These are a couple of the most charming scammers next door who you’d never suspect running
a scam!
Let’s get right into it!
Monique Brady Monique Brady.
Millionaire socialite.
Career woman.
A happily married wife, and mother of four beautiful children.
At age 45, her life was a dream, one she worked very hard for.
Despite her humble beginnings, Monique Brady was made for the finer things of life.
And that included lavish parties.
Brady lived in an exclusive estate in Rhode Island, where she had built a cozy circle
of friends around herself and her family.
She regularly invited her friends to her $1.1 million mansion for hangouts and cookouts.
These events weren’t just lavish, but they were also somewhat intimate.
Her guests could feel safe there, and could have a nice time without worrying about putting
up appearances.
Brady rarely ever mixed business with pleasure, so there was very little talk about what she
actually did for a living.
But her parties were opportunities for her to set the groundwork for her future scams.
She was generous, down-to-earth, a friend you could trust to give you sensible advice
on serious life matters, and most importantly, a friend you could trust with your money.
Background Brady was born in Vietnam in 1975.
As a child, life was very difficult for her family.
Her father left Vietnam for the US in search of better jobs, and after a few years, he
asked the rest of his family to join him.
Monique and her mother left Vietnam on a boat.
During the trip, the boat sank, and they had to be rescued from drowning.
They ended up in a refugee camp in the Philippines, where they stayed for some time before finally
making it to the US.
Baited Brady played her victims excellently.
She baited them and waited until they had established a strong, trusting bond.
Then, she struck.
To her friends and family, Brady was a calm and collected real-estate entrepreneur who
had her life together and was moving up in her career.
Perhaps the thing that made her so unsuspecting is that she came off as someone who wasn’t
only very professional but also very skilled in her field.
She made her friends and family believe she was a sort of real estate developer whose
job was to renovate houses facing foreclosure.
It made sense, given the history of the real estate industry in America and the 2008 financial
crisis.
Banks had all these properties they didn't know what to do with.
They were desperate to get the homes off their hands, and they had two options: sell them
wholesale for any price a buyer was willing to pay or spend a little extra money renovating
them, then sell them at a higher market value.
MNB LLC This was where Brady came in.
The banks would contact her agency, MNB, to help with the renovations.
These contracts were usually worth up to $80,000.
The only problem was that she had to front all the initial renovation costs - to buy
materials and pay subcontractors.
So she convinced her targets to invest in these "projects" in exchange for a fifty percent
return on the amount they invested.
She convinced about 31 of her friends and family members to invest.
Because they believed they were making "safe" real estate investments with someone they
could always trust with their money, the victims didn't think to question the scheme.
Brady made her supposed real estate rehabilitation scheme more believable to potential investors
by providing fraudulent emails seemingly from a national property rehabilitation company.
The emails verified that the company had approved Brady to rehabilitate a property.
They also included fraudulent itemizations of work her subcontractors would do on the
property.
At some point, she researched an actual employee of the national property rehabilitation company
and used the employee's identity, without permission, to make the emails look more authentic.
Some investors invested in multiple projects, often rolling over their profits to invest
in new projects.
Brady always had a reasonable answer for every question the investors asked her.
Whenever anyone requested their profits, she paid upfront.
Little did they know she was robbing one person to pay the other.
In reality, MNB never worked on any rehabilitation project, and banks only hired the company
to perform menial tasks on foreclosed properties.
These tasks often included mowing grass, changing locks, winterizing properties, boiler or electrical
inspections, and snow removal.
The projects were worth less than $1,000, some as little as $25.
The majority of them were worth just a few hundred dollars.
By 2018, Brady had scammed about 23 people for approximately $4.8 million.
The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation revealed that she had solicited funds to rehabilitate
171 properties.
Ninety-eight of those properties were buildings her company was never hired to work on.
The entire scheme was worth about $10.3 million.
Lavishness Lavish parties weren’t the only thing Brady
indulged in.
She bought a $1.1 million home in one of the most exclusive and prestigious neighborhoods
on Rhodes Island.
All her children attended expensive private schools.
She also purchased a collection of Louis Vuitton shoes and other luxury items.
She went on expensive vacations abroad frequently, most times with her husband, kids, and other
families.
Brady also had a serious gambling addiction.
Shocked To say that Brady’s victims were shocked
at the news that she was fraudulent is an understatement.
Some of them almost didn’t believe it.
They all loved Monique, so the idea that she had betrayed their trust and friendship and
scammed them was unfathomable.
Brady’s victims include a close friend from childhood, a close friend from law school,
a childcare provider for her children, an elderly Alzheimer’s patient, her stepbrother,
and three of her ex-husband’s colleagues.
Aftermath Brady kept multiple accounts with different
banks, perhaps to avoid suspicion.
Unfortunately for her, the banks got suspicious and alerted the IRS and FBI, and the FBI soon
started looking into her books in 2018.
The investigation revealed that Brady scammed her friends, neighbors, and family members
and used the money to fund her lavish lifestyle.
When she started feeling the squeeze of the investigation, she tried to delete emails
and all records of her agreements with the investors.
She also advised them to do the same.
She later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.
According to court documents, Brady tried to escape justice when she became aware of
the investigation.
She bought a one-way ticket to Vietnam and tried to flee with her lover Kevin Heitke,
a Rhode Island attorney.
She claimed she was going to visit her grandmother, but when she found out that the FBI knew about
her travel plans, she moved her flight to an earlier departure date.
The FBI arrested her a day before her scheduled flight.
Two days before the arrest, she had served divorce papers to her husband, Thomas Brady.
On July 11, 2019, Brady pleaded guilty to wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and
obstructing an IRS investigation.
In February 2020, the US District Court in Providence sentenced her to 8 years in federal
prison, with an order to refund her victims a total of $4.78 million.
Brady has now asked the court to grant her quick release and cut her sentence short so
that she can take care of her children.
She claimed that her ex-husband wasn’t doing a good job of caring for their children, especially
the one with special needs.
Monique isn’t the only person who had the trust of the community to run a scam, nor
will she be the last.
Hal Brown Hal Brown was another person who was highly
respected in his community.
His solid religious reputation and the respect that members of his local community gave him
placed him in a perfect position to scam his friends, family, and neighbors.
He was able to convince people to trust him with their money.
The website for one of his companies, Oodles World, described him as an Asheville native
“well-known in the entertainment and marketing industries for his creative expertise and
management and networking skills.”
Background Before Brown turned to the life of crime,
he had a fairly successful entertainment career.
His online biography states that he launched entertainment and production companies in
California and Texas and has done extensive voice-over work.
It also claimed that he’s written and produced quote “literally thousands of individual
pieces and full musical scores for such clients as Disney, Sea World, NBC, ABC, NCBS, FOX,
Warner Brothers, Paramount, Holiday on Ice, Universal Studios, McDonald’s, Honda, Toyota,
Coca-Cola, and Kellogs.”
If everything his website says is correct, Brown has had a successful career.
Why did he feel the need to engage in fraud?
Intellectual Property Between 2007 and 2019, Brown defrauded at
least 60 victims, amounting to $22.5 million.
Many of them were at or near retirement age.
A press release from the US Attorney’s Office described the scam as “a sophisticated Ponzi
scheme through his company Oodles Inc. and its various affiliates.”
According to Judge Bell, the district judge who later heard the case, he said quote “Brown’s
conduct represented some of the worst fraud committed in the worst way and harmed some
of the most vulnerable victims.”
He claimed that his company, Oodles, owned hundreds of millions of dollars in the intellectual
property of family entertainment shows, movies with a religious theme, and so on.
He repeatedly lied about his company selling intellectual properties to well-known media
companies.
The victims could make profits by investing in Oodles in exchange for very high returns
on their investment.
To make his scheme appear more credible, Brown provided fake bank statements and falsified
company agreements.
Sometimes, he would impersonate employees of well-known media companies.
He also once impersonated a lawyer to make his scheme look legal and reduce suspicion.
Brown pretended that he had ties to big media companies like Disney and Apple, claiming
that his company had more than 420 intellectual properties worth several hundred thousand
dollars.
He once hired a freelance artist to create letterhead documents for companies like The
Walt Disney Co., Paramount, Apple, and First Republic Bank.
Brown would later tell law enforcement the letterheads were for his daughter’s student-organization
competition.
Innocence?
Brown repeatedly claimed innocence even after the police took him into custody and the court
began his hearing.
He made a video declaring his innocence and sent it to people he worked with in the past
to solicit letters supporting his good character.
With this misinformation, some of them actually wrote letters of support for him.
According to the court documents, Brown maintained a flashy lifestyle with the ill-gotten funds.
He would use the money he got from new investors to pay existing investors, like a Ponzi scheme.
Whenever his victims asked for payments, he would produce fake bank statements and company
agreements.
One of them showed a record of $864 million worth of bank transactions.
Targeted Brown scammed the elderly and retired people
he was close to, including his family, friends, neighbors, and fellow church members.
Many of these victims would later testify against Brown in court.
Brown’s scams cost them a lot of damage, draining their nest eggs and forcing some
of them to come out of retirement and start working again just to make ends meet.
He scammed about 23 people, some of whom have filed complaints against him in the Buncombe
County Superior Court.
Brown often promised unbelievably high returns on investments.
One of his victims, an Asheville resident, invested $1.8 million, and Brown promised
a return of $3 million.
Another client invested $2.8 million and another $600,000.
Aftermath Brown’s case hearing took place in Charlottesville
in 2017.
After all his claims of being innocent, he eventually pleaded guilty to securities fraud,
wire fraud, and transactional money laundering for orchestrating a $13.7 million Ponzi scheme.
The presiding judge, Kenneth D. Bell, sentenced him to 210 months in prison and three years
of supervised release, in addition to ordering Brown to pay $17 million in restitution.
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Let us know in the comment section if you believe in the statement, “once a scammer,
always a scammer”?