FBI Agent Exposes the Dark Side of Mega Churches

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Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast 2h 5m 3 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 5 hours ago
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Why do fraudsters target mega churches and their congregations?

Tom Simon 0:00
Churches tend to be a haven for defrauders. He would pitch to the church congregations his chairman's fund that was actually endorsed by Jesus Christ Himself. Over a two-month period, he embezzles forty seven million dollars. Hello Matcox. Hello. So good to see you. What's going on? Thanks for having me back. Got a dozen stories for you today. Yeah. I'm gonna tell you about the crime. I'm gonna tell you the whole crime story. Some of them involved me, crimes I investigated, some of them do not. And your job is to guess the sentence. Okay.
Matt Cox 0:34
Within how many years? We need to set a guide. Yeah, because
Tom Simon 0:37
I'm
Matthew Cox 0:37
never gonna hit one on the
Matt Cox 0:37
head. Are we keeping score? Is this I'm keeping score today. Oh okay. I'm keeping score. Let's say we have three years.
Tom Simon 0:43
No, within a ten percent variant. Okay. How about that? So you can be 10% right on you know number of months or whatever, number of years on on the upside or the downside. It's close. It's pretty close. You want
Matthew Cox 0:56
15%?

How do the hosts set up the scoring rules for guessing prison sentences?

Matthew Cox 0:56
I think within 20%. Come on. 20% that's 20%.
Matt Cox 1:00
So so if it's a 10-year sentence, he's got to be be within two years. Yes. Fair enough. I can live with that. I mean it's your show. So if I'm 20%, then that's uh that's okay. And we have 12 stories. Yes. So what's a passing grade? Let's say I think eighty
Matthew Cox 1:14
percent, huh?
Matt Cox 1:15
Let's say eight eight out of ten is is passing. I mean, you don't have to ask me. I mean uh there's money on the I'm not paying them. Yeah, this is just uh this is audience retention. You know, people gotta watch to the end. All right, okay. Nine. So you gotta
Matthew Cox 1:27
you have to have nine. I have to have nine. Let's say nine out of nine would be roughly eighty percent. You're shooting for nine of ten.
Matt Cox 1:32
Somebody we don't have
Tom Simon 1:32
an actual scoreboard up here against the red wall. The first story is one that I investigated. Oh, okay. A fella named Kevin. So this guy got away. Nice, nice. You familiar with annuity investments?
Matthew Cox 1:43
Yes. What do you know about annuities? Um, annuities are where you it's like an insurance product, right? Like you invest in like an insurance product. Yeah, it's
Tom Simon 1:52
it's the only in it's the only investment product that life insurance people are allowed to sell. Okay. Okay. And so life insurance people, you know, I term life insurance or whatever. If I croak, my heir gets X dollar amount. There's also whole life which has like a a built-in thing to it. But the real money in the life insurance sales business is selling these investment products called annuities. And what annuity is you're going to pay a certain amount of money either per month or a lump sum. And then when you hit some certain age, you're going to get a check every month like Social Security. Right. So supplement your income until you die. And then the then the investment goes away. It has no value at that point, which is why it's sold by life insurance companies 'cause they're all into the actuarial tables and how long you're likely to live and all that.
Tom Simon 2:33
Right. I don't like annuities as an investment. I think um the pr the problem is that when you're evaluating your investment choices, there's always a life insurance guy, since that's the only type of investment he can sell, that they're really pushing annuities. And the commissions on annuity sales are insane. Yeah. Really high to the salesperson. So
Matthew Cox 2:52
huge
Tom Simon 2:52
incentive to lie. When that's baked into it, like a financial planner may not st ever steer you toward an annuity, but a life your life insurance guy who you know and trust is always gonna try to put you in an annuity. Kevin was an annuity salesman.
Mike (Unknown) 3:05
Okay.
Tom Simon 3:06
Right. The life insurance guy. Most of his clients were senior citizens and they loved Kevin. He was their guy.

What was Kevin’s annuity scheme and how did he steal $400,000 from his clients?

Tom Simon 3:14
One day Kevin, and many of whom were in Hawaii. Um, his he lived in Hawaii at some point, had a lot of uh clients in Hawaii, senior citizens. He begins contacting his clients one week and saying, Hey, listen, I think I can get you a better rate on your annuity. Can I have your permission to pull it from the current annuity? We'll cash it out and we'll put it into my personal program that I'm running.
Matthew Cox 3:36
That's not the problem because annuities, if you pull money out of annuities, you typically have like a a a

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