Here’s yet another Christian scam, one aided by megachurch preacher “Bishop” Eddie Long (the same guy implicated in a big gay scandal and who was crowned king by a fake Jewish rabbi a few months ago). And it sounds like a lot like those prosperity gospel scams.
Ephren Taylor stepped into the pulpit with the ease of preacher’s son, taking the microphone at the New Birth Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the powerful pastor Eddie Long was introducing him to the Sunday morning crowd.
“Everything he says is based on the word of God,” Long pledged to the members of his megachurch. But Taylor wasn’t a visiting minister. He was a financial adviser, one who claimed to have made his first million before he turned 18. And he promised he could do the same for his fellow Christians.
“We’re going to show you how to get wealth and use it for the building of his kingdom,” Taylor shouted to the congregation one morning in 2009. It was all part of what he called his “Building Wealth Tour,” which crisscrossed the country touting his investments and financial advice.
But according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, what Taylor was actually peddling was a giant Ponzi scheme, one aimed to “swindle over $11 million, primarily from African-American churchgoers,” that reached into churches nationwide, from Long’s megachurch in Atlanta to Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church congregation in Houston.
But Taylor has disappeared, hiding out from lawsuits, federal charges and angry, mostly African-American, investors in at least 40 states.
Praise the lord and pass your retirement account.
14 comments
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KathyO
May 25, 2012 at 11:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“I’m going to show you how to get great wealth. But first, a word from my cousin, the Nigerian prince.”
jba55
May 25, 2012 at 11:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sweet bog, I don’t understand how people both fall for this kind of crap and how the perps get away with it. At least this guy seems like he’s been called on it and hopefully he’ll get his earthly reward.
I wonder why the article repeatedly points out that the scamee’s are mostly African American. What’s the relevance?
tbp1
May 25, 2012 at 11:50 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m sure I’m not the first one to notice this, but the kind of gullibility it takes to belong to a church like Long’s, or Osteen’s, or (fill in the blank with your local megachurch), makes the congregants perfect pickings for con artists, all conveniently located under one roof at the same time.
As outraged as I am, there’s still just a bit of lingering social Darwinism in me from my long-ago Randian phase to think that anyone who falls for something like this kinda deserves it. And then I recover my humanity and the outrage wins out.
anandine
May 25, 2012 at 11:53 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sure, it seems silly to us, but if you start with the congregants’ assumptions (There is a god who knows and cares what we do and who can reward us either through grace or works, and preachers are representatives of that god), then it’s perfectly rational to conclude that giving money to this scam artist will make you rich.
d cwilson
May 25, 2012 at 12:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The reason why people fall for these scams is because they put a lot of trust in their preachers. Taylor knew that if he got the endorsement of people like Long, he’d have their congregations in the palm of his hands.
Marcus Ranum
May 25, 2012 at 12:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sure, it seems silly to us, but if you start with the congregants’ assumptions (There is a god who knows and cares what we do and who can reward us either through grace or works, and preachers are representatives of that god), then it’s perfectly rational to conclude that giving money to this scam artist will make you rich.
If you take that line of reasoning, then you’d conclude that christians would tend to be wealthier and luckier (thanks to prayer!) than buddhists, etc. Las Vegas would ban christians from playing at the tables and they’d perform so well in the stock markets that they’d always be the market-makers. But we observe that that’s not the case. Therefore there probably isn’t a god that specifically concerns itself with the financial well-being of its flock. We observe further that holy men of almost all religions seem to enjoy an approximately comparable economic advantage – they all can afford big hats and fancy clothes and so forth. So we might conclude that there’s not a god making sure that only holy men of its particular faith are outperforming all the others.
This kind of long-term population study is particularly interesting because it’s been going on for at least 1000 years. So we would conclude that if intercessionary prayer worked at all for any particular religion, its adherents would be substantially better off, worldwide. (Christians are substantially better off in terms of worldly power but it was at the cost of honing their military skills on fellow christians for several hundred years)
teawithbertrand
May 25, 2012 at 12:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A young woman approached me in the Home Depot the other day. She said she had bought something for her father which he did not need, and when she returned the item, the store gave her a gift card in exchange. I laughed out loud when she asked if I’d like to buy it from her. I thought of reporting her to the management, but I did not want to deprive her victim of a desperately needed lesson on credulity.
michaelbusch
May 25, 2012 at 12:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@jba55:
That Taylor’s victims were primarily African-American is relevant in that Taylor is African-American himself. A significant fraction of Ponzi schemes are affinity frauds (http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/affinity.htm), with the person running the scheme targeting members of a social group that they are also a member of.
As other examples beyond Taylor: Bernard Madoff targeted many members of the American Jewish community, Allen & Wendell Jacobson targeted mostly Mormons, Tackaberry and Palazzo targeted senior citizens, and Won Charlie Yi targeted the Korean-speaking community in southern California.
The con artists will often donate to philanthropic causes associated with the group. For example, Madoff donated something over a hundred million dollars to Yeshiva University and served as the chair of its board of trustees.
I learned about this thanks to my father, who is a lawyer specializing in lending. Ponzi schemes get especially messy to clean up, because a very large number of people will have invested money – often by obtaining loans – and the scheme works in large part by feeding the money back around so many times that it can become almost impossible for the lawyers and forensic accountants to figure out what money belongs where. So he likes to use them as cautionary tales: no matter who’s proposing it, if an investment seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Area Man
May 25, 2012 at 1:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud
John Hinkle
May 25, 2012 at 1:26 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The first thing I thought of when I read this far: this is going to be like that old scam in which you answer a get-rich-quick ad in the back of a magazine (sending a few bucks), only to find out the scam is to put ads in the back of magazines offering a get-rich-quick scam (for a few bucks).
<reads further>
Ah, it’s a Ponzi scheme. Close but no cigar.
thompjs
May 25, 2012 at 1:32 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Joel Olsteen what a surprise! He should be in jail anyway
yoav
May 25, 2012 at 2:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I find it hard to believe that professional conmen like Long and Olsteen would let another scam artist access to their marks unless they got some cut of the action, I hope someone is looking into that.
Pierce R. Butler
May 25, 2012 at 2:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
But Taylor has disappeared, hiding out from lawsuits, federal charges and angry, mostly African-American, investors in at least 40 states.
What an unsubstantiated smear from the secular liberal media.
Mr. ABCNews reporter never even considered that Taylor could have been raptured.
billdaniels
May 25, 2012 at 7:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“‘I’m going to show you how to get great wealth. But first, a word from my cousin, the Nigerian prince.’”
All of my dead Nigerian uncles would be outraged by this accusation, just outraged. BTW, there must be something going in in east Africa because I’m getting reports that all of my uncles in Ghana are dying off and I’m running out of $50 bills to send so I can get my inheritances. Every day I check the balance in my checking account to see how much the Nigerian government has sent me, but the balance mysteriously just keeps getting smaller.
Getting back to reality I actually did have my credit card hacked a few years ago. The hackers, located in Cyprus, took out small accounts and signed me up with their “services.” One of their fake services was a credit-card protection plan. The irony escaped them. I eventually recovered all of my money.