Great frauds in history: Reed Slatkin’s Investment Club

Reed Slatkin studied with Scientology's founder L. Ron Hubbard and became an ordained minister in the cult 1975. He used his position to set up an unlicensed investment club.

(Image credit: 2015 Los Angeles Times)

Reed Slatkin was born in Detroit in 1941, and was converted to Scientology by his uncle as a teenager, studying with the religion’s founder L. Ron Hubbard and eventually becoming an ordained minister in 1975. He would later use his position within the Church to set up an unlicensed investment club, which ran from 1986 to 2001, with around 800 investors, including the actor Giovanni Ribisi (who ironically starred in the 2000 film Boiler Room about penny-stock fraud), contributing a total of $593m. Slatkin would also play an important role in co-founding the internet service provider Earthlink in 1994 with Sky Dayton.

What was the scam?

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

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