← Witness: Sex, Lies and Streaming
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- [00:05]
Alex Turner Cohen
Good afternoon Alex. This information may be of some value to you.
- [00:09]
John Smith
This is an email I received two weeks after launching my podcast. Suddenly my investigation was going from a cold one to a live one.
- [00:18]
Alex Turner Cohen
I am a semi retired solicitor in Ipswich. I have acted for a Mr. John Carey Smith over the last four decades. In the 1990s he was also defrauded by Alan Metcalfe. He lost approx $700,000.
- [00:31]
John Smith
I know I said False Prophet was the final episode, but more tip offs have come in and I have to share them with you. Something that's always bothered me was what Alan got up to in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s after perpetrating a string of fraud on Australian soil. He'd apparently visited Russia for something to do with setting up online businesses. While he was there I discovered a few fragments on the Internet as well as one anonymous person who was afraid of Russian heavyweights tracking him down if he told me too much. In the 90s he brokered a deal with Russia. The last thing I need is 150kg Russian knocking down my door. It never sat right with me that I couldn't find out more. My imagination was running wild picturing KGB agents and Cold War spies having tea with Alan Metcalfe. And as it turns out, I'm not far off at all. I'm Alex Turner Cohen, a finance and investigative report porter from news.com and you're listening to the Missing 49 Million. This is a bonus episode, Leap of Faith. I keep reading the solicitor's email which she sent an hour after I'd left the office and gone home. A voice actor is reading it out.
- [01:59]
Alex Turner Cohen
I have acted for a Mr. John Carey Smith over the last four decades. In the 1990s he was also defrauded by Alan Metcalfe. He lost approx $700,000. John Smith started up one of the first, if not the first video chains called Plains video in the 80s. He built and franchised these stores in many states. In Australia, Video Easy eventually took them over when John soldiers Alan Metcalfe approached him to go into the business of the information superhighway which he was told would emanate out of Russia in the 1990s. John advises that Alan often spoke of God and had uncomfortable hand holding sessions at their meetings. I have contacted John, who now resides near Toowoomba and he asked me to contact you to let you know he is prepared to tell you how Alan managed to defraud him too.
- [02:48]
John Smith
Do I want to talk to John Smith? Hell yes. So I reply and convince him to let me record our conversation over a video call. John is a successful video mogul who in the 1990s, had recently sold his business for lots of money. In a way, he was kind of what Alan Metcalfe had claimed he strove to be. But Alan saw him as something else, a prime target. I asked John how he heard of Alan Metcalf.
- [03:15]
John Carey Smith
I was good friends with his brother Neil, and we were pretty close friends for many years. And Alan appeared on the scene and must have heard about me through Neil and took it upon himself to come and visit me, using Neil as an introduction, you know, so that I'd feel comfortable talking to him. And so I thought, if he's Neil's brother, he must be okay.
- [03:45]
John Smith
So tell me a bit about Neil. What was he like? What did he do?
- [03:49]
John Carey Smith
He had a factory in Carroll park and manufactured bits and pieces for electrical companies and things like that. He was a successful businessman himself. But his brother lobbed on his doorstep with nowhere to live, and I'm not quite sure why. I know his wife disliked Alan immensely. She wanted him out of the place. She was the main one who wanted him out. She was just telling me that he'd come and park himself in their place and they had no more privacy. They had a husband and wife and a grown up boy. He wasn't a boy, he was 20 odds or something, living in their house and they had no more privacy. And she wondered why he wouldn't go. And she was the one that actually told him he has to go, him and his wife and his son Clayton. And they stayed there for quite a while. And in the meantime he found out about me.
- [04:54]
John Smith
This was in 1993, around the time when Alan sold his penthouse along the Brisbane river and when the bank of New Zealand and someone else was suing him for unpaid debts. Clearly something had gone wrong. But John was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and entertained having a meeting with him in his office.
- [05:13]
John Carey Smith
He was a dominant sort of a person, a very dominant. And he sort of took over whatever discussion or meeting you had. Yeah, he wanted to set up a meeting. We did start off with some prayers and, you know, holding hands and praying, my God, what have I joined? Is this a cult or something? It certainly made me feel uncomfortable, but I was sort of bearing on this guy. He's a brother, this bloke that I know. He's straight shooter and a good guy. So I just sort of brushed that aside virtually. But he did do it every time he came, and then he had the audacity, like down the track to set up his own meetings and just walk in and use the boardroom that we had at the time for his own meetings. Without even telling me, he just lobbed there.
- [06:04]
John Smith
And in those meetings, Alan was spruiking his latest stroke of genius at the time, a plan to create Internet servers to connect businesses around the world.
- [06:14]
John Carey Smith
The Internet was just starting and that's the days when it was all telephone hookups and you know, the phone used to go beep, beep, beep, you have to hook up. And it wasn't actually going in Australia as far as you could go on and like it is today. You couldn't go on and research something. Or there was just pictures because he showed me some of the pictures from the US on his computer and he more or less suggested that there's a big market in the business industry with people, and he particularly emphasized Russia and America. That's where the connection is. That's what he wanted to focus on.
- [06:57]
John Smith
John ended up trusting in Alan's vision and initially invested $200,000 into the project called Alpha Info. And part of this plan involved John using his factory space to set up one of these Internet servers.
- [07:11]
John Carey Smith
He had a guy who came from the US and he set up what I think is what they call servers. They were big machines that nearly touched the roof. The way he initially spoke was that it would be up and running and he'd start doing connecting some. He wanted to connect people in Russia that needed finance with Americans or joint ownership or something like that in their businesses. And he said that'll be up and running and that'll pay the bills in the meantime. But it never happened.
- [07:48]
John Smith
John was coaxed to put more and more money in and it ended up totalling $700,000 according to an inflation calculator. That's $1.5 million today. Alan said he needed the funds to travel to and from Russia and the US to set up these Internet links.
- [08:08]
John Carey Smith
He travelled all over the world, him and his wife. And as I said, he come back from, well, so called Russia, but he may not have been in Russia, but he said he had put these servers in Russia too, in the universities in Russia. I didn't know whether they were going to Russia or Hungary. She came from Hungary and whether they were going spending time over there. I think they did bring the mother over to Australia eventually. And he was always in the US and always in Russia, or so he said. Although he did live the high life. They always looked like our first class. I Couldn't imagine him sitting in the economy anyway, put it that way. I don't think. I couldn't imagine him sitting in with the common people.
- [08:55]
John Smith
John tells me that Alan would always return from these trips immaculately dressed and looked like a multimillionaire whenever they met. I asked him about the gift that Alan brought back from Russia.
- [09:07]
John Carey Smith
Well, they come back and they, like a couple of excited schoolchildren walking in and said, guess what? And he pulled out this Cossack and he said, we bought your home again, you're from Russia. And I looked at it and just one of those fur hats you pull on your head, and I couldn't believe it. I thought, you know, that's.
- [09:28]
Bryce Hutchinson
I bought that.
- [09:29]
John Carey Smith
That's my money, you know. You spent my money to buy me a gift, I might add. It's still around that Cossack hat. I haven't got it, but some friend of my wife's got it.
- [09:41]
John Smith
It is, quite honestly, bizarre. Another quirky story to be added to an already long list in the escapades of Alan Metcalfe. And this incident really sowed the first seed of doubt for John. He'd had enough.
- [09:56]
John Carey Smith
I said, I can't keep just churning out money, especially when you haven't started yet. And he said that it'll. It's on the verge. And I said, no, I can't do it anymore. It was just after that that I started thinking this whole thing could be a scam. He's just taking a ride or living a good life or whatever. But it could be a scam.
- [10:23]
John Smith
Alan ended up abandoning the service he'd left in John's factory. John ripped them out but couldn't sell them because no one knew what they were. I asked John about his friend Neil, Alan's brother, who got him involved in this Russian Alpha project in the first place. Wondering if the relationship had soured it all, John tells me that Neil was dying by the time he thought he was being scammed. He didn't want to bother him with it at all. And Neil Metcalf passed away shortly after from a brain problem. I'm still not exactly clear on what this Russia project was. Another harebrained project of Alan's. An early iteration of Safe Worlds, Both of the above, or something else entirely. So I asked John. He's not sure either, as it's been so long.
- [11:10]
John Carey Smith
This book here really explains it all. It's strictly private and confidential, but I have no problem with sending it on.
- [11:18]
John Smith
It arrives in the mail a few days later, 50 pages in a Sleek black folder. These are the original documents and they're in surprisingly good shape. I immediately take photos of every page so that I'll have it saved digitally forever. It's dated March 1997 and is titled Alpha Information Limited Business Plan. I feel like I'm holding history in my hands. Alan Metcalfe would go on to make many of these to create his Safe World scam. Big information booklets filled with buzzwords that were as impressive as they were vague. Here's the artificial intelligence program recreating Alan's voice to read out his Russian business plan.
- [12:01]
Alan Metcalfe
Alpha Information Limited has been incorporated to establish and commercialise global information trading throughout the online distribution of the world. The information superhighway. Our goal is to establish the number one online business information system in the world.
- [12:23]
John Smith
Alan went on to say that this business, Alpha Info, would generate up to $1.25 billion a year and had been valued at 92 million bucks. He said it would be up and running by the year 2000, another promise that didn't end up eventuating. And family was important to Allen. His plans involved creating a role for his son.
- [12:47]
Alan Metcalfe
The vice president will be responsible for sales and marketing of the company's web servers. Clayton Metcalfe has been appointed this position.
- [12:58]
John Smith
I look for references to Russia and there's a lot. He wanted to start something called the Russian Business Exchange and said it would establish reliable communication between Russia, the US and Australia. And he'd actually got a deal with the International University Moscow to make this happen. Alan was very pleased with this university and the powerful people at work in its halls, including people who had been politicians and KGB agents in the Soviet Union.
- [13:27]
Alan Metcalfe
Administrators at the International University Moscow are also influential in the Russian system. The rector of the university is the former Minister for Education for the Soviet Union. The dean of the business school for former Russian military officers is an influential member of Russian Parliament, an active general in the Russian air Force and the former Deputy Chairman of the kgb. These connections provide the company with the access to decision makers in the Russian economy that is needed to establish the Russian Business Exchange.
- [14:05]
John Smith
Russia was key to this vision. It absolutely had to be set up in Russia.
- [14:11]
Alan Metcalfe
Russia is important to the development of AlphaInfo's Info Trading System because it offers low cost access to immediately available large numbers of business opportunities that are of acute interest to the business world.
- [14:27]
John Smith
What does Alan mean by low cost? Well, he wanted free labour and he was getting it from Russian university students who'd been soldiers under the Communist regime.
- [14:38]
Alan Metcalfe
The International University Moscow is seen by AlphaInfo as an ideal joint venture partner in Russia because It has some 400 business students, including an internal business school for former Russian military officers that produces about 50 mature MBA level students a year who are all seeking to learn Western business ways and find ways to participate in the future of Russia. This pool of talent is important to interface with the large number of Russian enterprises that need our system and provide data input at relatively low Russian rates. In return, the company provides the students with a way of earning valuable income and career opportunities.
- [15:27]
John Smith
I wonder how much these business students were being paid, if anything. And just how deep did Alan's ties to Russia go? There's a rumour that indicates Alan's Russian links didn't end there. Let's go back a moment. Someone had commented on a social media post about the podcast that Alan had got them for $100,000. This person called Bryce Hutchinson was indeed another victim of Safe Worlds. We speak over the phone and he tells me that he heard Alan had brought in Russian developers to set up the Safe World website. I want to meet him. It turns out he lives on the Central coast, just an hour and a half north of Sydney. So I drive up. Bryce is bearded, a young dad, and he takes me to the front room of his house. It doubles as a beauty salon where his wife runs a business. One of the first things I want to know is what he's heard about these Russian programmers.
- [16:24]
Glenn McFarlane
So he got something apparently. Like, I never saw it, but he got some IT guys that could encrypt. When money was transferred, there was no way of breaking into the system. It was like having an encrypted phone, nearly like. And the big guys that were tech guys that got into this, they saw the value in that because they reckon it was like next to none. The security was that good for it that no one would be able to match it.
- [16:52]
John Smith
And this was Russian people that he brought in. You heard that or.
- [16:56]
Glenn McFarlane
Yeah, that's what I recall. It was two guys that were tech guys that he involved in the Safe Worlds for the security side of it, for when you were doing like E transfers, if you're transferring currency or doing any of that, like, it was. It was literally unhackable.
- [17:10]
John Smith
There's not much more he can tell me about this. Later, I would go back to the former Safe Worlds employee Talijoy Grace to see if she knew anything about these Russian hackers. She says it would have been before her time working there, but says it is possible. Back in Bryce's front room, I ask him more about the hundred thousand dollar investment he made into Safe Worlds. And this is where things get even more interesting. Bryce is the youngest victim I know of in the Safe World scheme. He's only 33. He got involved with Allen and Safe Worlds when he was just 17 years old.
- [17:47]
Glenn McFarlane
So about 2007, my father, Steve Hutchinson, invested in a company called Safeworlds. I was about 17 years old at the time. I initially invested $10,000 in when I was 17 and then I put larger amounts in as I was over the age of 18. Like I did an amount for 60,000 and then there was share splits and I did more and more and more and my investment was pretty much $100,000 or plus.
- [18:15]
John Smith
Yeah, that's a lot of money. So how were you able to afford that at 17?
- [18:20]
Glenn McFarlane
So I borrowed the money off my dad to start with and then one of my good mates actually got me a start on a job on the Sydney Harbour Bridge from an instruction company. And then, yeah, I was on pretty good money there and sort of just paid the initial investment off pretty much over three years.
- [18:35]
John Smith
So were you paying it back to your dad, like with interest or how did that work?
- [18:39]
Glenn McFarlane
Yeah, there actually was interest on it. It was 10% interest on the investment. I did sign something, just it was more of an agreement of how I was paying the money back and that he was going to charge me the interest on the amount.
- [18:49]
John Smith
So if you reckon you invested 100,000, you would have paid about 110,000.
- [18:54]
Glenn McFarlane
It was probably around 120. Yeah, it was about 120,000 once I finished paying it off. Yeah.
- [19:01]
John Smith
And Bryce was slaving away trying to make a dent in his debt, working 60 hour weeks to pay it off.
- [19:08]
Glenn McFarlane
Yeah, it was a fair bit of money to pay back. Look at the time I was potentially earning probably between sort of $1,600,000 a week after tax. Clear. Like I was getting pretty good money so I could afford it. But yeah, it's a lot of money to. You know what I mean? I didn't even like all my mates had nice cars and that when they were younger and bought stuff and I was on a good job and I didn't even do that. I left that for years because I was paying this off. So yeah, it was things like that when you look back on. Yeah, and it's a lot of. It's definitely a lot of money to lose, like $900 a week. I'm not even paying that for my mortgage now. I still remember clear as day transferring the Last thousand bucks or whatever it was, and pretty much saying like, haha, like the whole thing's done, like it's paid off.
- [19:50]
John Smith
While there's no suggestion at all that Steve Hutchinson was a scammer, he was a believer in Alan's message, meaning Alan saw him as kind of a recruiter, even giving him bonus shares at a certain point.
- [20:04]
Glenn McFarlane
There was a few people that were closer to Alan that were actually making sort of money, not money back, but they were getting shares. So say, for example, they got someone to invest $50,000. They might have got like 25,000 shares. I wouldn't say he pressured me, but he was like, oh mate, you're letting a good offer go down, like all this sort of stuff. But I just feel like he'd gotten that many people invested and was that deep in it himself that even if someone told him it was a scam, he nearly wouldn't believe it. Like he'd nearly think it was. They were stupid. And he's on the biggest thing.
- [20:41]
John Smith
But as we know, Safe Worlds never went anywhere. And Bryce was soon regretting the mega investment he'd made into it. Tell me a bit about how this changed your relationship with your father.
- [20:54]
Glenn McFarlane
Yeah, look, I wouldn't say it was just safe worlds. Look, I don't know, we haven't had a real good relationship, but obviously, yeah, that was a pretty big blow with it as well, because I sort of. Look, I know there's risks in everything, but I took a pretty big, like, risk in it.
- [21:11]
John Smith
When's the last time you spoke to him?
- [21:15]
Glenn McFarlane
Probably a couple of years ago now, briefly over emails, just. Just over other stuff. But yeah, besides that. Yeah, I don't. I don't bring up the safe worlds to this thing at all. He hasn't got a lot of people around him like he's what, in his late 60s now? He's got grandkids he's never seen. So he's seen my son when he was probably two or three years old.
- [21:35]
John Smith
Bryce reckons his father invested heavily into safe worlds, like more than a million dollars. But I can't verify this. I contact Steve Hutchinson afterwards to get his side to all of this and he's yet to respond. Bryce puts me in touch with another Central coast local who he believes invested at Steve Hutchinson's urging. It's another case of family ties, the father and son connection pulling someone into Alan's orbit.
- [22:06]
Steve Hutchinson
My name's Glenn McFarlane and I'm based in Pearl beach on the Central Coast. I'm 52 years old and I have my own building business.
- [22:15]
John Smith
We speak in his sprawling kitchen, his cattle dog watching on. There's a ute parked in his driveway. The house feels newly renovated with a big open space living room and a massive stone benchtop. We speak over. Glen tells me he built it all himself. It was through this line of work that he met Steve Hutchinson.
- [22:35]
Steve Hutchinson
Steve was a brick cleaner and he was a contractor to my father, who was a builder. He worked for my father. So, yeah, I knew Steve when I was an apprentice to my father and I met him a long, long time ago. I remember Steve being a very motivated guy. He was a very, very driven and positive personality. So I trusted in that, you know, of what he had researched and what he knew about it and just him as a person, you know, a bit of a leap of faith, really. Just trusted in Steve as a friend.
- [23:11]
John Smith
How much would you say you put in?
- [23:12]
Steve Hutchinson
It was $50,000. Just finished building my own home and had a mortgage, so it was a lot of money at the time.
- [23:20]
John Smith
Steve Hutchinson was always upfront about the commission he received for recruiting people to the Safe World's cause.
- [23:27]
Steve Hutchinson
He wasn't being paid cash, but was being given shares for his contribution to bring people into the venture.
- [23:36]
John Smith
Glen also believes that Steve put in a substantial chunk of his personal fortune into the Safe Worlds project.
- [23:43]
Steve Hutchinson
I know it's in excess of a million dollars that he personally put in. I mean, I'm not 100% sure of that, but he sort of made. Made me aware that that was his investment in it.
- [23:57]
John Smith
Apparently Steve had made some good money from other investments and that went towards Safe Worlds. He also had a wealthy partner at the time who chipped in as well. They're no longer together. She's since remarried and she declines to speak with me. It also put a strain in Glen's friendship with Steve. In fact, he says they don't talk anymore.
- [24:19]
Steve Hutchinson
Very pushy. Yeah, he's very pushy with his belief in it to the point where his partner, or ex partner now was quite embarrassed that he pushed it so hard onto me. Not so much door knocking, but yeah, just very, very pushy on the phone and, you know, was pitched that I'd be crazy if I sort of didn't get involved in that ground floor opportunity.
- [24:45]
John Smith
As I leave his home, I can't help but feel that Steve Hutchinson's name seems familiar. So I go back through my notes and I'm right. This isn't the first time someone has mentioned him to me. Do you remember that retired couple, Kim and Roy, who gave Alan some of their money and then spent years helping him beta test the product. I spoke to them in episode three. This might help you remember.
- [25:10]
H
I think the worst part for me personally was when he promoted for us to go out and find local businesses and try and interest them in getting their own channel. And I did do that. And I'm an introvert and a shy person and I don't talk much. So this was a big effort for me. But I did it because I wanted to get prosperity for our family. And at the time I still believed that it was happening. So I involved a lot of people and tried to, you know, interest other people in joining in. It was embarrassing. When I look back.
- [25:50]
John Carey Smith
He was comparing himself to people like Edison and Einstein, you know, and people that had discovered penicillin and, you know, like he was making a comparison that he had, just as a normal man had discovered this law of thought and claimed that, you know, he was. He was the savior of the. Or could be the savior of the world if it all turned out right for him, you know, and for us.
- [26:18]
John Smith
Well, when I listened back to my interview with them, it was Steve Hutchinson who introduced them to Safe Worlds. Steve was a customer of theirs and he convinced them to get involved. They were encouraged by the fact he'd got his own son to invest.
- [26:33]
H
Well, I know this fellow. Steve's his name, first name. He got his son, or so he told us. I think his son invested quite a lot of money in it too. So, you know, he was involving family investing in it. So.
- [26:47]
John Carey Smith
And his partner at the time. Yeah, his lady partner, yeah, she invested money as well.
- [26:53]
John Smith
Like, he was always kind of like Alan in a way, chasing money, chasing the next kind of opportunity.
- [26:59]
H
But it wasn't just this company. He also introduced us to other shares, other share companies. So he wasn't just sort of fixated on Safe Worlds. He was looking for opportunities that might pay off.
- [27:12]
John Smith
Then the Safe Worlds platform started to falter.
- [27:16]
H
I did try and reach out to him. At one stage, Kim showed me a.
- [27:20]
John Smith
Message she sent to Steve Hutchinson, which is still unanswered to this day. So he was one of Alan's super distributors, bringing people into the Safeworld scheme from all over the Central coast, much like Rodney McKay, the guy who raised $15 million for Alan over in Western Australia and who invested $1.5 million of his own money into the scheme as well. Most of the tip offs I receive actually relate to Rod McKay. It's all stuff I already know or things I can't verify. But one email does catch my eye. This is what it says. A member of my family was, is involved in this scam. Apparently he was one of the first and contributed to the loss of my grandmother's farm and all her life savings. A very distressing and damaging influence on our extended family. Thank you for investigating this. It would be nice to know where that bastard put the money. I look forward to pissing on his grave. The reference to a farm immediately makes me think of Rod. And as it turns out, this was a relative of Rod's, someone in the McKay clan. He doesn't want to share his name, but is happy for me to record this conversation.
- [28:35]
Bryce Hutchinson
I think Rodney was always looking for that big thing, you know, the big payday investment, you know, something that goes really, really well. But it just seemed everything that he tried just never worked out, never panned out.
- [28:47]
John Smith
It seems like a parallel of Steve and even Alan himself. And Rodney then came into a lot of money to make his dreams more possible.
- [28:56]
Bryce Hutchinson
The farm to begin with. So my grandfather died in his early 60s. He had a form of cancer and it's my grandmother's farm then. And Granny, she ended up. There was a lot of the property, was quite a large property, and so they sublet or they let out a lot of the fields to other farmers in the area. Uncle Rodney had bought out or taken his share of the farm and then he sold that at some stage. What I thought is that parts of the farm had been sold off to help. I'm assuming the money went to my grandmother in terms of living costs and just running costs of the property.
- [29:32]
John Smith
Rodney put part of the inheritance into safe worlds instead, according to my source.
- [29:38]
Bryce Hutchinson
In essence, he was probably, you know, trying to do the right thing by his family. But there was no discussion about what to do with the money from the farm or whatever it was just like it's going into this. I questioned from the start, like, where's. Where is this information? Where is it written? Where is it? Cause I was at the same time I'd been when we'd heard about it, I was doing my own research just to try to find out something about it. And all I ever found was, you know, like little snippets of information about Alan Metcalfe and, you know, his deluded claim that AI he found in the Bible and, you know, that sort of rubbish. So. And as soon as I saw that, as soon as I'd read that, I said to Mum and Dad and my brothers, this is a scam, or this doesn't sound right. As soon as People start talking about God being the or the Bible being the source of this information. It's just like, oh yeah, this is wrong.
- [30:33]
John Smith
Losing the farm and the inheritance was a financial blow for the family, but it was also emotionally devastating for them and for his grandma.
- [30:42]
Bryce Hutchinson
I always just thought she was going to stay at the farm forever. Poor grandmother, she didn't really want to leave the home. She'd been born and raised in that region, that area. The property of her parents had been just down the road and there were all these old family connections and houses and whatnot all over the shop. So she really didn't want to leave.
- [31:03]
John Smith
She had to leave Geraldton and move to a nursing home south of Perth. For people with literally nothing left, the.
- [31:11]
Bryce Hutchinson
Home is almost brand new, the care is really good, facilities are just great. But the only way you can get into these places is if you have absolutely nothing. So no money, no property, no investments, nothing. You're on. It's called the Little Sisters of the Poor because these people are exceptionally poor.
- [31:32]
John Smith
There's no suggestion that Rod was trying to scam anybody, but as we've reported in past episodes, he was a true believer. To say it's left the Mackays with a sour taste in their mouths is an understatement. There's a deep schism in their extended family, one they'll all probably take to the grave.
- [31:52]
Bryce Hutchinson
I'm upset and angry. I'm really angry and I'm annoyed with Rodney because, you know, at the time this is all happening, we're adults, like, you know, we're not 14 or 15 year old kids that maybe the opinion's not as valued as much, but we were adults, you know, we're working with professionals, we've lived overseas, we've experienced a lot in life and then to hear that this is something based in God and the Bible and all that sort of ruby rubbish, it's just like, ugh, devastating. I can't recall speaking with Rodney for maybe 10 years or so before you'd see him, you know, three or four times a year at least, you know, at family events or catch ups, Christmas, that sort of stuff. My aunt was very, very upset about it because it was, there was no consultation. My mum was really upset as well. But mum doesn't like to get involved in conflict. My dad is still really angry about it to the point that he wouldn't forgive Rodney for what's happened. He won't. I don't think there won't be any forgiveness there from my dad.
- [32:59]
John Smith
So that ultimately is Alan's legacy. Broken families, broken promises. Instead of turning water into wine, he turned millions into nothing. His followers believed in him, his vision. Now some of them might never be able to afford money to pay for their retirements or their kids educations or the holiday of a lifetime. Alan's scam is over. But there's always another scam about to begin. So be careful out there. I'm your host, Alex Turner Cohen and this was the missing 49 million 14. 9 million. Thanks for listening. Head to news.com to read more of my reporting on this story. Do you know more? Get in touch through our dedicated tip inbox missing millionsews.com or contact me directly on Alex turner-cohenws.com or look me up on Twitter to get my details. I'm your host Alex Turner Cohen. Nina Young is the executive producer, Sound design and editing by Tiffany Dimack. Our editorial director is Dan Box, Grant McAvaney is our legal advisor and Kerry Warren is the editor of news.com au did you know that there's more than 2,000 stocks listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, Most of which you've never heard of, most of which are actually right at cutting edge of what's going to drive our economy into the future. They're in mining, searching for the battery metals to power us into the future. Medical companies researching the next big breakthrough to make us healthy into the future. Or tech companies, brilliant young Australian entrepreneurs seeking the next big tech unicorn. Well, if you want to know about them, search Stockhead. Stockhead is focused on the small you never know you find the next big thing. Stockhead.com.
- [35:03]
Bryce Hutchinson
The podcast Faith on Trial looks.
- [35:05]
John Smith
Into Hillsong both in Australia and the US and takes both the listener and.
- [35:10]
Bryce Hutchinson
Hosts on unexpected twists and turns in the story of Brian Houston and the singing preachers.
- [35:17]
John Smith
There are two incidents involving Pastor Brian.
- [35:20]
Bryce Hutchinson
The Australian journalists uncovered a litany of alleged criminal behavior in the megachurch Financial.
- [35:26]
John Smith
Gifts were being given to the leaders of the church. Listen to Faith on Trial Hillsong ad.
- [35:32]
Bryce Hutchinson
Free on Crimex plus on Apple Podcasts today or wherever you get your podcasts.