Did you hear the story of Melissa Caddick?
She is the Australian fraudster that conned around $23 million (AUS) out of close friends and family as well as other ‘clients’.
There is a three part drama and a documentary about her story on ITVX which is a fascinating watch.
Caddick wasn’t legally allowed to manage and invest money for other people, yet that is what she promised her clients.
But instead of investing their hard-earned savings, she took their money and spent it on herself.
This included money from her parents, brother, an aunty and uncle, close neighbours, and her best friend.
She got away with it by mocking up false trading statements claiming that everything was going so well, people decided to leave the money in to make more money, with several investing more money with her.
She wasn’t a criminal mastermind, just someone who had enough gall to shamelessly lie to clients and close friends and family.
Whenever someone wanted their money back and any profits they believed they had made, she paid them off with the money she had conned out of new clients.
In November 2020, just as the authorities moved in to investigate, she disappeared, never to be seen again apart from one severed foot that washed ashore onto a beach a few hundred miles down the coast.
It is believed that she committed suicide to escape the situation she now found herself in.
Some people believe that she had cut her own foot off and faked her own death as a way to escape.
Suicide is most likely.
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But the problem is that once someone has been exposed as a liar who has lied and conned people for years including close family and friends, all trust is gone and people will expect them to do something as extreme as faking their own death to avoid being sent to prison.
Melissa Caddick has destroyed the lives of many people because of greed, many of them being close family and friends.
In the drama, one of her victims, the brother of her close friend (who was also conned), had planned to retire at 40 on the profits he believed he was making.
Instead he was left with no savings and the knowledge that he won’t be retiring anytime soon.
What is doubly sad about this is that if she had the confidence and the ‘ball’s to do what she had done, she had more than enough confidence to do something legal and build an incredibly profitable business of her own… that wouldn’t have ended up with a prison sentence or suicide.
Maybe it would have taken longer and it would maybe required a bit more work than lying to people and mocking up false statements – although I would imagine constantly lying to people is a lot of hard work, it’s not something I would want to spend my days doing.
Melissa was simply a greedy person who just wanted to live a champagne lifestyle using other people’s money.
The idea of actually building something of her own probably wasn’t something she was ever going to consider…not while she could simply talk people into giving her their money.
Unless she did fake her own death and is actually alive somewhere and living on money she has manage to hide from the authorities, her con has left her dead and her family with nothing.
It was all pretty pointless in the end.
Instead of the grief of taking money from other people to pay off those who wanted their money back, if she had taken a small amount of money and started a business that generated a passive income, she could have been quite easily living a champagne lifestyle using her own money… without having to deal with ‘clients’ and authorities.
There are many ways today to make a lot of money.
I recently read about a 20-year-old who was now earning around £4,700 per month in passive income from a website dedicated to ‘fishing’ that he set up for less than £400!
I know that £4,700 per month is nothing compared to the sums of money that Melissa Caddick was stealing and playing with, but this is from one just website.
Some of the money made from that one website could then be used to make more of those websites which generate more passive income.
It could be used to pay other people to make those websites rendering the whole business passive other than communicating with and paying those who do the work.
She could have also taken a small amount of money and started an information publishing business.
You can start an information publishing business for free these days, but had you used a minuit fraction of the money Melissa was taking from people, you could have a whole range of eBooks and courses online that could be generating you a HUGE passive income.
There is no reason to be conning people for money these days.
There is more than enough money circling around online that anyone can tap into and cream off a decent profit.
I share a lot of business and money making ideas in our popular newsletter, Streetwise Confidential.
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Kind regards.
John Harrison.
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