The founder of the Embassy of Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations Church, otherwise known as (Embassy of God) in Kiev, Ukraine, reputed as the third largest congregation in Europe, Pastor Sunday Adelaja, has accused Christian leaders in Nigeria of inadvertently aiding the popularity of the controversial deposit money scheme, MMM.
The Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) scheme, which is similar to a Ponzi or pyramid scheme, gained rapid popularity in Nigeria, gaining millions of subscribers within one year of its introduction, while its website became the third most visited in the country. The scheme celebrated its one year anniversary in Nigeria in November.
However, the sudden announcement that the accounts of subscribers had been frozen for 30 days, on December 15, sparked widespread panic across the country and fuelled rumours that scheme had collapsed.
Adelaja made his stand known, in an article entitled, ‘Why Every Pastor Must Take a Stand Against MMM: I Am Compelled by My Personal Pain,’ published in his personal blog, sundayadelajablog.com. It was the fifth instalment of a proposed seven-part article on the subject.
The clergyman also shared his own personal experience with a similar scheme in his Ukrainian church between 2005 and 2008, which resulted in a lawsuit being filed against him, while the Ukrainian government also placed an indefinite travel ban on him.
While noting that churches with sizeable congregations are common targets for promoters of such schemes as MMM, he added that the naivety of most pastors which made them acquiesce to the uncertain propositions of the promoters ”is one of the reasons why MMM Nigeria has experienced such a huge growth and success in a very short time”.
“While we (church leaders) were looking at the crowd of twenty five thousand people who come to pray as church members, we didn’t know that there are other people outside of the church who have their own understanding of any crowd. To them, this was a readymade market that could be defrauded of their hard earned money,” Adelaja stressed, in an apparent reference to his own congregation.
He further stated: “I have personally watched a video by a so called pastor in Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries promoting MMM. I have also read and seen photographs of members of RCCG (Redeemed Christian Church of God) actually doing presentation for MMM in their churches. The reason I am saying this is because the method is the same. Somebody that you trust is selling an idea to you that you don’t bother to research and investigate because of your trust for that person. This way a lot of sincere and innocent brethren have fallen prey to the trap and deception of schemes like MMM.”
He said promoters of the MMM scheme have deliberately targeted Nigeria and other African countries because the fraudulent nature of their activities had already been exposed in Europe.
“When it comes to Ponzi schemes and organisations like MMM, they actually operate by showing rewards and benefits to church members. They promise people higher returns on investments, more than could be given by any other business organisation. So if MMM had attempted to infiltrate the Embassy of God, that could have been easy to detect because MMM was already scandalously famous for being a scam. At this time, the founder of MMM, Sergey Mavrodi, had already been convicted for fraudulently defrauding 15 million people of their money in Russia, so that could have raised a red flag in me and my members.”
Adelaja added that those that targeted his own church had used a respected and long-standing youth leader to make the scheme appear credible.
“In our case, I sent one of my pastors to investigate; he came back with a positive response. So I asked him the second question that who was it that was behind it, to which he mentioned the name of a visible youth leader, who I knew had been in the church for the past ten years. I knew for sure that such a person cannot have any bad intention so I didn’t have any cause for alarm, or so I thought.
“What I never knew however was that even though this young man probably never had any evil intention, but in the real sense he had partnered with other people who were not part of the church, whose intentions we could not guarantee.”
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