World Of Secrets - The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam: 1. The fall

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

World of Secrets presents The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam. Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman is the man of the hour. He’s responsible for one of the biggest gold discoveries in the world, deep in the Indonesian jungle. It’s a find that sends Bre-X stock prices soaring to stratospheric heights. So his apparent death — a dramatic fall from a helicopter flying to the gold site — sends shockwaves around the world. Did he jump? Was he pushed? But the days following his death will prove even more shocking. Please note, this episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide and death. The series has references to suicide and some graphic content. This podcast was first published in May 2024.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This week on Witness History. The story of Wenner Mosque was built in Canada and then literally picked up and moved 4,000 kilometres. Travelling through two time zones and across land and water, it was certainly an ambitious journey with challenges and near disasters along the way. ambitious journey with challenges and near disasters along the way. And while the Muslim community waited, one man was determined to give them a place they could call their own. Search and subscribe to witness history wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Hello again, I'm Yamisi Adegoke, one of the hosts of World of Secrets, to introduce the first episode of our World of Secrets special guest season. While we work on our next World of Secrets investigations, we're bringing you the $6 billion Gold Scam, one of our other investigative podcasts. It's the story of the biggest goldmine fraud of all time. First published in 2024, we're releasing episodes weekly. From the BBC World Service and CBC, here's episode one. Over to Suzanne Wilton.

First, a warning. The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide and death. ... A man named Michael Deguzman is standing in front of a hotel mirror. He's getting ready for a night out in a mining town in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Daguzman is a short, heavy-set Filipino man. He combs his thick black hair to one side and opens up his silk black shirt to show off his 24 karat gold chain. off his 24 karat gold chain. Deguzman wore a lot of gold. It's the evening of March 18, 1997. He heads to a karaoke bar, has a few drinks, sings his heart out to Frank Sinatra. The next morning, Rudy Vega, Deguzman's colleague, knocks on his hotel door. Deguzman opens the door. He's disheveled, half awake.

He's here to take him to the airport. They make it to the helicopter pad. Rudy Vega rushes to get him ready, and de Guzman climbs into the chopper. He's by himself back there, and the pilot helps him with his seatbelt. Degusman doesn't recognize the pilot. He's not the usual guy. The front passenger door snaps shut. Check.

The rear door is pushed forward and closed firmly. Lock. Check. Then they take off, headed for Boussang, the site of the largest gold discovery in the world. The chopper flies across a blanket of green jungle. It tips toward a peat swamp. Crocodiles slither into the water. The surface ripples from the downdraft.

Below lie nine-foot king cobras and other venomous snakes, wild pigs forage for nuts and roam through the vines. It's all familiar to Deguzman. He's taken this flight many times. It's now 10.30 a.m. Central Indonesia time, 20 minutes since takeoff. The weather and visibility is good. The helicopter is flying at an altitude of 800 feet.

A routine flight until suddenly something's wrong. There's a pop, a loud bang and a whoosh of air. The pilot maintains control, dips the helicopter to reduce speed and he looks back to see what's happening. He sees an empty seat. The left-hand door is fully open. Deguzman is gone. The pilot radios the tower, shouting,

my passenger has jumped from the helicopter. Michael Deguzman plunges 800 feet into swampy Borneo rainforest, presumed dead. Ten years later, I was sent halfway around the world by the Calgary Herald to investigate de Guzman's death. This story has haunted me ever since. How was he tied up with the wild ride of Brex, a small Canadian mining company,

and their once-in-a-century gold discovery? It's still a mystery. I'm Suzanne Wilton. From the BBC World Service and CBC, this is the $6 billion gold scam, a story about the lengths people will go to in pursuit of getting rich and how greed can obscure the truth.

This is episode one, the fall. Mabuhay, Philippine Airlines welcomes you to Jakarta. I've just landed in Jakarta, Indonesia. This is where it all began. Indonesia. This is where it all began. I'm here to trace the events that led up to that moment in the helicopter. It's hot, humid and loud, the opposite of my Canadian hometown, Calgary, Alberta. All these years later, I still have questions about what happened

at that exploration site. And I'm here to get answers, starting with what happened to the chief geologist, Michael de Guzman. Nobody was bigger on the scene than de Guzman. And it was almost like Jakarta in the 1996, 97, and de Guzman with an infinite amount of money were virtually made for each other like a match in heaven. Jim Richards is an Australian geologist who came to Indonesia in the 90s. They could not get the money in fast enough.

They were chucking money at us as geologists. Spend it, spend it, drill more holes. It was just nuts. During the mining boom here in the mid-90s, gold prospectors from around the world, mostly from developed countries, descended on Indonesia, exploiting the country's mineral wealth

for their own gain. And the boom meant there was money to spend. I've never seen a wall of money coming at you like that, that you were, it was insisting that you spend it. Normally it's completely the opposite. All of the sort of restrictions that might have been there from quite an Islamic country weren't there. It was the drinking and the sort of free living and the fast and loose lifestyles that were going on. For expats in the mining scene, the rules were different. They lived in a bubble of sorts, mostly separate from the locals, flush with cash, often spending it on booze and women.

I went into one hotel and I have never seen so many prostitutes in my life soliciting men and women in the vast atrium of that hotel. It was just one vast hall house. It was just insane, the whole place. I've never seen anything like it, and I've been around, you know? And de Guzman, an experienced geologist with a track record of finding gold, was deep in the scene. De Guzman had women every town, every nook and cranny he went through. There were girls there that he had on his payroll, that he partied with, that he had as his girlfriends.

And it was, yeah, it was one big rolling party for Mike. Everybody I spoke to was, it was, if you were out with Mike, it was a big night. De Guzman embraced the expat life. He hit up the strip clubs, loved karaoke, wild nights, and chasing women. The side of him that was the narcissistic side of him, which was women, it was booze, it was parties. Junior geologists who worked under him referred to him as a tyrant because of the long hours

he expected them to work on site. Mike was very controlling. He did seem to have a very forceful personality. Deguzman was often described as an enigma, hard to get to know. If he wasn't partying, he kept to himself. He was born in Manila, in the Philippines, on Valentine's Day in 1956,

and got his degree in geology in 1983. He headed to Indonesia in the late 80s looking to make it big, and he chased gold as hard as he chased women. He'd obsessively track for days through the intense heat of the jungle, looking at rock formations and signs of gold, spent hours writing up reports. Deguzman was a perfectionist, hyper-focused on the hunt for the motherlode the giant gold deposit every geologist dreams of.

And that search took him to a place locals call the Land of Hope, where he met the man who would change his life. Kalimantan is the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, the largest island in the Indonesian archipelago. It's home to massive mineral deposits. Kelimutan means river of gold and diamonds. Keli is a river, emas is gold, and intan is diamonds. So they've been mining gold in Kelimutan since, well, more than a thousand years, and diamonds. So it's been a source of wealth for as long as history goes back almost. Scottish geologist Roger Marjorie Banks spent half his working life mining in the remotest

parts of the world. When you go with a penning dish to a gold-bearing stream and scoop up a pile of dirt and shake it around. And there's these gleaming butter yellow grains on the floor of the dish. It's a moment of magic excitement, which I think everybody's caught up in. But it's a beautiful object. It's a valuable object. A mineral deposit that is rich enough to be worked for a profit is called an ore body. That's what de Guzman and every other exploration geologist was on the hunt for. But convincing people that an ore body is worth mining takes willpower and persuasion. Someone who had it and in spades was a Dutch geologist called John Felderhof.

He had a rugged, strong sort of face with almost built-in skull lines. Felderhof was often compared to the movie character Indiana Jones. He was quite an intimidating sort of guy actually, particularly with his heavy Dutch accent, which was there, and his dour taciturn character, which he had. No, no, he was quite a scaly guy until he got to know him. He'd made a name for himself a couple of decades earlier as the man who discovered a giant gold and copper mine in Papua New Guinea. In 1980, he moved to Indonesia lured by the promise of gold.

In the mid-80s, Marjorie Banks and Felderhof spent a day traveling up a river in a small boat and a couple of days trekking and camping out at a gold property, a parcel of land that Felderhoff had these rights to, and he was trying to sell it to Marjorie Banks. John's an interesting character, actually. You know he knows more than he's saying, which is a lot better, of course, than saying more than you know. But he gives the impression of being an honest guy, and in fact, I can vouch he's a competent geologist.

A man of strong opinions, I would say. Probably someone who doesn't tolerate fools gladly. But I got on well with him, actually. I quite enjoyed his company. The deal went nowhere with Marjorie Banks. And Felderhof continued on his quest to find a gold property that would appeal to investors. He was a guy who wanted to go smoke a cigarette and drink a beer after digging in the rocks all day.

Jennifer Wells worked for Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine, and she was on the story for years. Jennifer has here an entire plastic tub of files, files from her days of investigations. And there are pages and pages of notes and interviews. You've kept this all these years. We're a long time since. Why? Obsessive? It's an unresolved story. Jennifer remembers Felderhof had this reputation for sniffing out gold.

And he had a very interesting background in terms of being a so-called river walker, multiple sufferer of malaria. What's a river walker? Oh, just somebody who believed, who had almost a mystical character. And I think in geologic terms, it would be someone who has such a connection with the land that they have an almost innate ability to understand where, you know, seams of minerals may be present. In the mid-80s, Felderhof earmarked a site in a small community called Busang, deep in the jungle of Kalimantan, as remote as you can get, 200 kilometers from the nearest town. Felderhof was sure there was gold here, but he needed to persuade more people.

And that was proving difficult, even for him. It was in 1987 that Felderhof and de Guzman crossed paths for the first time. The two met while working at the same gold mining site in Kalimantan, the land of hope. Pretty quickly, they came to share their love of geology over beers in the bush. Deguzman's geological expertise,

his determination to find gold, blew Felderhof away. But they parted ways when Degusman left the site. But Felderhof didn't forget Degusman. And a few years later, the two geologists reunited when Felderhof decided he needed someone to help push his theory that Busan was worth drilling for gold. He knew de Guzman would be a valuable asset, a driven geologist thirsty to make a strike. After agreeing to work with Felderhof,

de Guzman trekked over 32 kilometers of remote jungle and started producing piles of reports about the geology around Busan. Like Felderhof, he was convinced there was gold there. It's terrain I remember vividly. When I trekked through the remote jungle in 2007, it was a difficult journey. It took five hours over land and another six in a canoe. Boosang is the last community in a series of river villages. Today, Kalimantan is largely inhabited by the

indigenous Dayak people. The Dayaks, they made tremendous guys to have with you in the field because they never got lost. They could find their way through the jungle. They were tough, they were reliable, and they were really just great guys. Reporting on this story for the Calgary Herald in 2007, ten years after Michael de Guzman's death, I traveled up the Mahakam River to meet local dyads. I've never forgotten the intense greens of the jungle and the humidity. You go outside and you're instantly covered in sweat. It's so beautiful, but it's also a daunting, difficult place

for visitors. I remember what to me were terrifying bugs and leeches that climb inside your trousers and worm their way into your boots. Vines with sharp hooks like barbed wire carpet the jungle. It's not an easy place to work. But de Guzman and Felderhoff believed they could find their fortunes in Busan. People who are driven by an enthusiasm that keeps them out trying and trying again and

having faith in your ideas because to create an ore body, it's not just what the geologist finds or the metal in the ground. It's the preparedness of your boss, of your company to put up the money. The shareholders, the investors, you've got to believe if you want them to believe. You've got to sell it. You've got to really put yourself on the line. And if you do that and it works, then you have created that old body out of nothing. You think it's just something they're lying on the ground waiting for the first person to stumble over it,

but it's not. It's a human creation, like an artwork. And the guy who actually creates it is often the exploration geologist who believes in it and has the personality to sell it and to convince people. And that's a human characteristic, which I guess you either have or you haven't. Deguzman and Felderhoff both had this enthusiasm, but luck wasn't on their side. Good evening. It's Black Monday.

There's never been a day like this one on the stock market. Fear, pandemonium, wreaking havoc in financial markets throughout the world. Foreign investors pulled out after the global stock market crash of Black Monday on October 19, 1987. Even in the gold market, they waited for gold to go up as stocks dived. It didn't. By the closing bell on the New York Stock Exchange, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged a record 508 points, wiping out all of this year's gains and more. By 1993, both men were down on their luck and they needed a break. The two had expertise, ambition, drive, but it wasn't enough. For their dreams of gold to become a reality,

it would take a third man. Just as their fortunes were at a low ebb, Felderhoff got a phone call from a small-time Canadian mining executive he'd met in Australia back in the 80s. from a small-time Canadian mining executive he'd met in Australia back in the 80s. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. David Walsh was an unlikely savior of faltering dreams. He started a small mining company called Briex Minerals in 1989. The Brie was for his son Brett, the X for exploration, Brie X. Walsh's motto was, quote, If you believe in something enough, you can sell it. But he was never very good at the selling part, according to former business correspondent for Maclean's magazine, Jennifer Wells. To me, David didn't stack up at all.

He didn't have the salesmanship appeal of the standard promoter or the promoters that I knew who were always fascinating characters. He didn't have the refinement of a smart chief executive. He didn't have the social ability to engage comfortably in my experience. And in 1992, Walsh declared personal bankruptcy. Breaks limped along, barely. By the beginning of 1993, he had to make his own luck. His thoughts turned to the Indiana Jones geologist

he'd once met. Maybe he could give him a few leads. Walsh got on the phone to John Felderhoff. The timing was perfect. Felderhoff and a Guzman needed to drum up investment for Boo Sang. Felderhoff and Walsh agreed to meet a month later at a hotel bar in Jakarta.

There's been a long time between drinks for those guys. I think there'd been some pretty tough projects and nobody had ever made, they'd never made it, those guys. So this was their, it was almost like their last chance. But he was a kind of sort of desperado who can pull a rabbit out of the hat. That's the nature of these small mineral exploration companies. One minute you got nothing and you're on the bones of your backside. The next minute you could be worth hundreds of millions of bucks. It's a really crazy kind of industry like that. But Walsh wasn't completely sold on Busan yet. There were still other sites he was looking at.

It worked like this. The Indonesian government would sell the rights to a parcel of land called a property, allowing a company to explore it for a certain period of time. Of course, you wanted to make sure you picked the right property, the one that would yield the most gold for the money you invested in exploration. And you needed experts for that. Walsh brought geologist Kevin Waddell along from Calgary to advise him on which mining properties to pick.

And on the first morning when we got there there was some parade. I don't know why there was a parade but right outside our hotel room we could see a parade on I guess it's one of the main avenues of Jakarta or whatever and and David of came right up, right away with the line. He goes, look Kevin, gee we just barely got here and they're already having a parade for us. That was a pretty funny moment. That kind of started it off right there. Walsh's son Sean was with him on the trip, supposedly as a graduation present. But Kevin Waddell suspected it was because Walsh needed his son's American Express card. If you're wondering how Walsh had any money to invest in gold exploration,

if he needed to borrow money from his son, it's complicated. There was no money in the company. But Walsh and his wife owned stocks in Brix. And with a financial sleight of hand, Walsh manipulated those stock options and managed to raise 200,000. Small potatoes in the mining world, but enough. I'm standing in the lobby of the Sari Pan Pacific. The meeting that sparked the meteoric rise of Brix minerals started right here. I just remember as on one of the main streets of Jakarta and they had like a hundred workers and the grass outside was lush. There were palm trees, nice big palm trees. The hotel itself was five-star. I mean it was first class all the way.

It had a flower shop in it and it had a lobby, a nice lobby and we did meet up with Felderhoff in that lobby a few times. David Walsh, Sean Walsh and Kevin Wedel stayed at this hotel in Jakarta, the Saree Pan Pacific. And it's where the meeting took place, where breex and gold fever began. There was an urgency to everything. It was business-like and they were going to get some sort of deal done. That was pretty apparent.

The dinner was a very formal affair. Kevin Waddell had to change out of his shorts and Hawaiian shirt and into a suit. John Felderhoff, normally a disheveled figure, his glasses held together by tape, was also wearing a suit.

Walsh also suited up, donning a tie, something he hated to do. There was a strict etiquette for these two maverick mining personalities to follow, and their futures depended on it. If you wanted to set up a company, for example, in Indonesia, you had to have, by law, an Indonesian partner. That's Roger Marjorie Banks again.

John Felderhoff suspected he could convince Walsh to invest and get the Indonesian government on side, but needed the dinner to go well. And there was another man at the table, someone who represented an interested third party. Marjorie Banks says no mining deal went through unless you had a businessman. Yes, they were all men with close ties to Indonesian President Suharto. And the very best partner to get was from the top, a member of President Su Saharto's family.

Next best thing would be a general, and after that, you try and find some super rich businessman, and everything would become plain sailing for you. Cali Man, for example, needed a lot of permits. It was still an area with a lot more restrictions than anywhere else in Indonesia. Kevin Waddell remembers there was indeed a pretty big roller present with strong connections to the Indonesian government.

You know, there were some big players and they were all there to, you know, look at money angles and to get things going. This Adam Tobin who was apparently had inroads to Suharto, the president. But their big roller, Adam Tobin, their Indonesian partner, didn't sign on immediately. Walsh didn't either. The next few days were tense, but finally Walsh was in. He agreed to pay 80,000 US dollars for the rights to explore Busan for a certain

period of time, with Felderhof taking control of operations on the ground. Walsh's role was to convince potential investors there could be gold so they'd fund the exploration. And Tobin, the prominent Jakarta businessman with links to Soharto, was on board too. He'd be able to smooth the way for their license to explore the area with exclusive rights. When confidence of a deal was riding high, Felderhoff made a point of putting Michael de Guzman forward as his project partner.

John Felderhoff actually gave me one of Michael de Guzman's cards and gave one to David and made it very clear that any project and any work he was doing in Indonesia for David Walsh and Breaks Minerals, Michael de Guzman would be involved and would be part of the project. I mean, we were told in no uncertain terms that anything John Felderhoff worked on, Michael de Guzman worked on as well. According to Kevin, once the deal was done, John Felderhoff and de Guzman refused to let him be involved in the project. Kevin and David stayed in touch, though.

You know, we just talked kind of lighthearted about how things were going and, you know, the progress being made. Like, you know, back in these days, everything looked like progress. They kept drilling, they kept getting good results. Things kept getting bigger, the tonnage kept growing. Everything looked tickety-boo. Bre-X was something called a junior mining company. Typically, their role was to explore properties to see if they were worth investing in for

bigger companies. To do this, companies like Bre-X had to promote their stock to get the money to fund the exploration. David Walsh needed a credible profile in the press to help draw attention to boosting and encourage investors to buy Brex shares. While Jennifer Wells followed Brex for McLean's magazine, she met David Walsh a couple of times. He decided on the advice of sort of communications or public relations people who were working for the company, that his best bet would be to find a reporter who would be sympathetic to their story in order to go big on a big business profile in the American press that would sort

of set the stage for David Walsh internationally. And did they find that? Well, they did. They found it in Fortune magazine. And Richard Behar is the one who wrote the fantastic story. Yep. It's Richard Behar. Hi, how wrote the fantastic story. Yep. It's Richard Behar.

Hi, how are you? How you doing? Good, I'm just in the middle of putting out a very quick press release. Can I get back to you? Yeah, I do need very much to talk to you. Richard Behar was one of the only journalists to make it to the exploration site in Busan. He recorded hours of interviews with the key players. When my producers got in touch with Behar, they discovered he still had interviews on

cassette tapes stored away in a storage unit in downtown New York. March 20th. Richard, I hope you got... David Walsh, I hope you got the... He dug them out and has given us permission to use these Bre-X tapes. Someone answered questions I have for you now. As per item 17, the date was... Three months after the meeting at Saripan Pacific, David Walsh, Michael Degusman and John Felderhoff were at work exploring the Buseng site.

They had a license to explore the land from January 1993 to December 1993, one year to make a discovery. In October 1993, they drilled the first hole. Nothing. Then they drilled a second hole. Nothing. Things were tense. The men were arguing. Felderhof was losing faith.

It was fast approaching December 18th, the last day they could drill before their license ran out. They only had a matter of days left, but de Guzman wanted to keep going. He said he was certain there was gold. He could smell it. And he knew just where to drill hole three and four. It had come to him in a dream. Do you remember going back when Deguzman was up all night?

He'd figured something out? I wasn't there. I heard the story. You heard the story. I'm trying to bring that to life a little bit. And what's the story you heard? What made them call? That's audio of Richard Behar talking to David Walsh in winter 1997, probing his memory.

After his dream, de Guzman phoned David Walsh. I guess Mike woke up, you know, went to bed thinking about it, woke up in the night thinking about it, went to the exploration office in the camp, got the maps out, geological trends or whatever, and woke Caesar up very excited to confirm his hypotheses. Now, where was Caesar at the time? He would have been asleep. Where though?

At the camp. That's Cesar Puzpos, de Guzman's right-hand man and a senior geologist for Brix. Where would Guzman have been? At the camp. Oh, they both would have been at the camp. That's my understanding, yeah. And he was looking at maps and other geological information. And then suddenly he had a eureka thought. What was it he realized though? I guess this Maradietream something or other, I don't know. He wanted confirmation of his hypothesis, so he woke Caesar up. Now was it also John's hypothesis or no? Not at that point. Um, she's right.

I know this is this is I don't know. Okay. So they drilled the spot apparently pinpointed by de Guzman in his dream. The results came in. Hole three, gold was detected. Hole four was even better. Nothing on this scale had been found in any of the other samples. And each following drill not only reconfirmed Deguzman's eureka moment, but improved upon it. They discovered the mother load. Now this is John's best memory on what he said to you when he woke you up from your sleep.

Yeah. Okay, Algary. I hate to harp on it. No, go ahead. This is the stuff journalism is. Okay. And all he could remember saying was, when you picked up the phone, he said, look, David,

we've got a monster by the tail. You know, he said, suddenly, pardon me, what do you mean? And he said, we've got a monster by the tail. So you can take that saying a few ways. To have a monster by the tail can mean to be in control, guaranteed of success. Or, it was a monster underground, about to be awoken, because John Felderhoff believed they'd only just discovered the tip of its tail. But there's another meaning, But there's another meaning, probably not what Felderhoff meant. If you let go of the tail of a monster, you're in trouble.

It will catch you. But if you hold on, you could also be in trouble. When news hit about the discovery of the gold, Brex began to ascend the stock market at lightning speed. Between December 1993 and May 1996, the price went from barely 20 cents to 200 Canadian dollars a share. At its peak, Briex was valued at $6 billion. People threw their life savings into it. It was heralded as the biggest-ever gold discovery.

At its height, Brix estimated its busing site held almost 80 million ounces of gold. That's 8% of the entire world's gold resources. Well, we heard about Bre-X from reports in the press and particularly the mining press, and we were all as jealous as hell. It was Bre-X had found the one we all hoped to find. The monster was well and truly loose. There'd been nothing like Brix.

It was on an unprecedented scale, and it would make many people rich beyond their wildest dreams. Now I'm returning to this story, traveling through Canada, Indonesia, and the Philippines to uncover why Michael de Guzman falling from the helicopter turned those dreams of gold into a waking nightmare. The Next time on the six billion dollar gold scam, the gold rush. Everybody was getting in on it and what are we going to get? Everybody wanted to get rich.

Everybody was looking at making a quick buck. How a small prairie town in Alberta, Canada was gripped by gold fever. This small community in the middle of nowhere suddenly became the hub of activity for a mining company with a mother lode across the world in Indonesia. But elsewhere, questions were starting to be asked. What if I told you there was no gold there? I'm afraid to tell somebody about this. They can kill me. The $6 billion gold scam is produced by BBC Scotland Productions for the BBC World Service

and CBC. I'm Suzanne Wilton. Our lead producer is Kate Bissell. Producers, Anna Miles, Mark Rickards. Story consultant, Jack Kibble-White. Music and sound design by Hannes Brown. Additional sound design and audio mix by Joel Cox. Executive editor, Heather Kane Darling.

At CBC, Veronica Simmons and Willow Smith are senior producers. Chris Oak is executive producer. Cecil Fernandez is executive producer and Arif Noorani is the director. At the BBC World Service, Anne Dixie is senior podcast producer, and John Manel is the podcast commissioning editor. Thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.