Ponzi scheme turns bestselling author's dream life into a nightmare

"(Jacquelyn) Mitchard, a widower,"

Ummmmmmmmm, Fred, do you know what a widower is?

she got greedy and got stung.
Cook should get 3 yrs,not 25.
A child molester recently got 8 yrs.

Greed,

Though Ms. Mitchard may sound a bit greedy to have moved her savings to this guy, there are probably many innocent savers that he has fleeced of their life savings too. I say his fellow inmates should rough him, stuff him and snuff him.

How do you single one person out, who was a victim of a ponzi scheme, to do a story about? A lot of people fit this description, why is this one more special?

Why is it, when money is involved the punishment goes into umpteen years? People are emotionally and psychologically destroyed by perverts who are given a slap on the hand and a few years to think about it. While someone who is greedy and finds a way to build a fortune on selling fake investments to greedy investors gets put away for a lifetime? He should have been giving them gadgets as payback or maybe soap products or even some gift checks. Then maybe he would have been judged as just selling a dream.
He just wasn't slick enough to figure that out.

I wonder if other states have had as many con artists as MN. I've always found it amazing how Minnesotans are so conservative and sceptical on one hand yet totally gullible to the get rich schemes on the other. Weird.

like I said wrote:

I wonder if other states have had as many con artists as MN. I've always found it amazing how Minnesotans are so conservative and sceptical on one hand yet totally gullible to the get rich schemes on the other. Weird.

Didn't Minnesotans vote themselves a sales tax increase?

That's beyond gullible and enters the realm of staggering stupidity.

Hey Melo, what public school did you attend? "Widow" is feminine, "widower" is masculine. Sheesh! Don't you have copy editors at the Pioneer Depressed?

Jamal wrote:

Hey Melo, what public school did you attend? "Widow" is feminine, "widower" is masculine. Sheesh! Don't you have copy editors at the Pioneer Depressed?

I agree. One would think that with so many unemployed English Majors out there waiting on tables and taking orders that the PP could find a couple copy editors that have a handle on the eight parts of speech?

Her first mistake was appearing on Oprah and it goes from there. There are a lot of abandoned children and babies to adopt in Minnesota. When folks go trendy and you are not a trust fund baby or a movie star, things start to crumble. Just saying.

One of the most basic rules of investing is never put everything in one place. The most basic reason a ponzi scheme works is that greedy people believe they have found an investment too good to be true. Common sense would save most people from these con artists but they see the high 'profits' and want to believe they are special enough that they are among the few 'smart' enough to have found such a good investment.

Mitchard earned her money fairly and through hard work. Why is she considered greedy to some readers? She invested unwisely and is a victim of a fraud and theft, whether it be $1 or $1,000,000. The number of years served in prison is based on the number of counts of fraud. Child molestors are a different issue, and in my opinion, do not have strong enough sentences, but that isn't the issue here, is it? Widow or widower? You get the point. This is an Internet article -- nothing is edited on the Web. And who the hell has the right to say that her adoptions were trendy? Come on, people -- your comments are worse than the article itself.

Buttomfly wrote:

Why is it, when money is involved the punishment goes into umpteen years? People are emotionally and psychologically destroyed by perverts who are given a slap on the hand and a few years to think about it. While someone who is greedy and finds a way to build a fortune on selling fake investments to greedy investors gets put away for a lifetime? He should have been giving them gadgets as payback or maybe soap products or even some gift checks. Then maybe he would have been judged as just selling a dream.
He just wasn't slick enough to figure that out.

So...why are you defending this crook? You know that each victom is a crimal act, so he has hundreds of victoms?

Move mountains to recover people's savings. Then, let this vermin rot in Stillwater for the rest of his natural life. . .not one of those country club federal prisons. Put him in the general population.

Here are two old hints about life: "If it sounds too good to be true it is probably not true." "If you can see the toupee from Saturn he is probably a phony." Yet this "smart" woman missed them both. Sounds like an ideal candidate to give advise on TV.

Many wrote:

How do you single one person out, who was a victim of a ponzi scheme, to do a story about? A lot of people fit this description, why is this one more special?

Uhh, perhaps it's because she's a famous novelist? That could be it, but I'm not quite sure.

The story leaves out an important point, how and why did she invest with this crook. She's presumably in Wisonsin and this guy was in Apple Valley.

Many wrote:

How do you single one person out, who was a victim of a ponzi scheme, to do a story about? A lot of people fit this description, why is this one more special?

Because she is a writer, has a publicist and is jockeying for a talk show. She is positioned to make money off her and others misery. If it all works out she'll make more money talking about her loss than what she lost.

Annoyed wrote:

Seriously, where is the story here? Do some investigative work for a change, even if it paints this lady in a bad light. Why did she invest? Simply because her husband caught a radio program about this? Is the underlying religious nature of that radio program what scares you away from reporting the facts? Can't insult these people for following a false prophet, cuz it could be seen as a diss on their brand of Christianity....
How much did she invest (the larger the amount, clearly the dumber she looks). I imagine it was a hefty amount too.

Her husband is dead.

I have been investing for almost 40yrs and find it hard to believe anyone would have invested with these guys if you heard their radio show on KSTP 1500. I heard it on Sunday mornings a couple of times and couldnt understand anything the guy in jail talked about. Pat Kiley, the other one on the show sounded like he had forgotten everything he ever knew about investing. It was just talk that was about mumbo jumbo economics that a chimp could have put together. It's too bad people lost all their moneyy but you had to be a real sucker to have fallen for their spiel. The program was a paid commercial but I was still surprised that KSTP broadcast a show that was so blatently nothing but a buch of crap. I guess the station was desperate for revenue and has no ethics themselves when it comes to what they broadcast.

Read the story Paul...

""Four years earlier, we'd invested with two Minneapolis 'investment specialists' who did currency arbitrage and other, less risky investments.(My husband) had discovered them on a local radio show."

He is dead now, but wasn't when they invested.
That "local radio" show was an out there religious one, previously reported on....