From Inside the Luxurious Pyramid

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[Get-Rich-Quick]
On April 19, 2001, a man named Alyn Waage was arrested at the airport in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with $4.5 million in his briefcase. Waage had boarded the Learjet intending to fly to Belize to pick up an employee who worked at the mail forwarding office there, then fly on to Vallarta where his company, the Tri-West Investment Club, was based, and then to Latvia where he intended to buy a bank he dealt with. The first two steps of this schedule he completed, but he wanted to deposit some of the money in the bank himself so he took a few million and stuffed it in his luggage. When the jet landed and the customs officials asked to look through his bags, the jig was up.

Within two weeks the FBI, the Mexican federal police, Interpol, the Costa Rican justice department, the Canadian RCMP and several other commercial crime divisions had all come to the same conclusion - that Tri-West, of which I was an employee, was in reality nothing but a pyramid scheme.

Tri-West offered what we called "prime bank debentures" on our website.

In addition to the one-hundred-and-twenty-percent return on investors' money which we offered, paid monthly, we also gave each investor fifteen percent of whatever their referrals invested, plus fifteen percent of their referrals' dividends as well. With incentives like that we didn't need to sell a thing ourselves, as people were out spreading the word to their friends and neighbors from Australia to Zimbabwe in order to help them out and get a piece of the action at the same time. Some members had only put in a thousand or so of their own money but had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in referrals. That got them into trouble when the club was shut down after Waage's arrest and the authorities checked into exactly who was selling these imaginary securities. While some people made a killing with us, others lost their life's savings.

I was at Waage's estate in Costa Rica on the day he was arrested, having spent that morning with him and another man counting the day's take. It amounted to around $1.2 million. The amount of money that we made as posted on the US Department of Justice website (www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/triwest1.htm) was $60 million US, but that seems pretty low to me. If anybody were to ask me how much I think we really made, and by the way nobody ever has, I'd put it much higher than that; more than a hundred million at least, and some people I worked with estimated it to be double that. Either way, we made a lot of money. And it showed.

Read more about the Canadian who worked for a pyramid scheme and is now selling a book hawking his story...

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