> In March 2022, FBI agents showed up at the home of the lawyer alleged to be behind the scheme, resulting in a shootout and a four-hour standoff, during which the lawyer confessed repeatedly to having run J&J as a Ponzi scheme.
The blatantness of this one is quite impressive. I've seen some interesting bullshit claims before but claiming a $30bn pipeline project in a 1st world country with a fairly good recordkeeping system that anyone can just visit and validate (or fail to validate, as the case may be) is really something else.
I mean, do you even have to leave your desk to determine that these guys don't own all this land they claim to own?
It's a bit like Theranos again, some of the basic claims being made are prima facie unbelievable, this stuff should not be passing the most basic of due diligence checks, but somehow it gets this far down the line before someone picks up on it. It's all very weird.
Man, in Utah they really go hard!