Snoqualmie 'moneymaking machine' reels in $1.5M from victims

SNOQUALMIE — The flashy video on the Web site for Regenesis 2x2 shows happy jet-setters cavorting in a pool, thanks to a "global, all-star team" in a gleaming boardroom that has worked out an innovative new program for "your financial freedom."

"If you've been searching for a home-based business that will allow you to live the life of your dreams and rise to your full potential," the confident announcer says, "your search is over."

But the Secret Service says that what's billed as a "proven moneymaking machine" is really just an old-fashioned, pyramid-style Ponzi scheme. And it has apparently reeled in more than $1.5 million from those who bit on the lures of "extraordinary income fast."

And that global team? The Secret Service says it's just a pair of Eastside suburbanites — a 46-year-old woman who works as an elementary-school aide, and a 41-year-old man who is on federal probation for an investment scam he pulled in Nevada.

On July 17, the Secret Service raided the man's home and vehicle in Snoqualmie, a post-office box in Kirkland and the Regenesis company office in Snoqualmie.

The agents carted off several computers, dozens of boxes of documents and rooted through the trash bin behind the office building in search of evidence.

No charges have been filed, and no one has been arrested. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Brown in Seattle said the investigation is ongoing, but he declined further comment.

The Regenesis office, on River Street in downtown Snoqualmie, was empty Wednesday, apparently just as agents had left it. Computer monitors were still turned on, but their cords dangled in vain toward computers that weren't there.

None of the Regenesis operators could be reached to comment. The Web site, www.regenesis2x2.com, remained active.

The Regenesis site was launched in January, and the Secret Service began investigating it in June, according to the search-warrant documents. An agent posed as an investor and received marketing material that explained the system, the documents say.

According to the documents, investors send in several hundred dollars to buy a "commission center," which supposedly pays off when other people are recruited to join the lower levels of the pyramid.

The Web site boasts that people can quadruple their initial investments every month with no work. It claims more than $3 million already has been paid out.

But the Secret Service documents say it's a classic Ponzi scheme because there's no actual money made from real investments. The new investors' money goes to pay the original investors until the whole thing collapses.

A pyramid-scheme specialist analyzed the details and found that mathematically, 75 percent of the investors won't see a dime, the documents say.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks and money orders have been deposited in about a half-dozen different Regenesis bank accounts, the Secret Service alleges.

The agents tailed the Regenesis operators and watched them pick up their mail, then discard several letters of complaint from participants, the Better Business Bureau and a Texas lawyer who accused the company of deceptive marketing, according to the Secret Service.

The 46-year-old school aide is listed as the president of Regenesis.

Her business partner has family on the Eastside, where he moved a few years ago from the Lake Tahoe, Nev., area, according to court records. In 2007, he was convicted in federal court in Reno of money laundering for running a phony investment firm that promised people 10 percent monthly returns. He took in more than $200,000 but spent most of it on himself, the records say.

He could have faced more than four years in prison. But the judge sentenced him to a year after he pleaded for leniency.

He argued he had paid back the money, helped the FBI learn about investment-fraud techniques and helped investigators make a criminal case against his father, who lives in Issaquah and was charged in a separate and larger investment-fraud scheme in Reno.

And he told the judge that his family, including his wife and five children, needed him home to support them with his job selling "motivational and marketing programs."

Ian Ith: 206-464-2109 or iith@seattletimes.com