2. One of the largest pyramid/Ponzi schemes in U.S. history was one run in the 1990s by a group calling itself Greater Ministries International. Posing as a Christian group, they engaged in affinity fraud, targeting other Christians with a program they called the "Double Your
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3. Money Gift Exchange." They promised to double money you donated because of their ostensible investments in precious metals like gold and silver. The two key people behind Greater Ministries International, Gerald Payne and Haywood "Don" Hall, actually had ties to the
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4. anti-government "patriot" movement, with ties to a number of others in the movement, such as Patrick Henry Talbert of the "Kingdom of Heaven," and hosted sovereign and patriot gurus like Eugene Schroeder and David Wynn Miller. They also had ties to local white supremacist
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5. Charles Eidson (who had previously headed the so-called Church of the Avenger); Eidson even moved into their headquarters for a time. A number of GMI officials ended up being named "unindicted co-conspirators" in a major case involving Florida sovereign citizen activist
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6. Emilio Ippolito. But GMI was really about making money. They convinced people to donate thousands or tens of thousands of dollars; one event alone in Pennsylvania had 700 attendees and raised $500,000. Of course, because it was a pyramid scheme, initial investors were in fact
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7. getting money back, so they became enthusiastic proselytizers for the scheme. GMI in particular liked to target smaller and more insular audiences, such as fringe churches. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, they actually targeted the Amish and Mennonite communities, using locals
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8. ties to those communities as an "in." All told, GMI may have taken in as much as $500 million from victims (though, as a Ponzi scheme, some of that was paid back to early investors). The whole saga, which I have reduced to the barest of essences, is fascinating. In the early
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9. 2000s I composed a backgrounder on Greater Ministries International and their scheme, and you can read it here: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/Grater-Ministries-International-EIA.pdf …. Around the time this was all going on, I was speaking with a small group of attorneys in Ohio and started to tell the whole GMI story.
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10. But one of them stopped me, saying, "Um, can we change the subject? I am actually representing GMI right now in Ohio." Unfortunately, the Amish and Mennonite communities are not infrequently the target of scams and frauds, in part because they may have money but are often
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11. Not very "worldly." In the late 1990s I actually wrote about an entirely different "Patriot" movement scam that targeted Amish in Pennsylvania. This one involved the so-called Commonwealth Trust Company and it marketed bogus trusts to people.
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