Griper Blade: An Investment 'Sanctioned by God' -- Brazilian Condoms and Panamanian Booze

Sometimes you come across a story that's just so bizarre and filled with so many absurd details that you have to double check to make sure it's actually true. Plenty of bloggers have been fooled by satire. There's the pro-life blogger who fell for an 'op-ed' in The Onion. The title, I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion, turned out not to be a clue. While we're on the subject of people falling for satire, check out Landover Baptist's hate mail page for all the people who think it's a real church. Sometimes, it's not idiocy that makes us fall for this stuff, but acting on our first reaction and not stopping for a moment to think. It's kind of the moral of this story.

So, just to be on the safe side, I ran this one through a google news search and, yeah, it really happened. We'll start where I found it; a small town paper in Kelowna, British Columbia.

The Daily Courier:

They thought they were hand-in-hand with the Lord, but investments by members of a Kelowna church were tied to corn liquor, condoms, over-the-hill drums of paint and organized crime.

Members of the Christian evangelical New Life Church will get about one-third of their money back from a bogus investment plan that scammed them out of $1.3 million.


Under a deal brokered by the B.C. Securities Commission, two principals in the fraud have agreed to pay $500,000 in restitution to investors, most of them members of the church.

The church had been pulled into a scam by a very shady bunch of hucksters with a list of investments. John DeVries, Ernest Reed Grafke, Ralph Bromley and Wesley Campbell convinced the church to invest in a company called Amber Enterprises. The idea was that they'd make millions in an import/export business called IPIC Investments, supposedly out of California. The list of investments were crazy, but the church went along with it all because they were told the company had been "sanctioned by God."

And that was enough to get New Life Church to invest in an unregistered company with no prospectus and buy a strange list of items for importation. Some of these investments actually existed, but were crap; others were entirely made up. The fact that televangelist/faith healer/notorious scam artist Benny Hinn was in on the deal should've clued them in that this wasn't on the up and up. The whole thing was a Ponzi scheme. The worthless investments were a front...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Tags: news | politics | Benny Hinn | crime | British Columbia | Canada | Texas | California | christian | religious right | morons | bullshit