Speaker 1: We have gathered today to give thanks to God for
Speaker 1: the life of Alan Miles Metcalf, and to a third
Speaker 1: a Christian conviction that while death is the end of
Speaker 1: human life, at marks a new beginning in our relationship
Speaker 1: with God. Please let us stand together as we see
Speaker 1: amazing grace.
Speaker 2: I'm starting this story at the end, the end of
Speaker 2: Alan Metcalf's life. This is his funeral. It's a Wednesday,
Speaker 2: the first day of March in twenty seventeen. I'm looking
Speaker 2: back at this scene immortalized on a YouTube video. It's
Speaker 2: a video that I've now watched multiple times, and each
Speaker 2: time I notice other small details. Count forty or so
Speaker 2: people sitting in the pews of the church. The thirty
Speaker 2: two degree day is hot, sweltering, and a few of
Speaker 2: the men have actually taken off their suit jackets. Sad
Speaker 2: faces stare up as the reverend begins his service. It's
Speaker 2: just past one pm in a Uniting church in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Speaker 2: Alan's widow, Mary Metcalf, takes to the stand to deliver
Speaker 2: her eulogy. She cuts a striking figure with her larger
Speaker 2: than life makeup and heavy jewelry, as well as a
Speaker 2: long black lace veil draped dramatically over her face. Her son, Clayton,
Speaker 2: towers next to her. Alan's only child, Mary describes her
Speaker 2: husband as a gift from God.
Speaker 3: I prayed to God when I was fifteen to send
Speaker 3: me a husband who would be a kindred spirit, a
Speaker 3: visionary who would not be afraid. God answered my prayers
Speaker 3: in abundance to send me Alan Metcalts.
Speaker 2: Alan was seventy years old and extremely overweight. In the end,
Speaker 2: he died of a heart attack. He was a seemingly
Speaker 2: successful businessman on the Gold Coast, a beachside city built
Speaker 2: around shining skyscrapers. And watching the funeral, it seems like
Speaker 2: Alan was pretty popular. More than ten people speak and
Speaker 2: others send video messages from all around the world.
Speaker 4: My mother told me years ago, Peter, you'll count your
Speaker 4: genuine friends on one hand. In your lifetime, Alan, you're
Speaker 4: on my hand.
Speaker 5: We're not going to mourn him.
Speaker 6: We're going to celebrate his life, what he did in
Speaker 6: the world, what they're still going to do in the
Speaker 6: world because of Alan Metca.
Speaker 7: I truly believe he was a genius, and I trust
Speaker 7: the history of books will prove out.
Speaker 4: To be the case.
Speaker 2: Only that's not quite the story I find when I
Speaker 2: pick up those history books seven years later and learn
Speaker 2: about Alan Metcalf for myself. The words I'm hearing now
Speaker 2: to describe him are very very different.
Speaker 5: Deceitful, a conment.
Speaker 4: He was a scammer and a lunatic in a way.
Speaker 5: He struck me as being the kind of guy could
Speaker 5: sell ice to the Esquimos, but you just wondered what
Speaker 5: was the ice made of?
Speaker 2: Depending on who you asked, Alan was a visionary or
Speaker 2: a thief, a genius, or a fool who believed his
Speaker 2: own fantasies. Now six hundred people are wondering which it was,
Speaker 2: after putting their money, in some cases their life savings
Speaker 2: into a scheme that Alan was running. Alan claimed he'd
Speaker 2: found the secret to artificial intelligence in the Bible. He
Speaker 2: told the world his company would be bigger than Google.
Speaker 2: He was a messiah to his devout followers, able to
Speaker 2: lead them to a promised land free from ever having
Speaker 2: to work again, and guaranteed them with almost religious conviction,
Speaker 2: truly biblical returns.
Speaker 8: Welcome to see World's TV. Just like magic, I'm going
Speaker 8: to show you the easiest way to make money online.
Speaker 8: So what is safe World's TV. It's more than just
Speaker 8: a website and more than just a software application. It's
Speaker 8: the world's first Internet television and e business platform.
Speaker 2: Alan's investors were ordinary people, entire families, friend groups, pensioners,
Speaker 2: people from all over the world. They believed in Alan.
Speaker 2: They believed they were going to get their money to
Speaker 2: pay for their retirements, or their kids' educations, or the
Speaker 2: holiday of lifetime. Until suddenly Alan died. Those investors were
Speaker 2: left asking what happened to their money, all forty nine
Speaker 2: million dollars of it. I'll never meet him. He died
Speaker 2: before I was even a working journalist, but he's consumed
Speaker 2: my every spare thought. For the past year. The money
Speaker 2: has gone missing. No one seems to know where it is,
Speaker 2: and I'm setting up to find it. I'm Alex Turner Cohen,
Speaker 2: a finance and investigative reporter from news dot Commeddy you
Speaker 2: and you're listening to the Missing forty nine million. This
Speaker 2: is episode one Judgment Day.
Speaker 7: Hello. I'm Alan Metcalf. In nineteen ninety nine, I was
Speaker 7: fortunate enough to make the breakthrough discovery of the law
Speaker 7: of thought that in the IT world is called universal logic.
Speaker 7: Much to the surprise and disbelief of many people. I
Speaker 7: found the law of thought in the Bible. We have
Speaker 7: used the law of thought to develop what we believe
Speaker 7: is the world's first artificially intelligent, mass distributable Internet robot
Speaker 7: for television and electronic business.
Speaker 2: The voice you're hearing there is Alan Metcalf. He might
Speaker 2: be dead, but Alan lives on in numerous YouTube clips,
Speaker 2: A ghost in the machine. Let's go back to the
Speaker 2: email which started me on the search for Allan's missing money.
Speaker 9: Hi, my name is Charlie Waynepin. I'm a resident of
Speaker 9: the Netherlands that I'm writing about a financial investment that
Speaker 9: I made in Australia back in December twenty thirteen. I
Speaker 9: was informed that you're a journalist that writes sharp articles
Speaker 9: concerning financial issues, including fraud. Therefore, I hope that you're
Speaker 9: the right person that I can refer to for this matter.
Speaker 2: This is Charlie reading from his email. He explained that
Speaker 2: he'd invested tens of thousands of dollars into a scheme
Speaker 2: called Safe Worlds, as had many other Australians, and that
Speaker 2: the founder of the scheme was now dead.
Speaker 9: Please let me know if this is something that you
Speaker 9: would be willing to work on and if you can,
Speaker 9: I will be very high happy to send you my
Speaker 9: correspondence that I had for this project. Thank you in
Speaker 9: advance for your consideration, looking forward hearing from you.
Speaker 10: When did this come in April? Didn't it?
Speaker 2: It's been almost a year to the day. Actually, I
Speaker 2: never would have imagined from that one email. This is
Speaker 2: me talking to my boss, Sarah Sharples, the finance editor
Speaker 2: at news dot com TODAU. She's the one that actually
Speaker 2: first received that email from Charlie. Tell us about what
Speaker 2: was happening that day When the email came in. What
Speaker 2: did you think?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: It was a tip off? You receive a lot of
Speaker 2: tip offs. Was there anything about this one that stood out?
Speaker 2: What do you remember now given how much ended up
Speaker 2: coming out of this one email.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we do get a lot of tip offs, which
Speaker 10: is where some of the best stories come from. I
Speaker 10: remember receiving this email and he said he'd invested in
Speaker 10: this company back in twenty thirteen, and he'd invested fifty
Speaker 10: two thousand, which is a lot of money. And it
Speaker 10: got really intriguing as well because the email talked about
Speaker 10: what he'd been sold to invest in was a company
Speaker 10: that was going to surpass Google and YouTube, so obviously
Speaker 10: they're big players now. And then ten years later he
Speaker 10: still hadn't seen any of his money or any return
Speaker 10: on it. He'd been chasing it for ten years. The
Speaker 10: founder had died, but the wife had taken over it,
Speaker 10: which was a bit weird because, like he said, they
Speaker 10: had no idea what her experience was.
Speaker 2: And then what what did you do next?
Speaker 10: I have to admit I read it and I filed
Speaker 10: it away as something we needed to follow up, and
Speaker 10: then we get so busy I forgot about it. And
Speaker 10: he actually emailed me again and asked me if I
Speaker 10: was interested and if not, should he take it elsewhere?
Speaker 10: And I think that was a good tactic from him,
Speaker 10: because I was like, oh, no, we're interested. And at
Speaker 10: the time I was going on some extended leave, so
Speaker 10: I passed it on to you, like, oh, yeah, this
Speaker 10: could be interesting, I'll pick it up. You were very
Speaker 10: casual about it.
Speaker 2: I reached out to Charlie to find out more. Charlie's
Speaker 2: been coming to Australia for work trips since the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: He's made strong friendships on these visits, and it was
Speaker 2: on one of these trips in twenty thirteen, when his
Speaker 2: Ozzie friend David Gorman told him about Safe World and
Speaker 2: Alan Metcalf.
Speaker 11: David and his friends already had bod shares and they
Speaker 11: talked me into buying some as well. So I had
Speaker 11: a look at it and it looked really interesting. That
Speaker 11: looked like something futuristic. So I thought it was a
Speaker 11: good investment, and so, you know, we put a whole
Speaker 11: big part of our savings into it.
Speaker 2: Charlie wasn't so wealthy that this was spare money he
Speaker 2: just had floating around.
Speaker 11: No, that was life savings. We had just finalized everything
Speaker 11: concerning the mortgage of our house and this was our
Speaker 11: life saving that we were going to keep for a
Speaker 11: direction retirement.
Speaker 2: Still, it seemed like an offer too good to pass up.
Speaker 11: They seemed like a really good investment, especially knowing that
Speaker 11: they were intending to take it to the stock exchange.
Speaker 11: So I thought it was a chance of a life.
Speaker 2: David Gorman, the man who encouraged Charlie to invest, put
Speaker 2: in twenty thousand dollars himself. I meet him at his
Speaker 2: home in Sydney's North where he lives with his wife,
Speaker 2: kids and two pugs.
Speaker 4: So I bought some shares at five cents, some at
Speaker 4: ten cents, and some at a dollar, and he was
Speaker 4: talking about selling them at would have been about one
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty dollars a share, So that would have
Speaker 4: been yeah, quite a few men for myself.
Speaker 2: He still remembers meeting Alan Metcalf, who seemed to have
Speaker 2: an almost larger than life presence and a silver tongue.
Speaker 4: I first met him at the Manly Pacific Hotel, it
Speaker 4: was called then down at Manly. He always dressed pretty well, actually,
Speaker 4: he always wore a suit and tie. He was medium height,
Speaker 4: I think Biggish man, quite large. I think he's probably
Speaker 4: had a few health issues. He was always out of breath,
Speaker 4: but very approachable, flake very gifted.
Speaker 12: The gap.
Speaker 4: I think the way he was describing what safe worlds
Speaker 4: can do, and this universal logic that he found in
Speaker 4: the Bible, you know, if it came off, it came off,
Speaker 4: but it sounded, I mean, it sounded, you know, intriguing.
Speaker 2: David works in the health industry and he's actually never
Speaker 2: invested in anything before. He's not the kind of person
Speaker 2: to rush into big financial decisions, but there was something
Speaker 2: different about this opportunity.
Speaker 4: Never was a risk taker. I'm not a risk taker,
Speaker 4: same as my father. Very conservative. But my friend Michael Blake,
Speaker 4: you know, the ex football he'd probably know him or
Speaker 4: heard of him, got me into this about two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight.
Speaker 7: Oh beautiful part.
Speaker 8: Why am I cave sending this troopers like screaming.
Speaker 4: Over the twenty two?
Speaker 12: He's beat right, big work bag.
Speaker 5: I couldn't comes at him. He's back and found his brother.
Speaker 3: That's Blake back the back Michael Blake.
Speaker 8: Oh god, it's.
Speaker 7: Tapa, his younger brother.
Speaker 8: I have done so well up on my cave, Pap.
Speaker 12: That is champlaining football.
Speaker 2: I speak to Michael Blake at his apartment in the
Speaker 2: Northern Beaches of Sydney. A Holy Bible sits on the
Speaker 2: table between us. Michael played professional football throughout the seventies
Speaker 2: and eighties along with his brother Phil. He's not the
Speaker 2: most technologically savvy guy.
Speaker 7: I might also just.
Speaker 2: Get you to chuck your phone on, are you yeah?
Speaker 2: Would you be able to put on the aeroplane mode?
Speaker 12: Or too much?
Speaker 2: Just because apparently when Michael was there at the funeral,
Speaker 2: he was actually one of the eight people that carried
Speaker 2: Alan's coffin to the grave.
Speaker 6: I was a little bit disappointed in the funeral because
Speaker 6: the people that talk are basically all talking about Safe
Speaker 6: World and that business that he worked on. But he
Speaker 6: was more than that. You know, that was only a
Speaker 6: part of his life at that time. But as I said,
Speaker 6: he was a bit of Alaric and he was a
Speaker 6: good blake.
Speaker 12: He loved his sport. He's foot him and what have you,
Speaker 12: and that.
Speaker 2: In fact, it was sport that drew Alan and Michael together.
Speaker 6: I was heavily involved in rugby league. I cracked first
Speaker 6: grade the first time. I meant Allan was down at
Speaker 6: Darling Harbor because one time that I invested, he was
Speaker 6: over in Irvine, California at the time, and he even
Speaker 6: I think he phoned me up and he wanted to
Speaker 6: know it was Michael from Michael and Phil Blake from Manley,
Speaker 6: and he said yes. It was.
Speaker 2: After that first meeting, they stayed in touch.
Speaker 12: Over many years. I became friends with Alan.
Speaker 2: Yes, So would you consider him a close friend or
Speaker 2: what kind of level of friendship would you say there
Speaker 2: was there?
Speaker 6: Well, we've probably ended up as class friends. So I
Speaker 6: spent a lot of time with him over the years,
Speaker 6: and he had a good sense of humor. You know,
Speaker 6: he could be a little bit cheeky, and you know
Speaker 6: he was pretty good company.
Speaker 2: Michael had made decent money in his sporting career, and
Speaker 2: outside of putting some into his family business, he hadn't
Speaker 2: really invested before.
Speaker 6: I didn't really know what he was talking about, but
Speaker 6: I knew I wanted to get in. He said it
Speaker 6: was going to be bigger than Google, and that was
Speaker 6: pretty big, so I thought I wouldn't mind a bit
Speaker 6: of action with this. So my national investment was only
Speaker 6: around five thousand dollars. But over the years, many years,
Speaker 6: over a decade, we reinvested, reinvested, got the opportunity to
Speaker 6: reinvest it, and because the program seemed to be building,
Speaker 6: gathering momentum, nearly ready to take off, we kept on
Speaker 6: putting more money in me and my family because we
Speaker 6: wanted to help everyone that we knew, all our kids,
Speaker 6: all our aunties and everyone like that.
Speaker 12: And we just thought, you know, how is this and.
Speaker 2: How much was it in total? Because I think who
Speaker 2: said five thousand at the beginning? What was the total
Speaker 2: final number? Like currently as it stands.
Speaker 6: Well, as we gradually build up. Even at one stage
Speaker 6: there me and my two brothers. We got our souper
Speaker 6: and made it a self managed fund and put that in.
Speaker 6: So all up, over many years we probably put around
Speaker 6: three hundred thousand in.
Speaker 12: That's the family.
Speaker 6: With Dad and my brothers, I actually probably raised over
Speaker 6: a million dollars. The way people would get involved through
Speaker 6: me is if I'm going to a football reunion or
Speaker 6: catching up with people's school unions. You know, they's say, Blakie,
Speaker 6: what are he up to? And I speak to him
Speaker 6: about what I'm up to, and I'd mention Safe World,
Speaker 6: how's supposed to be bigger than Google? It could be
Speaker 6: worth having a look at and leave it at that,
Speaker 6: And then they'd get back in contact with me, and
Speaker 6: I said, well, don't speak to me, I know nothing
Speaker 6: about it. Speak to Alan. And they'd speak to Alan,
Speaker 6: get in contact with him, and they'd invest. You know,
Speaker 6: they'd invest like five or ten grand or twenty grand.
Speaker 6: One guy put in one hundred grand. But I suppose
Speaker 6: they put it their money in because they trusted me.
Speaker 6: But I always got them to speak to Alan.
Speaker 2: Years later, a lot of his friends are not so
Speaker 2: happy about this.
Speaker 6: When they find out how much that I've lost in it.
Speaker 6: It makes them feel better.
Speaker 2: Listening to Michael, I start to realize how much of
Speaker 2: this comes down to belief. Michael believed in Alan, and
Speaker 2: he believed in Alan's vision, and in turn, his friends
Speaker 2: believed him.
Speaker 12: I've kind of.
Speaker 6: A bit taken aback because a lot of people invested
Speaker 6: in even though it was five or ten or twenty
Speaker 6: grand or whatever. People invested because they trusted me, and
Speaker 6: I feel as it was a little bit used.
Speaker 2: Probably while Michael Blake trusted Alan blindly, not everyone did.
Speaker 2: Seen one, two three?
Speaker 5: How much is that doggie in the window room with
Speaker 5: a waggedy tail? Nice? My name is David Richardson. I'm
Speaker 5: a senior producer with Under Investigation with Lis Hayes, and
Speaker 5: I operate from Channel nine's Sydney office in North Sydney.
Speaker 2: David Richardson is an investigative journalist who's been in the
Speaker 2: industry for more than thirty years. He's also Michael Blake's
Speaker 2: best mate, and when his friends started to talk about
Speaker 2: safe worlds, alarm bells rang For David.
Speaker 5: My spider senses were tingling something bad. Alan had impressed
Speaker 5: him with this concept of safe worlds, and Michael and
Speaker 5: another one of our friends were interested in having a
Speaker 5: deeper look at what Alan was trying to sell, and
Speaker 5: they set up a meeting in town, and Michael asked
Speaker 5: if I would come in and just act a third eye,
Speaker 5: you know, just cast an ear over what was being
Speaker 5: proposed and whether there was any danger involved, obviously with
Speaker 5: my experience chasing down scammers and bad guys. So there
Speaker 5: was a meeting in town and we all sort of
Speaker 5: went in and met with Alan, who had rented an
Speaker 5: office in the city, and my first impression of him
Speaker 5: was that he was a hand grenade waiting to go off,
Speaker 5: and he just didn't look healthy. He was massively overweight,
Speaker 5: he was ruddy complexion, you know, he just didn't look
Speaker 5: terribly healthy. But he could talk. He could really, really talk.
Speaker 5: He was amazing. So he sat down and he started
Speaker 5: to explain this Safe World's concept, which to me initially
Speaker 5: seemed to be this combination of almost an alternate internet
Speaker 5: marketing bizarre similar to Amazon or ali Baba or eBay,
Speaker 5: but at the same time it had an e commerce perspective.
Speaker 5: But then the big selling point that he was trying
Speaker 5: to get across to us outside of that was the
Speaker 5: creation of universal logic, and he said he had discovered
Speaker 5: universal logic and the key to being able to allow
Speaker 5: all computers to talk together. So for people who don't understand,
Speaker 5: I'll try to put it as simply as I can,
Speaker 5: because I had to go and get people to explain
Speaker 5: it to me. Is that individual companies have their own
Speaker 5: proprietary rights. So you've got Apple or DRL or HP
Speaker 5: or them and all of their programmers right for them.
Speaker 5: So that's why Microsoft often doesn't sink with Apple, and
Speaker 5: Apple programs won't sync with Microsoft programs. The whole concept
Speaker 5: of universal logic was that regardless of who the programmer
Speaker 5: was or who the manufacturer was, the computers worldwide would
Speaker 5: be able to talk to each other seamlessly, and that
Speaker 5: was going to be the language of safe Woods effectively.
Speaker 2: David was skeptical, especially when he learned that this key
Speaker 2: revelation that underpinned the whole scheme Allan was selling had
Speaker 2: been made while reading the Bible.
Speaker 5: And being an ancient history nut. I said to him instantly,
Speaker 5: or was that the ara mat Hebrew, Greek, Latin or English?
Speaker 5: And he said English? And I just laughed. I said, Oh,
Speaker 5: you've got to be joking, you know. If he had
Speaker 5: said it was in the Aramaic. I might have sort
Speaker 5: of believed part of it on the grounds that people
Speaker 5: and you know, theologians and historians have been finding code
Speaker 5: in the Original Bible for years, or what they deemed
Speaker 5: to be code. But what he was talking about was
Speaker 5: just tosh. You know, there were some scholars who believe
Speaker 5: now that parts of the English Bible had code that
Speaker 5: had been implanted by Elizabeth the first spy master, Francis Bacon. So,
Speaker 5: you know, for him to suggest that, after so many
Speaker 5: rewrites and translations, that somehow, miraculously this language or code
Speaker 5: or something had somehow materialized in the Bible, and only
Speaker 5: he had been able to find it, after the Bible
Speaker 5: has been poured over by you know, thousands and thousands
Speaker 5: of scholars and theologians. It was just too much for me,
Speaker 5: and I just couldn't. I couldn't swallow it. And I
Speaker 5: remember walking out of the meeting and the three of
Speaker 5: us went up to the Tattlesules Club to have a
Speaker 5: beer before we went home, and they said, what do
Speaker 5: you think? And I said, yeah, don't go near it now.
Speaker 5: I just don't buy it. To me, it just you know,
Speaker 5: I thought it was just rubbish, complete rubbish.
Speaker 2: And there were other things that David found unbelievable too.
Speaker 5: I went down to look at an office space that
Speaker 5: they were talking about buying, and it was the Manly
Speaker 5: Rugby Union building, you know, Manly over the road from
Speaker 5: the Manly Oval. I thought, my god, I mean this
Speaker 5: story building, it costs an absolute bomb. How are you
Speaker 5: going to pay for all of this? You know, they
Speaker 5: were wandering around as if you know, oh yeah, we'll
Speaker 5: put this here and this there and that there. And
Speaker 5: I thought, my god, how are you going to pay
Speaker 5: for all of this? And that was the problem, How
Speaker 5: were they going to pay for any of it?
Speaker 2: Alan did not successfully buy the building. The sale went
Speaker 2: to a tender process in twenty ten, and a well
Speaker 2: known property developer called John Nicholas snapped it up for
Speaker 2: presumably millions. He wouldn't say. David also tells me there
Speaker 2: was something else that made him doubt the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Why was Alan so interested in his friends?
Speaker 5: They were not looking for big companies, And I thought,
Speaker 5: what's going on? You know, they were looking for the
Speaker 5: low hanging fruit. What it means is that you've come
Speaker 5: to the table looking at small Mum and Dad investors
Speaker 5: without having convinced someone with real nuse to put their
Speaker 5: money on the table to start with. So he didn't
Speaker 5: have a big computer company behind him, he didn't have
Speaker 5: big computer programmers behind him. He had rented a lab
Speaker 5: slash office complex in Silicon Valley that he talked about,
Speaker 5: but I mean, I think the thing was for me
Speaker 5: was that there was no big investor. I was just
Speaker 5: really worried that, you know, I was going to have
Speaker 5: friends who were going to lose their dough, but not
Speaker 5: just that that they were being asked to go out
Speaker 5: and use their contacts to try to get more investors.
Speaker 5: And I thought, you know, I really feared that that
Speaker 5: would then leave them exposed potentially if the whole thing backfired,
Speaker 5: because they would be left holding the baby. And part
Speaker 5: of the deal was that Alan would convince them that
Speaker 5: I know, you know, you can become a major sales
Speaker 5: operator here. And then this started to look like a
Speaker 5: pyramid scheme. I wasn't interested in investing in any way,
Speaker 5: shape or form. And you know, my advice to all
Speaker 5: my into that particular point of time was that look,
Speaker 5: just wait, at the very least wait before you start
Speaker 5: pouring your money in because I just didn't see that
Speaker 5: this was going to go anywhere.
Speaker 2: And how did you feel when they kind of disregarded
Speaker 2: your advice and went ahead and invested anyway.
Speaker 5: Oh, I just thought it was silly, you know. I
Speaker 5: thought it was silly, you know, But that's it. I mean,
Speaker 5: these were my friends.
Speaker 2: David's friend Michael Blake didn't just invest in Safe Worlds.
Speaker 2: As well as spreading the word in his network, he
Speaker 2: started working for the company himself.
Speaker 6: I ended up on advisory board. But I think that
Speaker 6: was mainly because Allen liked me, and because of my
Speaker 6: contacts and the contacts that my contacts had. But the
Speaker 6: thing about the advisory board, we weren't.
Speaker 12: Listened to, you know.
Speaker 6: But if it had it came off and it was
Speaker 6: big like it was, it would have been ridiculous because
Speaker 6: I know nothing about it.
Speaker 12: I got no interest in it.
Speaker 6: I don't like using computer if everybody don't use the
Speaker 6: internet unless I have to do, and that it would have
Speaker 6: been we'd being involved in something this big, you know.
Speaker 2: David watched his friends like Michael getting more and more
Speaker 2: involved with Alan and investing more and more of their money.
Speaker 2: He decided to do something, so he started digging, but
Speaker 2: couldn't find any real signs of Safe Worlds being anything
Speaker 2: like the potential global technology superstar was being preached.
Speaker 5: Us and the whole time too. In the background. After
Speaker 5: about eighteen months was us pushing like, Okay, when are
Speaker 5: we going to see this? When are we going to
Speaker 5: see it? You know, show me universal logic, Show it
Speaker 5: to me, Show me how show it to me. You know,
Speaker 5: is it like cryptocurrency that it's just this dollar signs
Speaker 5: in fresh air or is it real? I mean, show
Speaker 5: me how this works, and show me the program, show
Speaker 5: me the Safe world site in Australia, show me all
Speaker 5: this stuff. And it was just so long in coming
Speaker 5: that I thought, where's all this money? Because I knew
Speaker 5: that there were people who were investing not just tens
Speaker 5: of thousands, but hundreds of thousands. I knew people who
Speaker 5: were investing their superannuation money. It just gobsmacked me that
Speaker 5: people were willing to invest. But you know, because of
Speaker 5: the IT boom and because of the success of companies
Speaker 5: like Amazon eBay, everyone was looking for that next big
Speaker 5: thing and they thought, well, if we can get in
Speaker 5: on the ground floor, fabulous.
Speaker 6: He always used to say, trust me, trust me, and
Speaker 6: I trusted him, but he didn't trust anyone else.
Speaker 2: Michael Blake, the former footy player who became close friends
Speaker 2: with Alan, started worrying he might have a problem.
Speaker 6: We had some pretty big guys that were willing to help,
Speaker 6: and he wouldn't let go. He wouldn't trust them, basically
Speaker 6: because he thought it was too big.
Speaker 2: One time, Alan even had a meeting with an IT
Speaker 2: expert who had extensive contacts in the military.
Speaker 6: And said he was the smartest IT person he's ever met.
Speaker 6: And he goes, Alan, you might have real artificial intelligence.
Speaker 6: I'll sign an NDA shame if you got it, we'll
Speaker 6: get it going, mate, and he refused to do it.
Speaker 12: He did, so I can't trust him. I can't trust him.
Speaker 2: Do you think that was because he didn't trust him
Speaker 2: all because he didn't actually have the product to show?
Speaker 12: Well, it didn't make sense to me, but maybe he
Speaker 12: didn't have anything to shape.
Speaker 2: As I started to dig, I found more and more
Speaker 2: people who had invested their money. One person put in
Speaker 2: one point five million dollars. Entire families staked their fortune
Speaker 2: on the venture. Michael Blake wasn't even the biggest recruiter
Speaker 2: for Safe Worlds. Another man raised fifteen million dollars from
Speaker 2: four hundred and fifty other people. Some of them wouldn't
Speaker 2: speak to me because they were afraid it would impact
Speaker 2: their chances of getting their money back. In total, Alan
Speaker 2: managed to raise forty nine million dollars from his friends,
Speaker 2: their families, and other small time investors. And perhaps that's
Speaker 2: the craziest part of this whole thing. That's a lot
Speaker 2: of money. To put in context. Forty nine million dollars
Speaker 2: is about one hundred ferraris forty yachts. It's more than
Speaker 2: twice the amount that infamous Sydney conwoman Melissa Caatics scammed
Speaker 2: out of people, which was twenty three million. Forty nine
Speaker 2: million could buy you forty nine houses in Sydney, well,
Speaker 2: maybe more like Melbourne these days. If you looked at
Speaker 2: Alan's website, you'd never guess that this was the business
Speaker 2: he'd founded with that much money. Www dot safeworlds dot tv.
Speaker 2: When I try to access it now I get an
Speaker 2: Era four or four not found. But looking back at
Speaker 2: old videos and screenshots of the website, I can see
Speaker 2: an amateurish layout like something straight out of the nineties,
Speaker 2: not a slick, multimillion dollar outfit, and By the time
Speaker 2: Allan died, there was no one left working at the place.
Speaker 2: Michael Blake tells me about how he heard that his
Speaker 2: friend had died.
Speaker 6: I remember because I was at a care of beach
Speaker 6: for a function for a weekend and that with a
Speaker 6: few mates, and I was just walking along the beach
Speaker 6: with a bit of a hangover when I got a
Speaker 6: phone call from Mary saying I've got some bad news
Speaker 6: for it. And I kind of knew before it's even
Speaker 6: told me. He said, Alan's passed away. We're all in shop.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: Alan's death was a personal tragedy, but Michael realized there
Speaker 2: was also something else left unresolved with his passing. Alan
Speaker 2: had no heir to take over the business. No one
Speaker 2: knew what was supposed to happen now that he was dead.
Speaker 6: As far as I understand, he had the algorithm in
Speaker 6: a safety secure box or something in the Cayman Islands,
Speaker 6: and that was the protection of the algorithm, and he
Speaker 6: gifted it to charity if something happened to him and
Speaker 6: Mary or whatever.
Speaker 12: He was very protective of it.
Speaker 6: He always said if it got in the wrong hand
Speaker 6: and it could destroy the world.
Speaker 2: So Alan had been thinking about the future. But according
Speaker 2: to Michael, he had planned so little for his death
Speaker 2: that his wife and son were unable to front the
Speaker 2: costs for his funeral.
Speaker 6: Just for paying some bills, internet bills, phone bills, the
Speaker 6: registration of the liquid gold in the Cayman Islands or
Speaker 6: wherever it was, and just a few things and that,
Speaker 6: and you know, I probably lent him I don't know,
Speaker 6: thirty or forty thousand dollars or.
Speaker 9: Something like that.
Speaker 2: Well, and did they ever pay it back? Were you
Speaker 2: just kind of never asked for it? Or how did
Speaker 2: that work?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 6: Mary said that she'll pay me back tenfold when the
Speaker 6: Irish steel comes off.
Speaker 2: The Irish deal was supposedly where an irishman was going
Speaker 2: to buy the whole business for more than a billion dollars.
Speaker 2: And as for the liquid gold, Michael mentioned it was
Speaker 2: linked to a digital currency business Alan had opened in
Speaker 2: the Cayman Islands. I'll explain more in a later episode,
Speaker 2: I promise. At this point, I'm going to pause for
Speaker 2: a moment because, dear listener, I have a confession. If
Speaker 2: you're thinking that Alan might not have been entirely upfront
Speaker 2: with his investors, well I have to confess that I
Speaker 2: haven't been entirely upfront with you. I said I'd started
Speaker 2: this podcast at the end with Allan's funeral, but actually
Speaker 2: this is just the beginning. Mike crusade to find the
Speaker 2: missing money has taken me all over the country, to
Speaker 2: most of the capital cities and also a tiny town
Speaker 2: in Western Australia which could be the key to it all.
Speaker 2: The search for the millions has also led me to
Speaker 2: notorious tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, and had
Speaker 2: me trying to track down an Irish billionaire. At times,
Speaker 2: I've been looking over my shoulder for Russian cronies. My
Speaker 2: investigation will take me from Australia's richest woman to this
Speaker 2: nation's most controversial politician, all the way to Tea Party
Speaker 2: and ex US President Donald Trump. It might have begun
Speaker 2: at Alan's funeral, but his story is far from over.
Speaker 5: How could you do it?
Speaker 4: He was basically version point five of Trump As a question.
Speaker 7: I just said, Alan, this is just crazy.
Speaker 9: I can't do this.
Speaker 1: You claim that he was the savior of the or
Speaker 1: could be the savior of the world if it all
Speaker 1: turned out right for him, you know, and for us.
Speaker 5: There's a hidden partner there's somebody else involved in this
Speaker 5: potentially is the other person's spider at the center of
Speaker 5: the web. The only other alternative is that he's not
Speaker 5: dead and that he's in fact living off the money.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. A new episode is coming out weekly
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Speaker 2: you don't miss an episode. Head to news dot com
Speaker 2: dot Au to read more of my reporting on this story.
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Speaker 2: or contact me directly on our Alex dot Turner, Dashcohen
Speaker 2: at news dot com Doreau, or look me up on
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Speaker 2: Nina Young is the executive producer, sound design and editing
Speaker 2: by Tiffany Dimack. Our editorial director is Dan Box. Grant
Speaker 2: McAvaney is our legal advisor, and Kerry Warren is the
Speaker 2: editor of news dot com Doreay you