I'm Andrew Rule his Life and Crimes. Today we're talking to our friends in Sydney. We're talking to a particular friend in Sydney. Alex Turner Cohen has been investigating an extraordinary alleged con by a man called Alan Metcalf. And I don't want to say too much about Alan Metcalf at a minute, because Alex has been looking into his activities going back at least several decades, and she has uncovered an extraordinary story which is eye popping, to say
the least. Without further ado, let's talk to Alex Turner Cohen about her work in revelations about Alan Metcalf.
Master con Man, thanks for having me, Andrew.
Who is Alan Metcalf? How did you start working on his activities?
I mean, I've been investigating him for a year and it's still hard to say who exactly he was, but you know so much we've come up with over this investigation. He started off seeming like a successful businessman from the Gold Coast who found a secret code to artificial intelligence while he was reading the Bible, and he convinced people that he found this tech that was going to revolutionize
the global economy and take over Google. But then when we looked a bit deeper, it actually turned out he wasn't quite as a successful businessman as he claimed, and he actually had a history of fraud and deception and tax dodging that dated all the way back to the nineteen sixties when he was just a young man starting out. So yeah, so that's I guess. One of the questions
we try to answer was who is this guy? Is he a businessman that's just made a mistake, or is he someone that set out to defraud people?
How did he come to your attention.
I'd write a lot about dodgy people, scammers, and so does my colleague, my boss actually, and she was going on some extended leave and actually received a tip off about this, and it was just kind of a few lines saying, I've lost my money. Is there anything you can do about this? So she passed it on to me before she went away, and I wasn't really sure how interesting it was going to be. You know, maybe it was someone who just lost a few thousand dollars
to a really kind of obvious fraud star. But then when we looked into it, it's it turned out to be at a really, really elaborate scheme. And when I asked this man if he knew how much had been lost altogether, he said it was about forty nine million dollars. So that's when my ears started to prick up.
Right, that got your attention, that magic figure forty nine million. It called me a skeptic. But if someone said to me, they have this wonderful money making scheme and it involves reading a secret code embedded in the Bible, I would immediately think this is ridiculous. All this is a con or, this is somebody who's kidding themselves. You know, they're delusial. What would make people think that was a wonderful start to a financial investment, a secret code deciphered from the Bible?
I know, I mean, it does sound ridiculous, and I'm to be honest, the first time that someone told me that, I did laugh, which was maybe not as sympathetic as
I should have been in the moment. But what was interesting was he started on that kind of selling point, you know, in the two thousands, in the early two thousands, when we were in the midst of a tech boom and an it boom, and people were looking for the next big thing and a lot of the people that he gave that spiell to were, you know, were of that kind of religious background. But what's interesting is a lot of the investors who put money in who were
not religious were not actually given that sound bite. They weren't given that spill until they'd already give away their money. So for the people who were atheists or just non believers, they weren't actually told that this code was found in the Bible. They were just told he discovered this amazing breakthrough in artificial intelligence. And it was only later on that they realized it had a bit more of a ludicrous background to it than they first realized.
Okay, so he didn't hit them with this up front. This somehow crept into the conversation later. Does it strike you, and this is a very general question before we return to the particular, does it strike you that a lot of people are uncommonly vulnerable to suggestions that out there there is this incredibly good invention or technique or knowledge or revelation that will make them rich.
Yeah, I mean I would I would say that that kind of ability to fall for that kind of idea that you know, I get rich quick scheme is probably Parlily, what's keeping me busy every day in the newsroom writing about these kind of scammers and con artists. But I guess another interesting thing in many cases I cover, including this one, is I think you're more likely to believe in something like this and not do those proper background
checks depending on who's actually approaching you. A lot of people it was, you know, a friend of twenty years or a brother, a cousin. Because what was smart about it was this Alan metcalf Fellow was able to convince one person very well, and then from there they did all the convincing for him, and it kind of bypassed those normal checks that you do in a case.
Okay, so he would be able to get almost like an unknowing secret agent inside other people's family networks or friendship networks exactly her do it for him. As we've seen in other cases down here there were there was a big scame based on racing that came out of Victoria but was nationwide, and it seemed to be the same thing that a few people who had apparently enriched themselves then genuinely went around saying, how good is this?
I turned fifty grand into five hundred and look at my new car, look at my swimming pool, look at my new house. And so those people's friends said, where do I sign up? And they became sort of spookers for the actual con man. And they didn't know that they were spooking for a con because they thought they'd made money, because the con men actually paid them, and paid them handsomely in order to bait the trap for one hundred hours.
It's very clever because then you're getting people out there who are trustworthy and have those in built networks to do the convincing for you, which yet sounds like that case you just talked about.
That similar thing. There were all these cons a sort of later underneath, regardless of what the mechanics of the fraud is. That's the way they work. They spread like a virus, don't they. They spread them like virus in a behalf or something.
Yeah, there was one man, as an example, someone literally did use it a scriptor that the people who got on board kind of spread the damage to other people in this Safe World that's the name of the software
he was selling. The Safe World's Alan Metcalf case. But there was one man who put in one and a half million dollars of his own money, and then he was so convinced about it that it was going to take off and make them all rich that he actually got four hundred and fifty other people to sign up from this kind of smallish country town in western Australia. So that was I guess that was the ultimate in sprooking that idea. Someone from her background who never scammed anyone before, the.
Retired wet farmer, thoroughly decent father and grandfather, steady as she goes, I've earned a dishonest dollar in his life, Trusted by everyone, he becomes the one who's leading the charge and takes all his friends, neighbors and relatives over the edge.
And then he's the one kind of left to blame in a way as well.
And they become so involved in it. I imagine that psychology is they get so tied up in it that they insist that it's legit, even when it starts to be clear to some observers that it cannot be legit that person digs in because they have invested all their credibility in it.
Yeah, it's kind of it's a psychological phenomenon actually, which we looked into this thing called sunk cost fallacy, where if you put a bit of money in something and then you put a bit more in, you're more convinced that this could be something, and you're more likely to just not accept that it was a scam as well.
So that's been a lot of people involved in this scheme who still to this day are still insisting that maybe it could take off, even though Alan Metcalfe has died and the technology has no one knows where it is. There's rumors that it's in the Cayman Islands, but they're still insistent that it could take off and they could become millionaires overnight.
There was once a long time ago, the legend of Lassider's Lost Reef, and the back in the good old, bad old days, a lot of people thought that Lassider's Reef.
He was a Lassider was an explorer type searcher for gold, and he'd gone off into the desert in Australia, out in you know, South Australia, Western Australia, and the story went that he'd found this ridge full of valuable minerals and valuable stuff and it was going to yield millions of dollars or pounds in those days, and that he'd perished on the way back, and for decades people went
looking for Lassiter's lost reef. And I think there is something that people call Lassiterus syndrome, and that is that, you know, this belief that out there, somewhere there's something wonderful waiting. And I've heard it used about not just about money, but about wildlife. They say that people who believe that you can go to Tasmania and look long enough and hard enough, you'll find Tasmanian tigers, the thylo scene, which is almost certainly extinct. But there's this Lassitus syndrome
that makes people think. Some people think that that it's out there, and the fact that they talk about it to their friends and fellow enthusiasts is an echo chamber that makes them believe more strongly and to resist any other arguments against it. Is that a sort of a linkage with what you found with the Metcalf case.
Yes, that definitely. It almost feels like people were like they were expecting that there was you know, no matter what kind of red flags came their way, they just always kept kind of rationalizing it. You know, like there was this kind of group of true believers, and to this day, some of them still believe it's going to turn into you know, this magical technology platform carpet right.
Yeah, I know, it's probably hard to explain because it's probably not able to be explained because it's probably not logical. But can you just, for our listener's sake, explain a sort of a mud map of the con a mud map of the of the scheme that he proposed.
Yeah, so well, he claimed that he had this technology platform that was going to be like a combination of Google, Amazon, PayPal, eBay, YouTube, kind of all the big names that were kind of buzzwords that you could throw around back in the two thousands. But he claimed it was going to be bigger and better.
Okay, bigger than Google.
Yeah, bigger than Google, Bigger and better than all of them because of this AI code he discovered. And what was quite clever was a big strategy for him was getting like he would actively encourage people and even monetarily incentivize them to approach friends and family so they'd get bonus shares and you know, they'd get discounts and that kind of thing. And so as a result, if he got just ten people on board. It spread to twenty and then it spread to forty, you know, kind of
that kind of effect. But throughout he was also you know, using he was kind of playing off on the names of certain people too. So he had some church leaders who were involved and he'd name dropped them. He had quite a big, well known sporting star involved, Michael Blake, who played for Manly in the eighties. He even put some of these people on his advisory board, so then he could say, well, look, I've got Michael Blake on the advisory board. We've got this American reporter from you
know who's a sports reporter. He's working with us. We've got this employee from HP who's very good at tech. He's endorsed it, right. And then when you started to look into it, you know, some of these people were no longer involved with the business. Some of them, like Michael Blake, one of the victims we've spoken to, said that he didn't really know much about technology, so having him on the advisory board didn't really mean much in
that way. And then you know, sending them updates saying, you know, oh, the we're going to float on the sheer market in six months, and then when the six month mark came, Oh, it's going to be another six months. We just need another five million. And that went on for ten years until he died.
Basically, isn't it wonderful? And because he could clip the ticket of any money that was floating around, he could get his fingers on at least some of it, and he would He made a living and probably presumably a handsome living, just shuffling money back and forth and taking some of it. Is that right? Did it? Governess of a round robin? So that he robbed Pai to pay Paul was an element of the ponsi about this.
No, So that's what was interesting. There was actually no one ever got any return at all. There was no It was because it was all built around once its floats on the stock market, you'll get your money will times by one hundred and fifty, like it'll increase one hundred and fifty times the amount. So as a result, until that point when it floated on the stock market, he didn't actually have to live up to those promises
and give anyone any money. But yes, so they just kind of direct transferred their money to him, and he had a US bank account and an Australian bank account set up and then from that point the money. No one ever knew what happened to the money. He never sent any financial reports, and he was doing a lot of traveling. Him and his wife would often go overseas, all in the name of doing business, but it's hard to know for sure. And then you know, he certainly
wasn't working another job. This was certainly completely bankrolling their lifestyle.
Yeah, so this is he's a master at hosing down people's expectations at the same time as he kept those expectations alive, Yeah, saying you will, it will pay off eventually, but not today. He was very good at doing that for several states in that.
Right balance, I guess, and he was a mastermind at that.
Yeah, delayed gratification. Now his wife is still alive, Mary. Yeah, and Mary and miss Metcalfe married in nineteen sixty five in Queensland, I think, is that right?
Yes, that's correct, And there.
They were they had some young couple and I think was it rural Queensland? Where was that? Yeah?
So they He was born in Cannes in the tropical north and then they got married and were living in Mount Isa really kind of outback mining Town, Queensland.
And what brought them together. Do we know anything about the sort of No.
We don't know too much. They were quite young at the time. He was about nineteen, she was about seventeen. Really, yeah, so because it was you know, back back in those days. She did say that she had prayed for a husband who would be a visionary and then Alan Metcalf came along and he was certainly a visionary in a way. He had a strong vision for how to take money off people.
He must be a good talk and charismatic.
Yes, definitely. He's been described as gift of the gab, silver tongued and you can see it all the way back to when he was, you know, in his twenties when he was scamming people. He was involved in a mining racket. He was taking names off tombstones and scamming an insurance company and pocketing a commission.
Do you understand how the mechanics that scame It's a beauty, but do you understand how that worked? Because I'm not sure.
Yeah, well so how it would work with my understanding is he was employed by an insurance company AMP and he would go to a cemetery and take names off the tombstones, sign them up as clients. By putting his own money in, ah, he would get a commission that would actually be worth him putting that money in, because it would be more.
The commission's more than the deposit.
So the commission he'd get like forgetting his clients, it would be worth more than that initial fee that he paid out of his own pocket. And then he just stopped paying the fees because the person was dead.
And also he'd put in a ten pounds initial payment on behalf of dead guy, but the commission on that might have been twenty pounds or whatever. So yeah, he'd profit on each one. Well, God bless him. He went he robbed the insurances, which is in this country. Some people might think that was a little bit like bush ranging, fair enough.
But it was more of a victimless crime than what he went on to do later.
Yes, you'd think so. And anything known about Mary, who's still alive, and we wish her well, and she's a poor widow woman, and we don't say anything bad about Mary, but I have to say she was a beautiful bride, very handsome woman, and obviously very trusting and loving. What do we know about Mary apart from that, Yeah.
So I mean what you've described there is a little different to what some of the shareholds.
Oh is that right?
I guess part of the issue is that when her husband died, the business didn't actually shut down. So Mary inherited the business from Allan and was, you know, she had to deal with this acic investigation. So when Alan died, right in the middle of his death, they were actually being investigated by the federal government and so it was kind of left to Mary to deal with that situation. So she got in a little bit of trouble through
her role as running the company from that. So, yeah, Mary was definitely left kind of holding some of the babies that Alan had left behind, left like the mess he kind of left her with.
You've investigated this length. Tell us what some of the things you did. Where did it lead you this unraveling this excellent story.
A lot of the investigations has been kind of traveling around Australia, going to Queensland a fair bit for this investigation. We also went to that rural town in Western Australia where the bulk of people were scammed. We also found links to the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. But a lot of that information was kind of able to find out by talking to people there or talking to like international journalists, because a lot of that stuff
is kind of done remotely anyway. But yeah, it's kind of taken us everywhere, you know, to notorious tax havens, to the US. There was a lot of links to the United States as well, and some exciting possibilities to do with the Tea Party and Donald Trump.
What were they? What were those connections or possible connections.
Yeah, well, I don't want to spoil the We'll say that Alan will he wanted to be quite strongly tied with the Tea Party and that was coming. That was happening out of time when they were kind of on the rise and when Donald Trump got into power a few years later after that. Obviously, so the fact that so much money has gone missing and so much dark money was going into political campaigns in the US at the time is definitely an avenue we had to explore.
Now, Alex, you know, in my time, I've seen a game or two them. We just referred to one or two, but they were big figures, always thrown around, millions of dollars tens of millions or whatever, and people say, where's
the money. Well, in the scams that I'm referring to here that I've looked at in the past, it seemed clear to me that there was no one pot of money under someone's pillow or you know, in a box in the ground, or even in an offshore bank account, because in a lot of those other scams, there was a round robin Ponzi thing, and the scammer was actually taking funds from me and twenty other people in order to satisfy some of the investors who were screaming for money.
And so if at the end of the day, you know, fifty million had gone missing, there was no way there was actually fifty million in one place. A lot of it had gone sideways to other alleged investors, some of whom had enriched themselves along the way. But in this case, that's what's interesting. In this case, that is not the story. You are actually alleging that the most part of forty nine million dollars is somewhere or has been spent one of the Yeah, but it's either in cash or assets.
It somewhere.
Yeah, that's what's interesting because we were looking at whether there was a literal kind of pot of goal at the end of the rainbow where it was all being kept. Yeah. The fact that nobody ever saw a return on their investment means that the whole amount it wasn't like it was put back onto investors at all. So we looked at whether he legitimately spent it on business expenses or where else.
I legitimately or Yeah. The bottom line is that the missing millions are out there somewhere, and that you've pointed those who want to know towards where it is. And how are people going to listen to your podcast? And what is it.
Called so you can listen to this anywhere that you listen to your normal podcasts. It's called The Missing forty nine Million. And we've got five episodes out so far and a new episode is coming out every week.
That is wonderful. Alex Turner Curen, you've done good work and we all look forward to listening to that terrific investigation. Congratulations, Thank you so much, Andrew, thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heraldsun dot com dot au forward slash Andrew Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all
one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description No