UPS sued for workers’ role in $100M timber Ponzi scheme

MADISON, Miss. – A UPS store in Madison, Mississippi, is being sued for its workers’ role in a Ponzi scheme that cost investors about $100 million.

The Clarion Ledger reports New Orleans attorney Alysson Mills filed the lawsuit last week. The lawsuit says the store’s employees were complicit in a timber scheme in which about 300 investors were promised high interest rates. In reality, new money was used to pay old investors.

The lawsuit says workers notarized fake timber deeds and attested that grantors-landowners appeared before them, even though “no grant-landowner ever personally appeared.”

Scheme leader Arthur Lamar Adams is serving a 17-year sentence for wire fraud. Another Mississippi man charged in the scheme, William McHenry, has pleaded not guilty to similar charges.

The newspaper says the store said it had no comment.

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Information from: The Clarion Ledger, http://www.clarionledger.com