Let’s say you’re a Divison I NCAA athlete. And let’s say your team is invited to take part in a retreat in a wildly popular vacation destination like, say, the Bahamas. That sounds great, right — you and your teammates having some quality time to bond on an idyllic island in the Caribbean? Unfortunately for the George Mason University men’s basketball team, what they thought was going to be a memorable trip turned out to be memorable for very different reasons.
This week, The Washington Post‘s Salvador Rizzo reported on the sentencing of a travel agent who had previously pleaded guilty to defrauding the GMU basketball team. According to the post, the travel agent collected over $100,000 from the university and from some supporters of the team, only for the vacation to never materialize.
The basketball team wasn’t the only group left deprived of a scheduled trip. Maurice Eugene Smith, who was sentenced to 13 months in prison, confessed to operating a Ponzi scheme and defrauding a number of clients who believed that they were paying for enticing vacations.
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Consignment arrangements went very, very wrongIn their reporting, the Post notes that the GWU case alerted law enforcement that something was amiss. GWU had hired a separate company, VII Group, to plan the Bahamas trip; they, in turn, hired Smith for the planning, only to become suspicious after Smith stopped responding to their inquiries about it. That’s when they contacted law enforcement, including the police and the FBI.
On a more disquieting note, the Post‘s reporting suggests that Smith’s financial sleight of hand came about as a result of the economic effects of the pandemic, which can’t have been the best time to be running a travel agency.
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