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Now a born-again Christian and evangelical pastor, Minkow explains his religious devotion in one breath and in the next delves into the nitty-gritty of financial shakedowns. Though lately the press has focused attention on the crackdown on corporate fraud--with WorldCom executives finally coming to trial, for example--he says everyday Ponzi schemes are more prevalent than ever. According to the nonprofit National White Collar Crime Center, $40 billion is lost every year to such investor swindles. Current low interest rates are making matters worse, Minkow says, because retirees on fixed incomes are more vulnerable to shysters who promise higher rates of return. At the same time, the national run-up in real estate prices gives many people a way to tap extra cash, often through second mortgages. "When the value of your house goes way up, you can access that money at the behest of scam artists," he says, "and many of them will suggest you do exactly that."
Some of the smartest scam artists, Minkow explains, target groups united by religion, race or ethnic origin. From 1998 to 2001, at least 80,000 people lost $2 billion in religious-investor frauds, according to the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group representing state regulators. In fact, most of the eight major frauds Minkow helped uncover in the past year have involved hustlers trying to sell investments to church groups.
Minkow knows how to play that gig. He went undercover after getting a call from a prospective investor in a pair of Southern California investment schemes and, posing as someone with extra cash to commit, found enough evidence to allow the Securities and Exchange Commission to shutter the firms in November. They allegedly had conned nearly $26 million from more than 1,200 people, largely by targeting church-affiliated African Americans. In 2003 he managed to shut down another scheme, a California operation that targeted retirement funds worth $813 million. "Barry has a lot of insight into the many ways scams work," notes Peter Norell, an FBI supervisor who helped arrange Minkow's stint at the FBI's Quantico training facility. "That helps him ask perpetrators the right questions, which can lead to indictments and convictions."
He took yet another case to the office of New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who was in the midst of a spree of high-profile fraud prosecutions. Spitzer's experts contacted the FBI, and after Minkow agreed to wear a wire and record phone conversations with the purported scam artists as they solicited new money, the agency verified that the suspects were using an offshore shell company to bilk hundreds of millions of dollars from investors by pledging annual profits of more than 38% and an eight-year rate of return in excess of 1,000%. TIME has confirmed that the FBI is likely to move in on the fraudsters soon.