He's Supposed To Be Dead // The Aubrey Lee Price Story
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Do you think this guy really did all the crazy things he says he did? Or is he just a liar?
Who is Aubrey Lee Price and how did he recruit investors from his church?
So the guy's name is Aubrey, and Aubrey is 41 when this story starts, and he's living in Georgia. And the guy does a lot. He's a minister of a local church. He's also an investment banker at an investment firm. But then one day in 2008, he decides he's done working for other people. He wants to go into business for himself. So he starts his own investment firm and he turns to his church to find investors. And so he approaches fellow church members and close friends and just other people he knows. And he gives sermons and seminars in church about being a smart Christian investor. And he tells people that they can trust him with their money. And of course, they believe him. I mean, why wouldn't they? He's their minister.
I mean, he's the guy they should be able to trust. So they start handing over their money. Some even invest their retirement funds. And before long, $37 million is flowing into Aubrey's firm. But pretty quickly, it all starts to go wrong because he starts gambling with their investments. Basically, he's day trading with it in some high-risk securities, and he pours huge amounts of their money into this, and he keeps making bigger and bigger bets. And instead of growing the investments, he starts losing their money, like by the millions. And so soon he realizes he's about to be in serious trouble. And so Aubrey decides to hide his losses. And he begins falsifying records to cover up the transactions.
And he makes it look like his firm is making incredible returns. And this lie works. It works so well that he's able to raise even more money from investors, around $14 million, and he uses it to buy controlling shares of a local bank. Then he takes $21 million from that bank and he uses it to pay back his previous investors and also to gamble in the stock market. And of course, he loses all that too. So by 2012, Aubrey has lost $70 million. And as you can see, this whole thing has become just one big Ponzi scheme. So he needs even more money to keep it all going. But by this point, his clients are requesting payouts that he doesn't have, and he's finding it difficult to get new funds to pay them back.
And he knows it's only a matter of time before he gets exposed. Now, Aubrey, he could, you know, do the right thing and confess and turn himself in and take responsibility for his actions, but nah, what fun would that be? Instead, he comes up with a wild plan. He's gonna make himself disappear by faking his own death. That way, he won't have to face any consequences. So he gets to work on this plan. One day that same year, he writes a 25 page suicide letter to his investors and to his own wife and kids. And in this letter, he admits that he lost all their money investing and he says he's depressed and overwhelmed with guilt and that he's planning on unaliving himself by taking a high speed ferry boat out to the ocean.
And I guess when no one is looking, he's going to jump from it. Then he goes and he gets on a ferry so that there's public record of him being there. But of course, he never jumps. Instead, he secretly leaves the ferry when it docks in Fort Myers, Florida. Then he takes a bus all the way down to the southern border and he walks across the border into Mexico. And from there, he immediately catches some long distance buses and he travels further south into Central and South America. And there he lives off the grid as a fugitive. He changes his name, he grows his hair out and his beard a little. He gets work as a migrant agricultural laborer. So he like works on a lot of local farms down there. Meanwhile, everyone back home in Georgia believes this letter that he wrote.
They think he unalived himself out in the middle of the ocean. And like the Coast Guard comes out and they do a full official search for his body, but you know, they don't find anything. So they assume that he disappeared into the water. So as time passes, people just accept that he died. His parents, his own wife and kids, they all believe he's dead because he didn't tell them what his real plan was.
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3 chaptersSpeakers
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