The Big, Fat Maveric Con

Millions missing in crazy scam involving scores of victims.

- Jonathan Erasmus

A WOMAN FROM EDENVALE CLAIMS to have permission from the World Bank, the IMF, the UN and “all those short alphabetical organisations” to launch her own country. The launch date is 1 June 2017.

If you are a South African, you are in luck, as she will be annexing parts of Johannesburg as their HQ.

And if you haven’t already begun to roll your eyes, we must tell you it is a scam – an elaborate one that has been duping South Africans for more than a decade.

Almost all the operations which feed into the grand scheme of the “country” idea start with the word “Maveric” – be it Maveric Sovereign State; Maveric Bank; Maveric Old Age Homes; Maveric Oil and Gas; and so on.

Noseweek knows of at least three men who have been taken for more than R7.5 million, a school principal who defrauded her school of R5,000,000 to “invest”, a security expert who raised a 40,000-strong army to protect the “country” and a farmer who has bet his pension on his farm being turned into a retirement utopia, despite his own bank manager telling him he is being scammed.

The “President” of this soon-to-be-launched state is, in her own words, a “silly little old lady in Edenvale” called Marilyn Allen, aged 62, known to her followers as Gypsey Luongo.

Maveric Press Secretary Ursula Allen-Brown, a bona fide Sea Pointbased public relations practitioner who is also the managing editor of the website CapeInfoSA, said the launch date was 1 June. She said Noseweek would eventually “apologise for calling them a scam” when the truth is revealed. She claims the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, will give the keynote address at the launch.