ROCKIN RIVER CRIME UNDERWAY DROPS
OLDTIME DRAGS Mission Raceway back in business
Country music festival runs until Saturday
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Two per cent decline in crime in local area
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2012
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85¢+ GST
CCNA
Friday, August 8, 2014
SERVING MISSION SINCE 1908
PUSHING THE PACE
BOB FRIESEN PHOTO
The Mission Marlins hosted the Fraser Valley Regional Championships at the Leisure Centre last weekend. Here, Anna Scott powers through the water in the Div. 1 girls 50 butterfly event. See story page 19.
Loan outlet led to major fraud
Former Mission woman faces prison for $137-million Ponzi scheme Tyler OLSEN ABBOTSFORD NEWS
Seventeen years after the Little Loan Shoppe opened its doors in an Abbotsford strip mall, the now-defunct business’s proprietor is facing decades in jail after pleading guilty to 110 criminal charges in connection with a massive Ponzi scheme. Doris Nelson, a former Mission resident who now lives in Spokane, Wash., pleaded guilty earlier this year to 110 criminal charges in connection with
an investment scheme she ran for more than eight years. An attempt to cancel the plea was denied in late July. Nelson raised about $137 million from at least 650 investors from around the world. The U.S. government considers $35 million of that total “gross proceeds” obtained through the use of wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering. Now, as Nelson awaits sentencing, American officials want that money back – even though Nelson’s com-
ity of them receiving any money, he said the chances were “zero.” Nelson opened her first Little Loan Shoppe on South Fraser Way in Abbotsford in 1997. By 1999, she was collecting money from investors to open stores in Maple Ridge and Chilliwack. A Little Loan Shoppe was located on First Avenue in Mission starting in 1997, according to District of Mission business licence records, although that particular location isn’t mentioned in American court filings. Nelson
pany Little Loan Shoppe, filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Mission lawyer Gordon Ruley said Nelson was a client of his for many years. “I just wouldn’t have expected it from her,” said Ruley, who said he knows of at least four people in Mission who lost money in the scheme, including two who are his clients. One of his clients invested $1.5 million, while another put in hundreds of thousands. When asked about the possibil-
moved to the United States with her new husband in 2001. By the time she closed her Lower Mainland loan shops in the early 2000s, Nelson had begun taking telephone loan applications from Canadians. She expanded the business to the Internet in 2006, according to an American bankruptcy court filing. The Ponzi scheme began in 1999, when Nelson first started using money from new and existing investors to pay for annual Continued on 3
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