Advertising in Jamaican newspapers, Jared Martinez invited investors to take his forex trading courses – at $8,000 a pop. Credit: Market Traders Institute

Do you remember Ted Liming? He’s a truck driver from North Dakota we met in an earlier episode. He was looking for a safe place to invest a substantial sum of money and stumbled upon secureinvestment.com when searching online for, well, secure investments. Spoiler alert: It was a scam.

Ted’s not-so-excellent adventure into the world of foreign exchange trading led David Evans, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Markets, to another story that’s affected thousand of people and, more specifically, their wallets.

Evans takes us to the Caribbean, where we meet Jared Martinez – a character who oozes swagger and runs the largest school for forex trading in the U.S. We also meet one of his former students, who became his business partner and ended up in jail for bilking investors out of millions of dollars.

DIG DEEPER

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Julia B. Chan worked at The Center for Investigative Reporting until June, 2017. Julia B. Chan is a producer and the digital editor for Reveal's national public radio program. She’s the voice of Reveal online and manages the production and curation of digital story assets that are sent to more than 200 stations across the country. Previously, Chan helped The Center for Investigative Reporting launch YouTube’s first investigative news channel, The I Files, and led engagement strategies – online and off – for multimedia projects. She oversaw communications, worked to better connect CIR’s work with a bigger audience and developed creative content and collaborations to garner conversation and impact.

Before joining CIR, Chan worked as a Web editor and reporter at the San Francisco Examiner. She managed the newspaper’s digital strategy and orchestrated its first foray into social media and online engagement. A rare San Francisco native, she studied broadcasting at San Francisco State University, focusing on audio production and recording. Chan is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.