Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - She Scammed People with Magic Cheese? - The Madame Gi Story

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Gilberte Van Erpe aka Madame Gil is a Belgian con artist who launched a fake health and cosmetics company called Crema in the early 2000s. Posing as the mystical “Madame Gil,” she convinced thousands of people- especially in Chile- to invest in a bogus line of “magic cheese” and other products that supposedly contained miraculous healing or cosmetic properties. Investors were promised huge profits from selling this special cheese, but the entire operation was a pyramid scheme.

Springsteen, Deliver Me From Now, is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. I'm trying to find some real and all the noise. You always do? The artist you know, the story you don't. See Golden Glove's nominee, Jeremy Allen White, as Bruce Springsteen. Critics are saying it's a career-defiding performance. Let's burn this place down, Johnny. Springsteen, Deliver Me from Now Streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus.

Ready, Pee-T13. So this woman cons a whole lot of people by selling magic cheese? Now they call the woman Madame Gill. And Madam Gill's around 64 when the story starts and she's living in France. And Madam Gill really loves money. She loves money so much that she'll con whoever she can to get it. It seems like she's been scamming people for years. And one day in 2006, she comes up with her wildest con yet.

She sort of just shows up in Chile and she starts holding business conferences there all across the country because she claims she knows how to make everyone super rich. And she's a good salesman so all these people show up and listen to her. And what she's selling, people are calling magic cheese. It's actually a special powdered culture that allows people to make their own high quality cheese at home. I guess the cheese is kind of like white and creamy, like a, like a yogurt. Now, why would anyone want to make their own cheese at home? Well, according to Madam Gill, this special high-quality cheese is actually used in fancy French beauty creams. And like famous celebrities like Michael Jackson use these beauty creams all the time.

They don't use the bullshit creams that the rest of us peombs use. They use the kinds with the special cheese in it. And according to Madam Gill, big makeup companies like L'Oreal are just dying to buy this. stuff up, which is stupid. If L'Oreal wanted to put cheese in their face creams, why wouldn't L'Oreal just make the cheese themselves? But whatever. So she tells all these people that they have the opportunity to be rich. All they have to do to get started is pay her the equivalent of $400 U.S. dollars for this magic cheese powder. And as ridiculous as this whole thing sounds, it actually works. Lots of Chilean people believe her and they start buying up this cheese.

powder hoping that they're eventually going to make some money. And so word starts getting around about this new exciting opportunity. And soon, Madam Gill's business conferences are packed with people. Now, Madam Gill, she isn't new to this whole scam business. She has a long history of running cons on people. And she's savvy enough to know that the best way to lure people in and get them to trust her is if she makes it seem low risk. So she starts giving the first cheese kits away to her early customers for free. And people love this.

They take the free kits, and I assume they all go home and they start making all this yogurt cheese. And so it continues to snowball from here. Madam Gill is selling more and more cheese-making kits, and she keeps recruiting new people, and every new recruit means another kit sold. And the sad thing is,

she's targeting very vulnerable people, mostly targeting poor villagers and women living in poverty who buy into this grift because they're hoping to change their lives. And if that isn't sleazy enough, here's where an even bigger scam comes in. So all these people start making cheese at home. And Madam Gill will approach them and she'll be like, let me sell that cheese to big cosmetic companies for you,

and I'll give you your cut of the profit. And I guess people are like, sure. So she then takes the cheese from them and she doesn't sell it because who in the world is going to buy that shit? She just stores it in a warehouse. But she later pays the people a little bit of money and she says, here's your cut. So where does she get the money to pay them from? Well, she gets them from new people buying cheese kits. So she has successfully turned this weird fake cheese making scam into one big Ponzi scheme.

But the Chilean people, they don't know that. They think that they successfully sold a bunch of cheddar and that Madam Gill's business plan actually works. So they, in turn, buy even more cheese kits from her. Not only that, but she also urges the villagers to go back to their respective villages and recruit their friends and recruit their neighbors and their family members into this cheese-making business opportunity.

And like any good MLM scam, she's offering rewards and gifts, for people who sign up other people. And they do. The villagers have now had a taste of success and now they're hooked. They recruit their friends and their family and anyone they know.

Sometimes they'll sell their possessions, sometimes they'll even sell their cattle, sometimes they'll sell their own car. They will put themselves into debt just to keep that little bit of cheese money coming in. And by this point, Madam Gill has scammed around 5,500 Chileans into buying into her bogus cheese making kits.

And overall, she makes, are you ready for this? The equivalent of around $17 million US dollars. Meanwhile, all the cheese that these people are producing that Madam Gill is pretending to pay them for? Well, since it was never actually going to be used as fancy face cream, all this cheese is just piling up in warehouses. And we're not talking about like a few blocks of cheese here and there. We're talking about massive amounts.

Tons and tons of this worthless, stank-ass cheese that nobody wants just sitting there growing mold or whatever on it. But the thing is, no one's investigating this scam because everyone still believes that Madam Gill is selling it all to L'Oreal and other big cosmetic companies. Here's the thing, though. Eventually, like with all Ponzi schemes, she runs out of new people to recruit, and there aren't enough people buying new cheese kits so she can't. can't pay off the original cheese-making customers, which means the structure of her con starts to collapse. And so at some point, Madam Gill packs up her things and she quietly takes her 17 million US dollars equivalent and she moves back to France and she lives a good life. While she leaves all this cheese piled up in warehouses in Chile, all spoiled and

worthless and definitely not edible. And a lot of the villagers who sold their cattle or their cars or even quit their job to stay in the game, they're starting to realize that they aren't making any money from this. So some of them try to reach her for an explanation and they're like calling, but no one is answering. Madam Gill is long gone. Her offices in Chile are straight up closed. And so the Chilean people get super pissed. And at this point, they know they were scammed. And they're not going to let this slide. So they go to police and a lot of them file formal complaints and so police start investigating. And around the same time, reporters from a Chilean TV show called Contacto, which seems like an investigative reporting type show, they get word that this woman from France

scammed all these Chilean people. So they start investigating the hell out of this story. They interview a bunch of victims. They track down one of the original cheese kits and they try making some themselves, they go to one of the warehouses and they find 20,000 tons worth of cheese products just rotting away. And so eventually they go all the way to Paris and they actually track down Madame Gill. But of course, she refuses to speak to them. She probably knows they're trying to call her out. And so they turn their findings over to Chilean police. And Chilean police then contact Interpol. However, the French police also opened their own investigation. and they eventually conclude what we all already know that Madam Gill is a con artist.

So in 2008, they find her a niece and there, bam, they arrest her. And I don't have a mugshot, but here's what she looks like in real life. And so she's eventually convicted of money laundering and fraud, and she gets sentenced to six years in prison. And I guess she never learned her lesson because in 2018, she's arrested in Belgium for a completely different type of recruitment-based pyramid scheme, and there she gets convicted and she gets eight years in prison.