Too Good To Be True Playing A Pyramid, Jeri Dial Lost Money In The Dream Scheme - Now She Is Fighting Hard To Get It Back
Jeri Dial of the Spokane Valley suffered from a bout of poor judgment and lousy timing last spring. It cost her $1,500.
She’s hoping that persistence will make up for it, at least partially, later this month.
Last April, Dial gave a man she didn’t know $1,500, convinced the investment would pay a $12,000 return. She dreamed of using that money to open a coffee house in Coeur d’Alene.
It didn’t pay off.
The pyramid scheme she bought into tumbled in on itself the next day when authorities announced it was illegal.
“I gave him the money on a Friday,” Dial said. “Saturday, it came out in the paper that it was all illegal. I never saw my money again.”
Instead of being $12,000 to the good, Dial found herself $1,500 in the hole.
The Coeur d’Alene coffee house of her dreams turned into a vending cart in Pullman.
Dial, 54 and a 39-year resident of the Valley, spent the last year working to get even.
“I’m doing everything I can to get my money back,” she said.
Her battle continues June 13 when she’ll be in the Kootenai County Courthouse in Coeur d’Alene trying to convince an appeals judge to force the man to whom she gave the money - David Lohman of Kootenai County - to give it back.
It’s been a long, frustrating road for both Dial and Lohman.
Lohman, owner of a tavern outside Coeur d’Alene, sighed this week when contacted by a reporter.
“Oh yeah, my good buddy, Jeri,” he said.
Lohman contends that both he and Dial took a risk when they joined the pyramid scheme. He shouldn’t be held responsible for Dial losing her gamble, Lohman said.
“I think she’s wrong in all this,” Lohman said. “I didn’t do anything any more than she did. Anybody who didn’t think this was a high-risk gamble was stupid.”
Lohman, who won $12,000 in the scheme, said he in no way defrauded Dial or tried to convince her to give him the money. In fact, he said, he never met Dial until earlier this year, when he met her in court.
Dial admits she was naive when she decided to invest in the “Unconditional Giving Matrix,” a scam that swept through North Idaho and Eastern Washington last year.
Participants paid $1,500 each for a spot in a 15-space matrix that resembled a pyramid.
When all the spaces in the matrix filled up, the person at the top of the pyramid would collect all the other participants’ $1,500 payments, or $12,000.
All participants were told they would eventually climb to the top of a matrix and get $12,000. All they had to do was recruit people to join.
More than 440 people are believed to have taken part in the scheme, which violates the law in both Idaho and Washington.
“I got sucked into this pyramid thing,” Dial said. “I didn’t know it was illegal.”
That is, until it was front-page news in two states.
People started bailing out of the scam, and more than $329,000 was returned to participants.
Dial never got her money back.
She immediately launched a search for Lohman. She wasn’t able to find him, she said, until she hired a private investigator.
The investigator managed to track him down.
Once Dial discovered who had her money, she decided to sue in Kootenai County small claims court to get it back.
She went into the March hearing confident and came out disillusioned.
Judge Neil Walter ruled against her, saying both she and Lohman went into the scheme with their eyes open, so she didn’t deserve her money back.
Undaunted, Dial appealed the ruling.
In an effort to bolster her appeal, she took out classified advertisements in Coeur d’Alene newspapers looking for people who had lost money in the scheme and successfully sued to get their money back.
Through that ad she heard of one such person: Troy Siron of Rathdrum.
Kootenai County court documents show Siron successfully sued a Rathdrum woman last August, winning back the $1,500 he gave her as part of the “Unconditional Giving Matrix.”
Dial said that’s a precedent that just might swing luck in her favor when she goes before Judge Paul McCabe to argue her appeal.
“The law says you can’t profit from an illegal action,” Dial said. “(Lohman) profited from one. I don’t want to profit. I just want my money back.”
Lohman’s not volunteering to give it back.
“I still don’t feel I’ve done anything wrong,” he said. “It’s just another case of someone not taking responsibility for their actions. If she couldn’t afford to lose the $1,500, why did she get into it in the first place?”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color)