This blog is based on 4 years of personal and business experiences with David M Greene. I was first introduced to this man on 10/21/2003 at McClave Dental on
It is up to you to make your own informed choices. I am only here to state the facts from my perspective. It is up to the staff at Gold-Quest International to give you hard evidence against my beliefs and experiences. They should provide you with Tri Fund corporate tax returns or at least a copy of their Saxo Bank trading account balance to prove me wrong. Anything short of this would be just another well polished lie.
Background Information:
Web Sites: Gold-QuestInternational.com, G-QI.com, G-QI.biz, G-QI.info, Gold-Quest.info, TFFX.com, and Tri-Fund.com . Only the first two of the above sites are currently available.
Definition of a Ponzi Scheme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme .
“A Ponzi scheme usually offers abnormally high short-term returns in order to entice new investors. The high returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises (and pays) require an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going.
The system is doomed to collapse because there are little or no underlying earnings from the money received by the promoter. However, the scheme is often interrupted by legal authorities before it collapses, because a Ponzi scheme is suspected and/or because the promoter is selling unregistered securities. As more and more investors become involved, the likelihood of the scheme coming to the attention of authorities will continue to increase.
The scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, who became notorious for using the technique after emigrating from
SEC Definition of an Investment Club:
http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/invclub.htm
“An investment club is a group of people who pool their money to make investments. Usually, investment clubs are organized as partnerships and, after the members study different investments, the group decides to buy or sell based on a majority vote of the members. Club meetings may be educational and each member may actively participate in investment decisions.”
Gold-Quest International does appear to be an investment club until you add in the fact that each member has to sign a power of attorney releasing their funds. Each member has no say in investment decisions or club operations. An unregistered club can not exceed 100 members. Each manager does have their own sub club but they use all the resources of the main club. There are about 400 managers in the main club which exceeds the restrictions for what is allowed by an unregistered entity. This club has grown too large and is in violation of the
The government is not something that should be feared unless you are not being honest. If you are a voting citizen of a country, than you elect officials that pass laws to protect the average person against fraudulent behaviors. Most laws in effect today were put there after a scam was uncovered and innocent people were hurt. The government does not go around shutting down honest businesses. Any entity that makes false claims against the government actions (http://gold-questinternational.com/program.html) tend to break the laws themselves.
Secretary of State
“Whether you register or qualify for an exemption, the company is never excused from providing full and fair disclosure to investors. Put yourself in the shoes of an investor. If you were investing your hard-earned savings in a company like yours, what would you want to know?”
Tri-Fund Inc is a registered
It is important to note that their foundation in
Dave uses Wells Fargo bank for all his personal and business transactions that originate from the same account. Delroy Atwood originally setup this account in
Dave reopened another account at Wells Fargo and put John Jenkins as primary. John is a documented Native American and Wells Fargo can not require a social security number or tax id number from him. This is how they keep their bank accounts from reporting activity over $10,000 to the government.
David M Greene Background:
David Greene grew up on a farm in
Dave loves to gamble as you will find him at Redrock Casino or the
Dave is a very religious person in belief but not in practice. He makes an effort to say grace before every meal, even in public places. He memorizes the bible and rattles off quotes to show his beliefs. He comes off as very believable until you get to know him.
He is a very controlling person who is surrounded by people that have shady pasts. People that do not live an honest life, tend to have skeletons in the closet that are used to establish control over them. Being a honest independent contractor strained our relationship from the beginning. I am best described as a boy scout since I have no speeding tickets and I go out of my way to help others. I even worked for the government in the past and I always pay taxes.
Dave is a passive aggressive person who would rather buy a brand new car than fix the air conditioning in an older well running car. He hates confrontation and resolution. The times he was not satisfied with my work he went out of his way to hire another person rather than asking me for modifications. He becomes very angry and threatening towards low esteem individuals and avoids stronger esteem people.
I frequently mentioned to Dave about doing the right thing when running a business. He was more interested in learning about the loop holes in the laws rather than run a legitimate investment club. He is constantly obsessed with how much money he will make. He actually believes having bad credit is good for a person with assets. He thinks that a lawyer will pull your credit without authorization to find out if you are worth suing.
Dave uses cash to pay for most common things like utility bills, groceries, cell phone, dining and rent. He lives a cash only life style trying to avoid tax authorities. He surrounds himself with paid professionals that also have alternative life styles similar to his. You can often find a roll of cash sitting in his wallet as he likes to flash the bills while paying for services. I found this strange since that cash belongs to the members of his program and it should be in his trading account. Cash makes it very hard to track expenses and implementing an accounting system.
Dave does not like governmental bodies or authority figures. He likes to be in charge which is why he headed a political party in
For some reason, Dave has no obligation to the people that give him money. He thinks he is above the law and should be able to conduct business in the way he sees fit. He justifies his failures by blaming others or government agencies. He never claims responsibility for his excessive spending habits.
He lost his house and his family when the bank had a fired that burned his loan documents in
Dave has been asked to testify by the Canadian authorities over a failed investment club years ago. He did not testify, but he left the country to live in the
Dave boldly brags about not paying taxes for the last 15 years. 7 of those years he lived in the
John Jenkins Background:
John Jenkins is a registered Pembina Native American in
John is quite the talker but some how falls short when providing concreted evidence to support his claims. His talking and personal skills gave the G-QI program a sense of legitimacy. He likes to appeal to people’s egos in order to sell them on ideas. I have to give him credit, he is really good at selling ideas. If I asked him to provide solid proof on the health of the G-QI program, he would rattle off previous trading results instead of generating a cash flow statement. Of course this is not his fault, he is just following directions from David Greene. He likes to give people just enough of an explanation to sound believable but not accurate.
John lived in
John also says some really strange things. He is convinced that he has an engine that runs on water. Of course it only runs really rough for an hour or so before needing to be rebuilt. He claims he needs a lot of money to develop his revolutionary idea. Then he goes and states that it is just an old junk yard engine that he modified. I guess he has not seen the Slick 50 commercial when the engine runs for a lengthy time without any oil.
He is convinced that he has a friend who has a device that can detect gold under ground. When asked why his friend does not sell the device or develop it, he says his friend is not into money. He then goes on to saying the device needs more work since it only works with jewelry within a few feet of the device. I think I would trust a traditional metal detector in this application.
John is a unique person who sounds very convincing but falls short of the actual truth He also is known in
Working with David Greene over the years has not been easy. He is very impatient and likes instant gratification. The first project I worked with him on was the original Gold-Quest program in Nov 2003. I explained to him in the beginning that it will take several months to complete a basic site. He felt this time line was too long and wanted the project done much faster. Being a self employed person, I shortened the time line to 2 weeks but sacrificing the design to meet the deadline and to win the project. Most web projects that I work on are ongoing with plenty of time to rework designs later.
David Greene was partnered with Delroy Atwood during this time. We had many lunch meetings discussing the issues around the web site. My first impression was negative since it felt like I just stepped into a Sopranos episode. These two guys wore a lot of gold jewelry and both drove matching jaguars. Dave introduced Delroy as his partner which in today’s time means something else. I thought they might be gay mafia men involved with money laundering. I knew something was not quite right with them but they reassured me about their projects meeting legal standards. I soon found out they had wives and would not work with drug money. You can see their original site as it is still up in
Their general feelings about my work were positive with the timeline and results, but not thrilled about how the site looked. I explained on many occasions that it takes a lot of time to develop glossy sites. Apparently they were happy enough with this first project that they hired me for a longer second project know as the Tri-Fund Forex Trading Program. I did end up reworking the original site for free later on after the
The Tri-Fund name idea came about over breakfast at Denny’s in Nov 2003. Delroy and David were going to get a
The start up capital of $800,000 is still a mystery. Dave said that he and Delroy put $80,000 of their own money in and traded it up to $800,000. This is when Dave gained creditability with me. According to a different source, Dave was not consistently doing well with trading. Prior to this they were working in
David Greene’s impatience really hurt the
Dave was aware of my in depth knowledge of computer systems and how I get really good deals on hardware. He wanted to fly me down to
Right before Dave and Delroy left for
Once the
His main trader was supposed to run the training program web site. During a conference call to
Dave did not have a hard time spending money before he actually gained any ground in profit. He bought a van, rented a furnished apartment, paid generous salaries to all the employees, bought more computers than he needed, rented a fiber optic internet line, and had a large long distant phone bill. He also found a piece of land that had back taxes owed to the government. He paid off the taxes which amounted to approximately $150,000. The land was supposedly worth $4 million but he could not develop the land until a road was completed.
Dave also forgot to research the logistics of doing business in
A few months later, I did not hear much from David Greene. It turns out that he overspent on salaries and he did not hire qualified trustworthy people. Their bookkeeper had no training and she embezzled from their company. Delroy was not an active manager and was more like a delegating president. Dave was in charge of operations and he fell short in his duties. He hired inexperienced traders and spent all of his time training them. When he left the office, they would watch movies and chat on the internet. His so called trustworthy employee, Rafael was always trying to send out spam for his friends. He constantly called me trying to fix the network so Dave would not find out. All the employees chatted with me regularly since I worked from home. They did not have anything good to say about Dave since he was very controlling towards them. Dave was not at the office as often as he should be which is in tune with his current hands off approach.
After 1.5 years of operations, Dave figured out they were broke. They had three traders on the payroll, one crooked bookkeeper, one lazy president, and himself. The traders did not make much on the Forex since they were learning and had little money left to trade. Expenses kept eating away at their capital and it was hard for them to raise new money. Dave and Delroy decided to walk away from the office and all their lease obligations. Delroy walked away from his new home he purchased and they just left everything behind.
The little money they had left was used to go to
Eventually they went completely broke and flew back to
I lent Dave $1,000 cash on 12/28/2005 to help him with his personal bills. I also hosted his web sites and redesigned the Gold-Quest site for free. We tried to generate some income with this site through Google click programs and search engines without much luck. He really needed a sales team for everything to work. I did all of this once again without any compensation since I was a nice person and I believed in his sincerity. I hate building sites that never get used so I did everything I could to bring this man some cash flow. Including the $1,000 in cash, Dave owed me $5,000 in unpaid labor by April of 2005. He did treat me out to breakfast a lot which paid the interest on the debt. John Jenkins also lent him money to help him pay his bills during this time.
By April Dave established Canadian contacts with sales people to start the Gold-Quest International program that you all know today.
Gold-Quest International Program: 05/2006 to present
I started working on this project in May of 2006. Dave called me once again and asked me to build him 3 new web sites. He told me that he could not pay me for a while. I agreed to help him once again. I did not put a lot of effort into the sites since he wanted them running in 5 days without paying me. My wife completely objected and told me that Dave was just using me. In the end my wife was right and I should have cut my losses and just walked away. After the sites were finished, he started to get attention up in
In June 2006 his laptop died. I fixed it up and rescued his data for him. I also replaced the hard drive on his very old trading system. He did start to pay me back for all my current work but still owed me a lot for the past year. Of course he was using investor’s money to pay me, but I had no clue at this point.
Dave had a result page on his web sites including the older original site Gold-Quest.info. The results covered the time period between 01/2006 and 11/2006. It was my impression that Dave was actually trading all this time. He told me at Denny’s that he can’t post real results since no one would believe him. He said he under stated his activity for the week. I became aware that he actually did not start to trade any money at all until 11/2006 when his postings stopped. He traded a little in Oct 2006 but he did not do very well.
So what was Dave doing from 05/2006 until 11/2006 ?
Dave likes to shop and spend other people’s money. Once investors started to put money in, he went out and bought himself a new top of the line BBQ, outdoor furniture, 32” flat panel TV, 2 new Toyota Camry hybrid cars, laser eye surgery, 2 office computers, laser printer, office supplies, desks, 1 new trading tower, 6 more 32” flat panel TVs as trading monitors, network equipment, new dishes, gambling every week at Red Rock casino, dinners out every week at expensive restaurants, new clothes, and of course BBQ dinners at his home every Saturday/Sunday.
In the beginning of July, Dave hired John Jenkins to help him with the Gold-Quest International program. They rented a house in Summerlin,
Of course I fell for his sincerity bit and helped him once again. He still owed me lots of money from the past, but he was making an attempt to pay my current invoices. I felt I could afford the risk so I started the project on July 20, 2006.
My experience in
On September 9, 2006 Dave rented a house boat with company funds. We both went with our two wives to
Upon returning from the trip, a rough draft of the database software was put into action. Dave paid me a $5,000 non-refundable deposit for the use of my software. It took several more months of development to bring about a more complete product. During September I also funded and delivered his trading computer, setup his office, setup his phone systems, and helped with data entry. I did not receive payment until October of 2006 for this labor.
October 2006 was a turning point for me. Dave no longer had meetings with me, and this was not coincidental with having his full functional office in place thanks to my labor. I knew I was being used at this point. There was a lot of pressure from Dave and John to install the database at their home office. I explained to them that they did not possess the equipment or resources. I also learned at this time, that Dave did not actually trade one dollar of member’s money all summer long. His old trading station never got used and all he did was spend lots of member’s money.
I had a blowout with John this month too. The database was fully running now and I totaled the money owed. What they had in their accounts was $400,000 in cash and the program raised $900,000 to date. $500,000 had already been spent and I repeatedly asked where the money went. John said he did not know, but Dave was sending $5,000 / week all summer long to keep funding the monetary contract deals and paying out weekly commissions. Dave was also paying John all summer long and his rent. This conflict raised tension between John, Dave and I. From this point forward, I was not allowed to look at their cash accounts.
November came and Dave was finally making some money trading. He of course was behind and used new money coming in to pay weekly commissions. I was pretty disgusted with Dave at this point since he went out and bought everyone nice watches. I refused to wear the watch even to this day since he was spending member’s money like it was his own. My wife and I no longer wanted anything to do with them. We felt we had to do the right thing and some how expose Dave for his irresponsible behavior.
By December 20, 2006 I told Dave that John was making lots of mistakes and making excessive agreement changes. He was moving agreement dates around to benefit manager commission payouts. He was not qualified to handle this system and Dave said to me that I did not know John like he did. John was 61 and hardly had any computer or office experience. He used two pairs of eye glasses, one on top of the other to see properly. He was used to running a saw and hammer, not a keyboard and mouse.
We had two changes in policies that John never followed. The 10% commission payouts were supposed to happen on the same week as the 4% payouts. We decided in July 2006 to make this policy change which John violated. We also had a policy where members can not share email address as to avoid fraud. John also ignored this too which later created problems with the online system. The system payout commissions were not accurate and John was relying on manager’s book keeping. Everything was falling apart and Dave still wanted the database at his office. I said there is no way I can trust you or John to accurately maintain such a system. John had over paid the manager’s by $80,000 and I have the printouts to show this. Add this to the previous $500,000 spent and now the Gold-Quest International program was out almost $600,000. I felt there was no hope since payrolls and commission were due every week. This took away from the compounding effect that Dave always talked about. Staff payrolls alone cost the company $24,000 / week from October on. This figure does not include payments to Delroy Atwood.
At this point I spent 3 weeks of time auditing the database and making corrections to John’s mistakes. John and Dave were more concerned with manager’s commissions than responsibly handling member’s money. After all, the member’s money is what drives the whole G-QI program. I also said the program will go broke if we continue to payout 88% to the managers. I sent many emails suggesting we cut the 4% commission to 2% but they just wanted me to go away at this point. My software was the only accounting system they had. I did setup Quicken on their office computers to track the cash accounts, but they never updated the books. They did not want to waste their time tracking expenses and trades. After all, Dave told me that he never needed an accounting system his whole life.
Since Dave is super controlling, they went out and hired another programmer in January 2007 in order to reverse engineer my software and remove me from the picture. They were tired of hearing from me about how they were breaking the law and not looking after the best interests of the Gold-Quest International members. John hired his son to help him enter data so he could learn how to trade.
I then proceeded to build out the online system for managers and members. I added countless new features to the database and online systems making them completely secure and hack proof. When I learned about the new programmer, I stopped all work on new features to the database. I just maintained it from this point forward since Dave once again was stealing my intellectual property. What Dave did not know was I used my time to collect information in order to build a case against him and to prove his fraudulent behavior. It took me 8 months to build a case after which I then revoked the lease to my software. I made an offer for him to buy my software outright, but he refused since he already had his new system in place. It is illegal to reverse engineer software, but I figured my case with the member’s and government would be a lot stronger. Dave is smart but he lets his ego get in the way which always leads to legal problems.
To this date, his monetary contract deals have never paid him a dime and he spent over $500,000 of G-QI member’s money investing in the idea. He was counting on these contracts to bail the Gold-Quest International program out. John told members in the beginning of the program that their money was backed by $40,000,000 in assets acquired from monetary contracts. It appears Dave himself was conned out of money.
So this brings me to my final point.
Gold-Quest International Figures:
All the information below is public information. The financial health of any investment club is public knowledge and should be provided to all members every quarter. The G-QI club is under the State of
You can see from the above cash flow report how much the program has raised to date and what it owes. This system did not have any new entries beyond 09/20/2007. At this I revoked their lease, under the guidelines set forth in my software’s terms and conditions.
The program has brought in a total $14,157,902.14 from 05/2006 until 09/20/2007. Unexpired agreements total $13,284,593.14 .The G-QI program owes a total of $31,041,852.85 to members and managers. Dave has to make $108,919 profit per trade day in order to meet this obligation. This is a minimum amount that has to be made 5 days a week for one year straight.
The G-QI program has paid out $6,723,800.47 from 05/2006 until 09/20/2007 in commissions and agreements. The program has spent approx $100,000 on commission mistakes. Dave has paid out approx $1,500,000 in salaries and lawyer fees for monetary contracts. He has spent a lot more money on personal and business related expenses than what my figures reflect. He also spent a lot building a second database system and opening up another office. He spent a total of $ 8,223,800.47 out of a total of $14,157,902.14 raised which leaves him with $5,934,101.67 to pay for $31,041,852.85 of obligations. My figures do not include money potentially made from trading.
John and Dave have encouraged all members to reinvest their money into this program. Many have either made partial withdraws, full rollovers, and added more to their expiring agreement. This has given the program a longer life span than it would had on its own.
A lot of money was raised from 10/2006 to 12/2006 as you can see from the above picture. Between 09/01/2007 and 12/31/2007, the G-QI program owes $7,900,370.96 on expiring agreements and manager’s commissions. This is not including any new money raised from 09/20/2007 and 10/21/2007. According to my rough analysis, the G-QI program should be out of money by Christmas if not early in the new year. The G-QI program has been able to raise about $1,000,000 / month since Oct 2006 but that figure has been slowing down due to limited number of investors and funds available. This also can be interpreted as $1,856,000 is due every month from this point forward towards salaries, manager commissions, and member agreements. This is the minimum amount of money the program has to make every month from trading plus they have to return the original investment if agreements are not renewed.
It is up to the individual to make their own investment decisions. This blog is solely based on my opinions and experiences. If the SEC and Secretary of State for
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