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