, simplest, most effective thing I've ever done.

I lost 45 pounds in six weeks.

I was never hungry.

I did no exercise at all.

But Trudeau doesn't talk about the actual diet, which requires animals, hormone injections

and only consuming 500 calories a day.

I can eat whatever I want now, anything, and as much as I want any time I want, no restrictions

now.

And the weight's not coming back.

The book and related tie-ins are a nationwide hit, selling 850,000 copies and taking in

$39 million.

But James Combs says the three weight loss infomercials that air 32,000 times are riddled

with lies, directly violating Trudeau's 2004 FTC consent agreement.

The First Amendment doesn't protect deceptive commercial speech.

And that's exactly what this is.

He was lying to the public about what was in his book.

The FTC demand Trudeau pay a $37.6 million fine, based on royalties from the book sales.

For Trudeau, whose wealth has been estimated to be as much as $121 million, counters with

a stunning confession.

I own virtually nothing, so I have no assets.

I can't pay $37.6 million, I don't have it sitting here.

Trudeau says his corporate entities aren't really his.

They are actually controlled by a 22-year-old Ukrainian national named Natalia Babenko, whom

Trudeau has just married months earlier.

When she came here, she moved to New York to become a film student, but she was running

all of Kevin Trudeau's companies and managing all of the millions of dollars that were coming

in on a regular basis.

How Trudeau and Babenko meet is a closely guarded secret, and when investigators ask, she refuses

to talk.

They share a million-dollar home in Ohio, California.

This filled with art, grand pianos, pool table chandeliers, and the collection of Swarovski

crystals.

Peter Wings says most of Trudeau's followers are not turned off by this opulence.

Quite the contrary, they want to be like Kevin.

He always sold the dream of being him.

You can have this watcher, you can have this ring, you can live this lifestyle.

Trudeau and Babenko jet set from Paris to the Caribbean, living the good life and posting

photos taken by friends and followers on his website.

If you want to win again.

Behind the scene, Trudeau is just as eager to show off how good his life is.

Like the time he holds out a bag of gold bars estimated to be worth more than $100,000.

He pulls out a sack of gold bars, and he's showing me the different denominations of

gold bars.

I mean, he's literally got this in his house.

Not bad for a man who claims he's broke.

Like any snake oil salesman who sold one to many lies, Trudeau can't hide the truth

forever.

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Learn how meta helps over 35 million American businesses, like Peter's Grow, at meta.com

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Men are struggling with their mental health at some of the highest rates we've ever seen,

but most aren't getting the support they need, and that needs to change.

I'm Dr. Guy Winch, your host for season 3 of The Visibility Gap, presented by Signal Healthcare.

This season, we're focusing on men's mental health, bringing together real stories and

expert insight to explore the pressures men face every day, and why opening up can feel

so difficult.

Join us for the new season, wherever you stream your podcasts.

Kevin Trudeau owes the government $37.6 million for spreading his late-night lives,

but he isn't going down without a very public fight.

You can waterboard me.

Why don't you do that?

You guys are good at torture.

Pull my finger down.

He's also working overtime to hide his millions so the government can't collect.

He paid a significant amount of money to have his companies incorporated in other countries

and to make sure that everything was protected and was just moving money around.

But as fast as he's stashing the cash, Trudeau is planning yet another payday.

And if you're not a member of the Global Information Network, what are you waiting for?

Abe Hussein is a manager at a fast food restaurant when he first hears about Trudeau's newest venture,

the Global Information Network, or Gin.

Kevin made it seem like Gin was going to change the world and make it a better place.

And that's where I thought was going to happen.

Trudeau claims Gin has been formed by a cabal of billionaires.

Membership in our club is by invitation only.

They made some of their exposures in the secrets of the world, the masses.

So I thought I was going to learn the secrets of how the world works.

But Peter Wink has worked with Trudeau long enough to realize this was his typical huxtering.

Kevin Claimty was part of the secret group.

I was with Kevin for two and a half years and I never met any of them.

I will see you.

The true secret of Gin is that it's the golden goose of Get Rich's schemes.

A multi-level marketing operation, a pyramid scheme designed to entice new members to join

so that existing members make a fortune.

It was advertised as a 12 membership level.

In each level you had to upgrade to, it's been more and more money to where it was advertised

if you'd reached level 12 that you basically become an instant millionaire and you get a Ferrari as a bonus.

Hussain never gets the Ferrari despite spending $30,000 on gen products, travel, seminars and

whatever else Trudeau can convince him to buy.

Hussain does recruit 20 people to join.

For his efforts he's given a check for $202.

Hussain's just one of more than 35,000 who fall for Gin.

Making Trudeau another $100 million in four years until the operation is ultimately sold

to outside investors.

But before that happens, Gin's president is a familiar face.

She's Trudeau's 24-year-old wife Natalia.

She never came to anything that we did.

I mean all the high-level meetings you know where Kevin gave his orders what he wants to

do, she had nothing to do with it.

Gin pays the rent on Trudeau's 13-room mansion in Oakbrook, Illinois.

He sits on one-and-a-half acres and boasts a wine cellar, 11 car garage, five-and-a-half

baths and nine fireplaces, the cost $12,000 a month.

Meanwhile Trudeau is still trying to convince the world he's completely broke.

I'm virtually penniless right now.

They have no access to any bank accounts or any cash.

He's claiming that he's got no income coming in yet he's spending thousands of dollars on

things like organic meats and haircuts and cigars and trips.

In December 2011, surveillance cameras at a suburban Chicago casino capture what appears

to be Trudeau and Babinco attempting to launder $200,000 worth of company checks.

We found that he was caching in chips at a casino and that there was money flowing between

bank accounts that he was involved in, but not telling anybody.

In 2013, the court freezes assets, but that doesn't stop him from demanding receivers

Brick Kane and Kenton Johnson give him a monthly allowance of $59,000.

We thought that was a bit over the top and made a recommendation of about 4,700 a month.

In and out of court, he denies any knowledge of where his money is, pleading the fifth

and incredible 383 times.

I'm not about accumulating assets and I don't keep track of my money.

All I do is have business expenses.

But as the receivers dig deeper Trudeau reluctantly admits, he may not have told them the full

truth.

He didn't want us to get mad but he just remembered that he had an active bank account in Zurich

Switzerland.

He also remembered that he had an active account at a bank in Australia.

Trudeau's wife Natalia Babinco is in much help either.

She's disappeared with $800,000, presumably back to the Ukraine.

The gold bars that Trudeau one showed Peter Wink have disappeared as well.

Now with civil and criminal contempt trials looming in Chicago, Trudeau tries the most shameless

sale of his life, convincing his supporters to foot his legal tab.

But even then, he can't resist the upsell.

It does him no good.

On November 12, 2013, he's found guilty of criminal contempt of court.

When Trudeau appears for dissentencing, his carefully styled hair is shaggy and gray,

and the $1,000 suits are swapped with prison orange.

When he speaks to the judge, all traces of his trademark defiance are gone.

It was a very practice speech that for somebody who's so outgoing and so charismatic, it was

not his best speech.

Trudeau may be quiet for once, but his mentor Ed Foreman has had enough.

He interrupts the courtroom with an unscripted and very vocal defense of his friend.

I stood up to say a few words when, wow, bam, came three deputies right down on me, grabbed

me, and down to the floor I went.

Kevin Trudeau is sentenced to ten years in prison for contempt of court and refusing

to pay his $37.6 million dollar fine.

Today, Trudeau's repackaged infomercials steal air, and his products are available online.

Portions of those sales are paid towards his FTC file.

And Trudeau's pre-present YouTube videos still hint he's optimistic about the future.

Maybe I'll be in prison for the next 10 or 15 years.

Trudeau's still selling, but how long will people continue to buy his bill of goods?

He's deceitful to the court, and he belongs in jail for what he did he was as bad as anybody.

Philadelphia in 1993.

46-year-old investment banker Andrew Bogdanov has decided to go into business for himself.

His goal is to make millions of the dreams of small businessmen and hopeful entrepreneurs

across the country, says former prosecutor David Axelrod.

These were not big real estate developers, these were not wealthy people.

These were people who were just trying to take advantage of the American dream

and really build something for themselves.

Bogdanov forms Remington financial group in his suburban home office with a bold plan.

When traditional banks refuse a loan, Remington will be there.

Riding to the rescue with a roster of hundreds of private financiers.

You tell them what your project was, and they'd ask you how much you need it.

They'd say, congratulations.

We have someone interested in funding your whole project, whether you need a million dollars,

three million dollars, nine hundred and ninety nine million dollars.

It didn't matter.

But to get these investors on board, Bogdanov demands upfront a non-refundable

due diligence fee of between ten and twenty five thousand dollars.

For borrowers without options, it seems a small price to pay,

especially when Bogdanov says he's closing hundreds of deals each year.

The Remington machine was a cash minting machine.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were coming in, you know, every month.

Bogdanov is in shy when it comes to self-promotion.

He even hosts an internet radio show to lure more people toward Remington.

And we have investors and lenders all across the capital stack that can really meet the needs of

of anybody looking for any type of commercial financing out there.

Remington is quickly fulfilling Bogdanov's dreams and filling his pockets.

In the late 90s, he relocates to Scottsdale, Arizona to enjoy the sun and his spoils.

But before he leaves, he hires Matthew McManus to run things in Philadelphia.

To lure clients, Bogdanov and McManus rely on commissioned associates and third-party brokers

nicknamed Bird Dogs. Those brokers would take the victims to Remington, telling the victims

that this is a great funding opportunity, but they wouldn't tell the victims that they were also

getting to cut. Excited clients are funneled through Bogdanov's Arizona office and then sent on

to the Philadelphia headquarters. Now relocated to the prestigious Beled Atlantic Tower in downtown

Philadelphia. It's called the Arizona Pipeline, but the truth is it's flushing hundreds of people

down the drain each year. Eventually they tell you your project has problems x, y, and z,

and it just can't be financed. We're sorry, we tried really hard, but good night and good luck.

Marin County, California. In 2006, Ingrid Robinson is a one-time grief counselor with a broken

heart of her own. Eight years earlier, her only child, Michelle, died of a heroin overdose.

I was completely destroyed. I didn't know who I was. You know, I'd always lived for my daughter and

I was just emotionally and mentally gone. Robinson, who has no real estate experience,

decides she wants to build a residential and retail complex to honor her daughter.

She uses $500,000 to buy an acre of land in the wine country of northern California.

So I called it Michelle's diamond as a legacy for Michelle and I wanted people to know

if they had asked who was Michelle. She was the daughter of a mother who loved her very much.

Robinson wants a $100,000 loan to get her plans off the ground, but because of her inexperience,

she figures no bank will finance her dreams. She turns to a third-party bird dog and they

point her toward Remington Financial Group. They said, we've got the perfect company for you,

Remington Financial Group, and they went one step further and sent the perspective to Remington.

Robinson researches Remington, finding a well-respected company with offices across the United States.

There's an ad in Forbes magazine designed to look like a glowing testimony.

And Remington is accredited by the Better Business Bureau.

When Robinson speaks with Remington representatives in Arizona, she's thrilled by what they're prepared

to offer. The account executive said, we love your project so much. We want to finance the whole

thing. Robinson agrees to pay Remington's $10,000 due diligence advance fee to move the deal forward.

It's non-refundable, but the cost will be rolled back into the loan once she is approved.

$10,000 and quite frankly, I thought I got lucky because their normal fee was $25,000.

Now she waits for her dreams to come true, not knowing she's already caught in a nightmare.

Because Robinson's fallen for one of the oldest cons in the book, a so-called advance fee scheme.

You're offering somebody a loan. All they have to do is give you an upfront fee.

It's been around forever. Unfortunately, the scheme is simple and it's pretty easy to execute.

While Andrew Bagnanoff, Matthew McManus and their bird dogs are making millions off of due diligence fees,

their clients are about to learn a bit of truth about the loan deals.

Remington said it had access to all this capital and it had people interested in these projects,

and it had really had nothing.

Andrew Bagnanoff and Matthew McManus have built Remington financial group into a billion dollar

loan company. At least that's what their advertising says. Gold mines in South Africa,

oil wells in Ukraine. You need $200 million, not a problem. We have somebody interested.

You need $1.2 billion. We got it for you. It didn't matter.

But less than 1% of those deals are really happening. And behind closed doors,

Bagnanoff carefully schools his account executives to never let the truth get in the way of closing

a deal. In a conversation that is recorded by an employee and later transcribed,

Bagnanoff has no problem rationalizing how he betrays his clients.

He even says Remington is actually saving their asses by taking due diligence fees for projects

that are, in his opinion, inherently flawed. Rather than losing all their money,

they lost $10,000 or $15,000, which is pretty good service.

It's a perfect scam. Clients are scattered. They're not losing large sums of money.

And Bagnanoff can always claim the deals fell apart for reasons beyond his control.

When they didn't deliver the financing, they would come back and say,

look, we told you from the outside. This wasn't a guarantee. And usually that was enough

to convince people not to pursue it further.

In 2005, Gene Tecklin is a Minneapolis filmmaker with a wife and three kids.

He's just successfully directed his first independent feature, a murder mystery titled

Carousel of Revenge. That experience has taught him firsthand how difficult film financing can be.

Don't walk in a prank. It's high risk. And that's part of the filmmaking, but it's also exciting.

He and the partner raise a million dollars for their first movie.

Now they're dreaming much bigger, planning to make five more.

We had a very detailed business plan, forecast, marketing.

We had people tied to it who are very experienced in the film industry,

produce big films, work down big films.

Tecklin estimates they'll need $20 million.

Everything falls into place in the winter of 2006 when a bird dog third party broker

introduces Tecklin to the Remington Financial Group.

They're excited. They're talking about, hey, this is a great plan. We love what you're doing.

Everyone's happy and they're excited to get the deal done.

Remington says they have a New York investor who's eager to finance their dreams.

All Tecklin needs to do is send $27,000 for due diligence reports and an on-site inspection.

You know, in 20 days you'll be funded. While the 20 days come up, don't hear a whole lot,

don't get funded. I say, well, where's the funding? Well, the market conditions have changed.

Oh really?

Tecklin faces months of silence and stonewalling before realizing his deal is dead.

He has no idea what to do next. And as Remington is counting on,

Tecklin doesn't think law enforcement is going to care about his loss anyway.

Honestly, in my mind, I knew it wouldn't do any good. It's only $27,000. I'm one person.

Are they really going to pay attention?

2,000 miles away in San Francisco, Ingrid Robinson is realizing that her dream real estate project

is also falling apart. Remington's promised her $5 million, but now all she's getting is the run

around. They wanted tax records. They wanted all kinds of financial records. They wanted

corporation papers. It's a standard Remington ploy. Dangle the line as long as possible.

But in December 2006, Robinson turns on her computer to find the deal is died once and for all.

Out of the clear blue sky, I received an email saying, we regret to inform you that your project

has not passed our approval rating or whatever. No reason's given just we regret to inform you.

That's how bad it goes.

Robinson calls but don't have to demand her money back. At first, he appears eager to help.

He was being very lovely, very accommodating. And eventually, he referred me to the Philadelphia

office. And he said that that's where they were working on the project.

But when she speaks with a Philadelphia headquarter, she gets a completely different response.

He said, you know, you sound like you're a hysterical woman. And I said, if you think I'm hysterical now,

just wait. I will become your worst nightmare. And I did.

Robinson begins researching all she can about Remington's Andrew Bucdonough and Matthew

McManus. The more she discovers, the more infuriated she gets. CEO Bucdonough has been paying

himself more than one million dollars a year. He honeymoons in Spain and troubles around the world

to Hungary, Hawaii and Las Vegas. At home, he cheers on the Phoenix coyotes with seasoned tickets.

He spent tens of thousands of dollars on jewelry. He bought houses. They went on very lavish vacations.

While everybody was suffering, he absolutely could have cared less. He was enjoying the high life.

Meanwhile, Matthew McManus is living it up in Philadelphia, collecting $1.6 million

himself. Matthew seems to have had a very wonderful lifestyle. He drove $135,000

for a Porsche. He owned apartments and Pieter tares for his wife. They had a beautiful mansion

in Nantucket and he had a private jet. Robinson also learns that McManus has started a new company.

He calls Bluestone Real Estate Capital, offering similar loan deals as Remington.

He later claimed he leaves Remington in 2008. If so, he doesn't go far. Remington and Blue

stone share the same office space in Philadelphia's belt Atlantic Tower.

Their addresses were in the same location. I mean, there was nothing to distinguish that there

was a separation between the two. Other than Matthew's saying that he had nothing to do with Andy,

Andy never said that he had nothing to do with Matthew.

Prosecutors say it's a bait and switch to throw anyone off the cent of what they're really up to.

In early 2007, Ingrid Robinson begins a crusade to bring Remington financial groups

Andrew Bagnanoff and Matthew McManus to justice. But she admits trying to topple a billion dollar

company is no simple project. I couldn't imagine how brilliant they were. You know, Andy Bagnanoff,

he would zig, I would sag, I would sag, he would zig. I mean, he was amazing. He was always,

always at least one or two steps ahead of me. No one is interested in listening to Robinson's

pleas for justice. Until she meets former FBI agent Daniel Christie now with the Pennsylvania

Securities Commission. Dan and I became friendly on the telephone and I found out that he had been

an FBI agent and I said, Dan, how can I get this case to their attention? I've been calling

the FBI every day and nobody seems to care. I told her they will not open an investigation based

upon her $10,000 amount alone that we needed more victims with more dollar amounts.

Robinson scours internet fraud sites searching for other victims. She soon discovers there are

plenty out there. Next thing I know I've got a packet of about 10 or 12 Remington victims.

So I've called every single one of them and every single one of them

were telling me these horrible stories. Scattered across the country,

their dreamers, entrepreneurs, even a former mayor of San Diego.

One of the names she finds is a very unhappy, many-afterous filmmaker named Jean Teglon,

who's also eager to expose Remington. From that point on, we just started talking pretty much

every day and then that's when my research mode went in pretty deep. Remington's website is

plastered with testimonials from satisfied customers but when Teglon calls them, they say they've

never heard of Remington. We never raise that kind of money. I mean they would actually take locations

that were real and put them on there and just act like they raised money for them and they had

nothing to do with it. Teglon's research leads to the creation of a 92-page document titled

Stop Remington Financial Group, which roadmaps the fraud. They sent it to media outlets and

investigators but still no one listens. We had been on this for months and we were going nowhere.

We were going absolutely nowhere. Frustrated, Robinson and Teglon concoct a guerrilla

grassroots internet campaign to raise awareness. They post a message on a blog site saying that

Remington has admitted wrongdoing after all. We said that Remington was turning over a new leaf

and that they were giving all their victims refunds. All you had to do was call and we listed

everybody's home number and their office number and just say that you were thrilled that they

were going to refund their money. Remington lawyers quickly shut the message board down and threatened

further legal action but not before more people come forward with their own complaint.

Dan Christie takes Robinson's growing victim list and gives it to the people who will finally

do something. And I contacted both the FBI and the US Attorney's office in Philadelphia

and brought it to them and by gosh did they ever run with it?

Assistant US Attorney David Axelrod is assigned the case. He is stunned to discover that Robinson's

numbers are only scratching the surface. Remington is still in at least $26 million,

one non-refundable upfront fee at a time. It blows my mind in the fact that they were so successful.

I mean when you're talking about 1900 victims that's a ton of people and $26 million is just

astronomical. And those billion dollar success stories Remington has been bragging about.

Since 2005 that number has been exaggerated somewhat. You know what they say about a blind

scroll finding and not three people found financing through Remington.

Three people out of 1900 that's 0.15% and that's only the last five years Remington has operated.

Based on all the records we saw it was probably going on long before that. It wouldn't surprise me

if they had a 20-year run doing this type of work. In March 2011 FBI and IRS agents raid Remington's

offices in Denver and Scottsdale. I open up my computer. I see this and all I'm doing is screaming.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. They got them. They got them. They got them. I was unbelievably thrilled.

It's the first step in a process that eventually leads to the indictment of Andrew McDonough,

Matthew McManus and four others in April 2012. Andrew McDonough pleads guilty to fraud in 2013.

At his sentencing Ingrid Robinson finally meets McDonough face-to-face.

Audio recordings capture her bearing the pain Remington financial group has caused her.

They may be feel like a complete failure that I was stupid and could do nothing to honor my

blur. I wanted to create something lasting and beautiful to honor her and these guys

made it all ugly and dirty by lying and stealing my dreams of me.

For his part McDonough at least goes to the effort of apologizing.

That was greedy and greed and arrogance took over me and for that I'm terribly sorry and

I want to express my deepest regrets to my victims, the court and the government.

He sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Matthew McManus does take his case to trial but after the three-hour deliberation he's found guilty

of fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice. He too begs for sympathy.

My choices have led me to a place in life that no man would want to be in. Please, for my family,

have leniency on me. Thank you.

The judge is unmoved and sentences him to 16 years in prison. None of Andrew McDonough's victims

have recovered any of the money they gave Remington financial group.

After seven years of hard work Robinson, Teckland and Christie exposed one of the largest

known advanced fee schemes in US history. But former prosecutor David Axelrod concedes

there are probably many more companies out there still using the Remington business model.

All you have to do is go to Google and look for loans for small businesses and you'll see a bunch

of companies come up that don't quite look right and they all look a lot like Remington.

Today, Ingrid Robinson channels her efforts to expose other advanced fee schemes and the third

party broker she says send unwitting sheep to the slaughter. For now, she's been forced to put

away her dreams from Michelle's diamond. The property has been foreclosed to costing her nearly

$350,000. I was left financially devastated. This was my life savings. This was everything.

Everything was on the line to create this legacy from Michelle.

Now, she hopes her efforts to expose financial fraud will be a lasting tribute to her daughter.

There's nothing I could have done to save my daughter if I could I wouldn't but I sure as

help could write a wrong. The bottom line is there is evil in this world and it's cost us.

It's cost all of us so much.

Trudeau is scheduled to be released sometime this year in 2022.

Thanks for listening to the American Read Podcast presented by CNBC. I'm Stacey Keech.

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