Story by Hamish Broome •
FIVE YEARS ago Byron Bay woman Nyoli Scobie was living the kind of jetsetting luxury life most people dream about, but unbeknown to her, it was too good to be true.
The former advertising sales rep was living in Hollywood doing million-dollar deals with clients who were fighting in their rush to sign on the dotted line.
She couldn’t believe her luck.
But this was a scheme that would wreak financial ruin on hundreds of unwitting investors in Australia, the Middle East, and North America.
For Ms Scobie it all started in February 2012, when she responded to a sales job advertisement for a company called Glamour Nail and invited to a luxury Coopers Shoot mansion where she was given an offer too good to refuse.
‘More money than we’d ever thought of in our lives’
“We were promised we were going to earn more money than we’d ever thought of in our lives, and we were going to travel the world,” she said.
The “entrepreneur” who called himself Daniel Hannah told them about a revolutionary vending machine which could paint polish on nails and print intricate images on them.
It was a brilliant invention but there was just one problem – it didn’t really exist. It hadn’t been made.
But Ms Scobie didn’t know that then. She jumped at the opportunity, and within weeks had sold hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in licensing agreements for the machine covering Australia.
‘It just wrecked people’s lives all over the world’
Ms Scobie said she felt ashamed about being a pawn in the scheme which received millions of dollars from “everyday people” looking for ways to invest retirement money, or equity in their home.
She is still bewildered over the scale of the scheme.
“In one year we sold millions-of-millions of dollars worth of stuff which didn’t even exist,” Ms Scobie said.
She said victims of Mr Hannah’s scheme included a Lennox Head family that lost their entire inheritance and retirement savings while another had a mental breakdown over the losses.
“People lost marriages … a lady in Lebanon, her husband left her and took the kids. She was (removed) from the family,” she said.
“It just wrecked people’s lives all over the world.”
NSW Police would not comment on the status of the investigation into Mr Hannah’s activities, but said no charges had been laid.