Federal prosecutors say Winston Batino, a minister at the Chicago Church of Christ's North Ministry Center, spent five years collecting money from about 40 of his own congregants for luxury rehab facilities that never existed. The pews were the pipeline.
Six arrests in Hyderabad. A front company barely two weeks off the registry. And underneath it all, the same network that has run under at least four different names for a quarter of a century.
On April 25, 2026, Hyderabad police arrested a 61-year-old Country Sales Manager for Forever Living Imports India, alleging his operation pulled money from youth and housewives across multiple districts using three-tier packages and social media videos of a life nobody in the room was actually living. Police say the accounts they found held ₹3 crore (about $359,000 USD). The deputy commissioner says the real number is closer to ₹600 crore (about $71.8 million USD), spread across one lakh victims. That gap between those two figures is where this story lives.
Jasmir Urbina paid nearly $10,000 to a woman she believed was a lawyer. The hearing was fake. The deportation was real. Across the country, the machine that took her money is still running.
A call centre in Hyderabad with sixty tele-callers and a front company called Achievers Club allegedly pulled ₹600 crore from roughly one lakh young Indians who each paid ₹30,000 for a chance at easy money. The money is mostly gone. The dream was the product.
Stormy Wellington built a following of hundreds of thousands on a single promise: that ordinary people could become millionaires if they just believed hard enough and signed up fast enough. The income disclosures from the companies she recruited for told a different story, and the Federal Trade Commission was reading them.