Unleashed 101

The $461 Million That Wasn't There: Dozy Mmobuosi and the Tingo Fraud Tingo Group's 2022 annual report, filed with the SEC in March 2023, said its Nigerian subsidiary Tingo Mobile held $461.7 million in cash. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the authentic bank records for those accounts showed a combined balance of less than fifty dollars. In this episode of Unleashed 101, Jeremy Hanson tells the story of Dozy Mmobuosi and the Tingo companies, an agri-fintech empire that claimed to put smartphones and a digital marketplace in the hands of more than nine million Nigerian farmers. The SEC says almost none of it was real. The episode follows a board chairman who asked to see a single Tingo phone and never got one, four sets of contradictory audited financial statements, a bank statement doctored with pasted-on zeroes, and the reverse mergers that carried a company with about fifteen dollars in its account onto the OTC market and then onto Nasdaq at valuations above a billion dollars. It continues through the fake supplier payments, the impersonated customers who answered auditors' emails from look-alike domains, Tingo Foods and its claimed $400 million in first-four-month revenue against a bank account that made three transactions, and the failed bid for Sheffield United. Then come the Hindenburg Research report of June 6, 2023, the internal investigation that sent the stock soaring, the SEC trading suspension, the December 2023 complaint declaring that Tingo Mobile is a fiction, a federal indictment with the defendant at large, and a default judgment of more than $250 million. When enough documents agree with each other, people stop asking whether they point at anything real. This is a story about who gets to decide which questions are allowed.

For close to two decades, more than four hundred investors were told the same thing about a strange tour boat in Honolulu: it was almost ready. In 2009 the offering documents said Semisub One was ninety percent complete. In 2018 investors heard it was finished. In 2019 they heard it was at the finish line and needed one more push of one to two thousand dollars each. Behind those updates, the U.S. Coast Guard had inspected the vessel thirty-eight times and handed the company a work list of forty deficiencies. In this episode of Unleashed 101, Jeremy Hanson tells the full story of Semisub Inc., the Hawaii company run by Curtiss Edward Jackson and Jamey Denise Jackson that federal prosecutors say raised more than twenty-eight million dollars on the promise of a semi-submersible vessel and a fleet of copies to be sold for thirty-two million dollars each. The episode walks through the state securities orders in Pennsylvania and California, the claimed partnerships with the Department of Homeland Security and BlackRock that the SEC says never existed, the share price that went from a promised dollar fifty to five cents, and the investor money the SEC says went to rent, a Mercedes, groceries, psychics and recreational drugs. Then the story leaves the boardroom. A video titled Death of FBI Informants. A fully fueled boat slipping out of Kewalo Basin the day before a bond hearing. An arrest at sea off Barbers Point. A 2024 conviction, a thirteen-year federal sentence, and more than sixteen point seven million dollars in restitution ordered against his former wife and co-defendant. Semisub One was real. It floated, it passed inspection, and it carried tourists. That is what makes this case one of the clearest lessons in the series: a real product does not make the promises around it true.

When the German government needed a hundred and twenty-five million dollars in 1929, it did not go to a country. It went to a Swedish engineer who controlled roughly three quarters of the world's match production and had already lent money to France, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Peru, and more than two dozen other governments. Newspapers called Ivar Kreuger the savior of Europe. His companies paid dividends above twenty percent for fifteen straight years, through a decade when almost nothing else did. On March 12, 1932, hours before a meeting with bankers and auditors, he was found dead in a Paris apartment. Three months later the accountants finished. The profits had been invented. The dividends had been paid out of money new investors were handing over that same week. And among the assets in his vaults sat forty-two Italian government treasury bills worth roughly a hundred and forty million dollars that Kreuger had forged himself, alone, at a desk, with the officials' names misspelled. This is the season finale, and the hardest case in it, because Swedish Match was real. The factories were real. The monopoly concessions signed by finance ministries were real. Every check anyone ran came back true. A fraud built on nothing dies the first time somebody looks. A fraud built inside a genuinely excellent business can run for fifteen years and take the savings of two continents with it. In this episode: the engineering degrees finished in three years, and the New York construction years where he learned how American capital actually worked. The completion-date penalty clause that made Kreuger and Toll the most respected builder in Sweden. Why the match was the perfect product and why only a government could protect it. The trade at the center of everything: dollars for a monopoly, American savings for European reconstruction. Lee Higginson and Company, the Boston house that put its seventy-year name on securities it never audited. Four hundred subsidiaries and accounts prepared by one man. The dual-class share structure he invented that still governs half of Silicon Valley. The forged Italian bonds nobody examined for two years. And the rules that came out of the wreckage: the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, consolidated statements, and independent audits. Unleashed 101 is a Fuzzy Life Entertainment production. Note: this episode discusses a death recorded as a suicide. QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS Who was Ivar Kreuger? A Swedish engineer and financier born in Kalmar in 1880 who built Swedish Match into a global monopoly controlling roughly two thirds to three quarters of world match production, and who lent money to more than thirty governments in exchange for exclusive match concessions. What was Kreuger's core business model? He raised capital from American investors in dollars and lent it to cash-starved European governments after the First World War, taking long-term national match monopolies in return. The trade itself was legitimate and genuinely valuable. How large were his government loans? He lent France roughly seventy-five million dollars during the stabilization of the franc in 1927 and Germany a hundred and twenty-five million in 1929, which was among the largest private loans ever made to a sovereign state at that time. Where did his dividends come from? Not from earnings. A commodity sold for pennies cannot produce twenty-five percent returns. Dividends were paid out of capital raised from new share issues, and each published dividend made the next issue easier to sell.

There is a scene that repeats in New York police accounts around the turn of the last century. A patrolman finds a man on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway with lumber and tools, building a toll booth. The man is polite. He has papers, and the papers are beautiful: engraved letterhead, a corporate seal, a deed of conveyance. He has paid for this, sometimes with everything he brought from the old country, and when he is told the City of New York owns the bridge, he argues. The name on that deed, more often than any other, was George C. Parker. This is where the phrase comes from. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. The premise was not absurd. The Brooklyn Bridge was built by the New York Bridge Company, a private corporation chartered in 1867, and it charged a toll on every crossing until 1911. In the countries Parker's victims came from, toll roads and licensed concessions were ordinary commerce. He did not invent a possibility. He located one already sitting in the mark's head and put a price on it. In this episode: the Roeblings and what the bridge meant to a city that could see it from every arriving ship. Fifteen million people through the port between 1890 and 1915, many carrying the proceeds of a sold farm and looking for a business to buy. The rented offices with a nameplate on the door, and why a professional address is the only thing most instincts actually check. The forged deeds, the walking tour of the structure, and the payment plan taken out of future toll revenue. Grant's Tomb, sold by a man claiming to be Ulysses S. Grant's grandson. The Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum, Madison Square Garden. Why almost none of his victims went to the police. The sheriff's hat and coat he is said to have walked out of a courthouse wearing. And the 1928 conviction under New York's Baumes Law that turned a lifetime of small frauds into a life sentence at Sing Sing. Then the second half, which is the reason this episode exists. Most of what everyone knows about George C. Parker is poorly sourced. The claim that he sold the bridge twice a week for thirty years has no traceable origin. A man named William McCloundy was convicted for selling the Brooklyn Bridge in 1901, which is a firmer record than anything attached to Parker, and the Gondorf brothers worked the same ground in the same years. The con was a category, not a signature, and it collapsed into one name because repetition was the only credential the story ever needed. That is the same failure this show keeps documenting, running in the retelling instead of the crime. Unleashed 101 is a Fuzzy Life Entertainment production.

In December of 1902 a Cleveland lawyer waited in a carriage outside Andrew Carnegie's mansion on Fifth Avenue while a woman went inside. She came out half an hour later holding papers, dropped one, and let him pick it up. It was a promissory note for hundreds of thousands of dollars, signed with Carnegie's name. She asked him to forget he had seen it, and then told him why. She was Carnegie's illegitimate daughter, provided for privately, and nobody could know. The lawyer gave his word and broke it within a week, which is exactly what she had brought him to New York to do. She had never met Andrew Carnegie. She had written the note herself. Over the next two years Ohio banks lent her millions of dollars against it, and not one lender ever wrote to Carnegie to ask. This episode follows Elizabeth Bigley from a railway worker's house in Eastwood, Ontario, through a forgery arrest at twenty-two, an eleven-day marriage that ended when the creditors arrived, a fortune-telling practice in Toledo under the name Madame Lydia DeVere, and a nine and a half year sentence in the Ohio Penitentiary, to a mansion on Cleveland's Millionaires' Row as the wife of a respected physician. In this episode: why she never had to make a claim to a single banker. The sealed envelope she left with a Cleveland bank officer who wrote her a receipt for five million dollars in securities without ever opening it, and how that turned an unverifiable story into verifiable collateral. Why the secrecy was not protection but a delivery system. Why no banker in Ohio was willing to write the one letter that would have ended it, and what that says about verification steps that are socially prohibited rather than merely inconvenient. Herbert Newton, the Boston lender with no reputation to protect, and the lawsuit that broke it open in November 1904. The collapse of Citizens' National Bank of Oberlin and the farmers and widows who lost deposits they never knew had been lent. Andrew Carnegie sitting in a Cleveland courtroom to look at the forgeries. And a death in the Ohio Penitentiary on October 10, 1907, her fiftieth birthday. Unleashed 101 is a Fuzzy Life Entertainment production. Cassie Chadwick, Elizabeth Bigley, Madame Lydia DeVere, Carnegie inheritance con, Andrew Carnegie illegitimate daughter, Unleashed 101, Jeremy Hanson, Cleveland history, Euclid Avenue Millionaires Row, Citizens National Bank Oberlin, Charles Beckwith, Herbert Newton Boston banker, Iri Reynolds, Wade Park Banking Company, James Dillon lawyer, Leroy Chadwick, Ohio Penitentiary, Hotel Breslin arrest, forgery, promissory note fraud, bank fraud history, Gilded Age fraud, female con artist, greatest cons in history, historic scams, white collar crime podcast, true crime finance podcast, American Greed style podcast, con artist history, 1900s America, affinity fraud, why banks lend against rumor, secrecy and fraud, verification failure, narrative nonfiction podcast, storytelling podcast, Fuzzy Life Entertainment, Fuzzy Life Studios