A Master Conman in His Own Words

**Paul Regan** (0:08)
Hello, my name is Paul Regan. I'm the CEO and founder of Next Level Holdings. How are you?

**Ryan Knutson** (0:15)
This is the voice of Paul Regan.

**Paul Regan** (0:21)
This is Paul Regan, chairman and co-founder of Yield Bank. How are you?

**Ryan Knutson** (0:25)
Regan ran two investment firms, and he spent a lot of time on the phone, pitching prospective clients.

**Paul Regan** (0:34)
This is Paul Regan with Next Level Holdings. How are you?

**Ryan Knutson** (0:37)
Hello?

**Paul Regan** (0:38)
Yes, good morning. My name is Paul Regan with Next Level Holdings. How are you?

**Ryan Knutson** (0:42)
I'm good.

**Paul Regan** (0:43)
Okay. So we have a call book today to go over your retirement income protection.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:50)
What is he trying to get these people to do?

**Jason Zweig** (0:52)
Trust him.

**Paul Regan** (0:54)
I'm here to see if I can clear up any questions you have, answer any questions you have, and give you comfort, explain the product. If you have a couple of minutes, I'd like to do that.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:07)
What Paul Regan had to offer sounded pretty amazing.
An investment with a guaranteed return of 10 to 15 percent. And not only were the returns really high, he said there was no downside.

**Paul Regan** (1:21)
Let me be very clear. There is zero risk of loss here. We have a guaranteed annuity that pays up to 15 percent per annum.
Okay.

**Jason Zweig** (1:31)
Sounds good.

**Jonathan Guzman** (1:34)
That's pretty high percentage, isn't it?

**Ryan Knutson** (1:37)
It is.
Our colleague Jason Zweig has been writing about investments for decades. When he caught wind of Paul Regan and what he was selling, Jason wanted to know how Regan got people to fall for this pitch.

**Jason Zweig** (1:54)
Offerings like this are very common. The reason it's a cliche to say, if it's too good to be true, it probably is, is because there are a lot of offerings in the financial industry that sound too good to be true and are too good to be true.
And this was one of them.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:12)
Jason says that Regan's clients were often in dire straits. They had health problems. They were retired or getting ready to retire.
And Regan was really good at building trust with them.

**Jason Zweig** (2:24)
These people were ripe for the picking.
I've also started to become a bit cynical in my old age. But I think no matter how cynical you are about the financial industry, maybe you're not cynical enough.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:44)
Jason has covered many scams and frauds in his career, but not one like this. Because as Jason investigated Regan's scheme, he obtained dozens of recordings that gave him a rare look at how this scam actually played out.
A portrait of a conman and his victims.

**Jason Zweig** (3:03)
He's listening for people's points of vulnerability.

**Paul Regan** (3:10)
Let's give you the benefit and the blessing of feeling that security, feeling that security the moment the first payment comes.

**Jason Zweig** (3:20)
And once they started to talk, he would pick up immediately on whatever made them potentially vulnerable.

**Paul Regan** (3:33)
This product was built for someone that did not want to ever consider the possibility of risk.

**Jason Zweig** (3:40)
And that was what he then would talk about, and that's how he got them on the hook.

**Paul Regan** (3:45)
I gotta tell you, you've touched my heart with the use and with the need. I can't think of anybody more deserving.

**Ryan Knutson** (3:55)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, July 13th.
Coming up on the show, a portrait of a Master Conman, in his own words, and how he was eventually brought down.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:24)
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**Ryan Knutson** (5:00)
Jason started looking into Paul Regan in 2024
It started with a very simple tip. Someone had heard about this investment he was offering and suggested Jason look into it. So he started poking around.

**Jason Zweig** (5:13)
The first story we ran, which was in August of 2024, essentially just asked a bunch of questions like, huh, really?
What's going on here? And the extremely high returns didn't make sense to me. The guarantees and the insurance didn't really make sense.