Infinity 2 Global’s Pyramid Scheme That Defrauded Investors of $34M
How three executives built a $34 million machine that consumed 96% of its own investors, dressed it up with fake celebrity endorsements and defective software, and walked away with millions before the FBI shut it down.
How the Machine Was Built: Fees, Tiers, and a Binary Trap
In February 2013, Richard Maike incorporated Infinity 2 Global in the Western District of Kentucky. The pitch was network marketing for digital products. On paper, it looked like dozens of other multilevel marketing operations. In practice, it was engineered from the first day to funnel money upward.
The structure worked like this: anyone who wanted to participate had to pay to join at one of four membership tiers. Novices paid $100 upfront. Players paid $400. High Rollers paid $600. On top of those initiation costs, every member also paid a $19.95 annual software access fee and a mandatory membership renewal each year. Those renewal fees ran from $300 to $900 per year depending on level. The financial obligations never stopped.
At the top sat the “Emperor” tier, the engine of the entire scheme. Emperors paid $5,000 for year one and $2,400 per year after that. In return, they were promised two things that lower tiers could never access: bigger recruitment bonuses and a pro-rata share of profits from an online casino that I2G had contracted out to a third-party vendor. That casino split was structured as 30% to the vendor, 70% to I2G, and then that 70% split 50/50, with half going to I2G itself and the other half divided equally among all active Emperors.
The compensation plan was marketed under the name the “Infinite Opportunity Plan,” which offered five distinct bonus pathways: Fast Start Bonuses (a flat 10% on every new recruit’s initiation fee, with no product sale required), Binary Income credits tied to recruiting new members at every level, Star Matching Bonuses based on downline recruiting activity, Leadership Pools offering cash bonuses as high as $10,000 for completing binary recruiting cycles, and the casino Revenue Share. Every single one of these mechanisms rewarded bringing in new bodies. None of them required selling any product to anyone outside the scheme.
The court’s opinion specifically noted that under the Binary Income system, an IBO could earn recruiting credit from a new member recruited ten or fifteen levels beneath them in the pyramid. The mathematical reality of a binary compensation structure is explosive: one person at the top, two beneath them, four beneath those, and so on, creating exponential growth in the number of people at each new layer who all need to recruit to break even. The concurring opinion in the Sixth Circuit’s ruling explains it plainly: when a pyramid reaches five levels deep in a structure where each person recruits just two others, the bottom layer alone contains more people than all four layers above it combined.
Doyce Barnes, I2G’s Vice President of Sales, prepared a revenue projection spreadsheet in March 2013, a month after the company was incorporated. That spreadsheet projected the company grossing more than $30 million by the end of its first year. Every single dollar in those projections came from distributor payments. Zero dollars were projected from outside product sales. This was the company’s financial plan, documented before a single investor had joined.
By the end of 2013, I2G had sold 7,000 distributor packages. The money was real. The products were not. The I2GTouch social media platform, which members were charged extra fees to access, was never finished. Songstergram never launched. Neither generated a single dollar of income for any distributor. Emperors who bought into the casino-profits pitch found their monthly payouts top out at approximately $90 in the first month, then settle into a range of $15 to $20 per month. The annual renewal cost for an Emperor was $2,400, which works out to $200 per month. The math was never close.
Emperor investors paid $2,400/year in ongoing fees. Actual casino income quickly settled to approximately $240/year, less than 10% of the annual renewal cost. The $90 first-month peak was never repeated.
The Lie Catalogue: Celebrity Endorsements, Fake Checks, and a Dead Man’s Software
I2G’s leadership did not simply omit unflattering details. They constructed a library of specific, documented falsehoods delivered to investors at in-person conferences, on conference calls, and through YouTube videos. The court record catalogs these misrepresentations in detail, and the Sixth Circuit’s opinion reviewed them individually in its sufficiency-of-evidence analysis.
The software products at the center of I2G’s pitch were a direct fraud. The I2GTouch platform was developed by a contractor named Rocky Wright, whose firm had already declared bankruptcy before a single I2G conference was held. When Wright appeared onstage at an I2G conference to discuss the company’s pending software, leadership introduced him to the audience as “Bob Johnson”, because, as the court found, “Wright’s software firm had recently declared bankruptcy, and the company feared that audience members might look him up.” There is no softer way to say this: they gave a man a fake name so that investors could not discover he was bankrupt. The Touch platform itself was not original technology; it was a near-copy of a product called “Qubeey,” which Wright’s firm had already offered online for free. I2G charged members from $25 to $200 per month for access to a defective, unfinished version of something that already existed at no cost.
Richard Maike told prospective recruits during a conference call that “the company was offered $100 million” for the Touch software alone. The court found this statement to be baseless. The offer never existed. It was invented to make a worthless, glitch-ridden, never-finished social platform sound like a technology acquisition target.
Faraday Hosseinipour was particularly active in online recruiting through YouTube videos she called “Hangouts.” In those videos, she told viewers to “join I2G, get your share of the 150 billion gambling pie, which is supposed to triple in the next two years.” She told prospective recruits that musicians Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Lady Gaga, and even Prince had agreed to endorse Songstergram. None of those endorsement agreements existed. Songstergram never launched. It generated zero income for any distributor.
At three separate in-person conferences, Anzalone and Hosseinipour stood before audiences and held up oversized, six-figure checks, sometimes for amounts they had never actually received. These were props. They were not documentation of real earnings; they were theater designed to create the impression that top-tier distributors were collecting enormous returns. Potential investors in the audience made financial decisions based on seeing those checks.
Doyce Barnes, on an October 2013 conference call, told potential investors they could just “sit on the couch” and make money from the casino. He described the casino revenue stream as “a passive position, that anyone can come in and share in the pool equally for one year,” adding “there’s nothing they gotta do except sit there and draw their money from the pool.” The actual casino payout record shows that passive income peaked at $90 in month one and dropped to $15-$20 per month afterward, while the monthly cost to remain an Emperor was approximately $200.
The Math Catches Up: 96% Losses, a Name Change, and an FBI Investigation
By early 2014, the reality of I2G was becoming impossible to hide. Distributors who had paid thousands of dollars to join were seeing the software they were promised either fail to launch or malfunction when it did. The Touch platform was rife with glitches and distributors were never actually allowed to sell it to consumers outside the network. The casino payouts had cratered. Outside observers began writing about the company’s structure online, and some distributors contacted state regulators or threatened class-action lawsuits.
Richard Anzalone, one of I2G’s inner-circle members who later cooperated with the government and testified against the other defendants, described the situation plainly: “the Internet was just really bad on I2G.” Hosseinipour, rather than address the criticism, worked to have negative content removed from the internet. When one distributor accused I2G directly in writing of being a “classic Ponzi organization” whose sales organization was “banned from selling the product,” and whose products were “truly low quality,” the company’s internal response was to suppress it, not to correct it.
Maike’s solution to mounting public scrutiny in July 2014 was to change the company’s name from Infinity 2 Global to Global 1 Entertainment (G1E). Not the products, not the compensation structure, not the executive team. The name. The scheme continued operating under the new brand until the revenue dried up completely. By the end of 2014, I2G/G1E had ceased operations entirely. By that point, it had collected more than $34 million from participants, of which only approximately $500,000 came from any source outside the distributor network itself. The remaining $33.5 million was participants paying each other, with the inevitable majority of that money flowing upward to leadership and the top tier.
The FBI began investigating I2G near the end of 2014 and concluded it was a pyramid scheme whose management and top-tier distributors had defrauded its lower-tier participants. A federal grand jury indicted Maike, Barnes, Hosseinipour, Anzalone, and two other top-tier distributors. Anzalone took a plea deal and testified for the government. The two other distributors also took plea deals. After a 25-day trial in 2022, the jury convicted Maike, Barnes, and Hosseinipour on both counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Anzalone died shortly after the trial concluded.
The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Numbers Can’t Capture
The $34 million figure is real, and it is damning. But a dollar amount attached to a fraud conviction tells you about the scope of the scheme, not about the texture of the harm. The people who paid into Infinity 2 Global were not nameless abstractions in a court filing. They were people who believed they had found a way to build something for themselves. Multilevel marketing, for all its predatory realities, targets people who have already decided that traditional employment is not going to get them where they need to go. I2G’s marketing was aimed squarely at that frustration. The pitch was not subtle: join at the Emperor level, sit back, collect passive casino income, and watch your investment grow. That promise was a lie from the first day Barnes put together his projections. But the people who believed it were not fools. They were targets.
Consider what an Emperor-level investment actually meant for an ordinary person in 2013. Five thousand dollars upfront, plus $19.95 in software fees, plus a membership renewal of up to $900 per year. For a household operating near the median income, that is not an abstract investment. That is rent. That is a car payment. That is the cost of a medical emergency. The court record shows that ten witnesses testified at trial that they bought Emperor packages solely because of the casino revenue promise, with no intention of recruiting anyone. These were people who believed they were making a legitimate investment in a passive income stream, not that they were handing money to a scheme that had already decided, before they arrived, that their money would flow to the top tier. When the casino payouts settled at $15 to $20 per month and stayed there, those investors were losing approximately $180 per month just on the annual renewal math, with no product to sell, no functional software to demonstrate, and no recourse.
The betrayal was layered. It was not simply that the product failed. Products fail. What happened at I2G was that the leadership knew, early and clearly, that the math did not work for the people beneath them. Anzalone, who was one of the inner-circle figures and later a government cooperator, testified that he discussed the critical observers’ conclusions with Hosseinipour, that those observers called I2G a “Ponzi organization,” and that he thought those criticisms were “valid.” He thought the criticisms were valid, and the two of them continued recruiting new participants anyway. People who joined after that moment were walking into a scheme whose own leadership privately acknowledged was fraudulent.
The fake checks at the conferences deserve their own accounting. Standing in front of an audience of people who are considering whether to spend $5,000 they may or may not have, holding up an oversized check for a six-figure amount that you never received, is not puffery. It is a deliberate act of psychological manipulation. The people in that audience left those conferences with a specific belief: that people like them were collecting enormous returns from this program. That belief was manufactured. The checks were props. The amounts were lies. The audience members went home and made real financial decisions based on fake evidence that had been staged for their benefit.
The celebrity endorsement fabrications belong in the same category. When Hosseinipour told people online that Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Lady Gaga, and Prince had all agreed to endorse Songstergram, she was not exaggerating the company’s potential. She was inventing a social proof that did not exist. For someone evaluating whether to trust a new platform, a roster of A-list music celebrities endorsing the product is meaningful information. It signals legitimacy, cultural relevance, and staying power. None of it was true. Songstergram never launched. The celebrities had no relationship with the company whatsoever. The people who made financial decisions in part because of those names were defrauded by fiction.
And then there is the systematic suppression of critics. When early, sophisticated observers sent detailed written analyses to I2G leadership explaining exactly why the structure was a pyramid scheme, the company did not engage with the analysis. Hosseinipour worked to have critical content removed from the internet. When a distributor raised the pyramid concern internally, her documented response was: “There is no alternative except to bury him.” The company that 96% of investors lost money in actively silenced the people who were trying to warn the next wave of recruits. Every person who joined I2G after those critics were silenced joined into a lie that had been specifically protected from scrutiny.
Legal Receipts: What the Court Record Actually Says
Every quotation below is drawn directly from the Sixth Circuit’s published opinion in United States v. Maike et al., Nos. 22-6114/6121/23-5029/5560/5561/5563, decided June 26, 2025. No paraphrasing. No invention.
“The company extracted some $34 million from investors who paid to join the scheme, nearly all of whom lost money.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 2
“Barnes’s projections of the company’s revenue were based 100% on payments from distributors, with zero projected income from outside sources.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 7
“Maike lied to prospective recruits about the casino’s monthly profits; and after monthly payouts to Emperors dropped to circa $17 per month and stayed there, the reality (a jury could easily infer) was that these defendants knew that Emperors would not recoup their investments from casino revenues.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 7
“Maike also lied about the company having been offered $100 million for the Touch software alone.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 7
“The defendants also knew, but concealed from prospective recruits, that Touch was nearly identical to a product that Rocky Wright’s (bankrupt) firm had offered online for free.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 7
“Hosseinipour misrepresented to prospective recruits that ‘passive income’ would allow them to recoup their investments without any recruitment of new members on their part. Barnes made the same misrepresentation to prospective recruits in an October 2013 conference call, telling them they could just ‘sit on the couch’ and make money on the casino.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 8
“Hosseinipour lied about celebrity endorsements of Songstergram (claiming that even Prince had ‘signed up’).” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 8
“The defendants also misrepresented to conference attendees the amounts that Anzalone and Hosseinipour received as distributors, by having them display oversized six-figure checks for amounts they did not receive.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 8
“Anzalone testified that he discussed with Hosseinipour the more sophisticated observers’ criticisms of I2G—including that it was a ‘Ponzi organization’—and that he thought those criticisms were ‘valid.’ Yet the duo continued to recruit new victims.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 8
“Moreover, when another distributor accused I2G of running a pyramid scheme, Hosseinipour was unequivocal about what the company should do: ‘There is no alternative except to bury him.'” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 8
“The scheme yielded more than $34 million in revenue for the company, nearly all of it extracted from the participants themselves; 96% of participants lost money; and the defendants themselves reaped millions.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 8
“Join I2G. Get your share of the 150 billion gambling pie, which is supposed to triple in the next two years.” Faraday Hosseinipour, YouTube video, cited in Majority Opinion, Page 4
“Join as an emperor, and you do not have to recruit, and you do not have to gamble. Can we all say passive income?” Faraday Hosseinipour, YouTube video, cited in Majority Opinion, Page 4
“After reviewing this business model, it’s clear to see Infinity2Global is [relying] on new member money paying for founding member incomes. This is a classic Ponzi organization. . . . Here you have a sales organization which is banned from selling the product. . . . All three so-called products are third-party programs and are truly low quality.” Unnamed distributor email, cited in Majority Opinion, Page 5
“Nowhere on the corporate site is there a product descriptions [sic] and the exact features offered by the social media platform. . . . Nowhere in the compensation document says that money is earned for the sale of products. But it says ‘if you buy this package’ you ‘will earn this rank’. Meaning you can purchase positioning. Nowhere in the compensation plan document states that money is earn [sic] through retailing products to customers, and there is no place for a customer to purchase a product.” Second unnamed commenter email to Anzalone and Hosseinipour, cited in Majority Opinion, Page 5
“The exciting part of [I2G] was, and what got us going, was the rev—the, excuse me, profit sharing of the—of the casino. That’s what really got the program going. . . . [M]any people believed, you know, I get—I need to get as many shares as possible, because this thing could be huge.” Richard Anzalone, trial testimony, cited in Majority Opinion, Page 13
“Barnes made the same representation in the October 2013 conference call to potential investors, when he described the casino revenue as ‘a passive position, that anyone can come in and share in the pool equally for one year.’ He added, ‘there’s nothing they gotta do except sit there and draw their money from the pool.’ Maike, who was on the same call, said nothing.” Kethledge, J., Majority Opinion, Page 12
“I2G’s promotional materials, among other things, make clear it operated as an illegal pyramid scheme. . . . The government proved the object scheme to defraud based on overwhelming evidence that I2G was a pyramid, as measured against Koscot.” Nalbandian, J., Concurring Opinion, Page 24
“These products, especially the Touch, were limited if not useless. . . . Though the Touch wasn’t functional, I2G didn’t wait to start charging its members for the opportunity to access it for an added fee (from $25 for Novices up to $200 for Emperors). Beyond that, the Touch was an expensive (and defective) knockoff of Qubeey—an existing, free-to-use product in the same market.” Nalbandian, J., Concurring Opinion, Page 23
“[T]hey were a fig leaf to hide the true purpose of the scheme: quick cash for those at the top of the pyramid.” Nalbandian, J., Concurring Opinion, Page 23
“As each level grows, the scale of the pyramid’s fraud also grows because with each new level its reach exceeds the total headcount of the layers above it. So when this pyramid has five levels, the sum of the first four levels (5+25+125+625=780) is less than the fifth level alone (3,125).” Nalbandian, J., Concurring Opinion, Page 16, footnote 1
“I2G was operating as a fraudulent pyramid scheme in which inflated returns were paid to early promoters in order to induce later victim-investors to invest in the company.” Second Superseding Indictment, quoted in Nalbandian, J., Concurring Opinion, Page 19-20
“It would be a considerable paradox if the worse the securities fraud, the less applicable the securities laws.” SEC v. Lauer, 52 F.3d 667, 670 (7th Cir. 1995) (Posner, J.), quoted in Nalbandian, J., Concurring Opinion, Page 33
Societal Impact Mapping: The Damage Beyond the Courtroom
Environmental Degradation
I2G was not an industrial polluter. No smokestacks, no chemical spills, no Superfund sites. But the environmental accounting of a $34 million pyramid scheme is not zero, and dismissing it as such misunderstands how financial predation and environmental harm intersect at the community level.
Consider the geographic concentration of this scheme. I2G was incorporated in Kentucky, tried in the Western District of Kentucky, and its in-person conferences were held across the country targeting communities where multilevel marketing has historically found fertile ground, places where manufacturing jobs have contracted, where rural broadband promises kept getting deferred, and where people were looking for alternative income sources. When households in those communities lose thousands of dollars to a scheme like this, the economic shock is not abstract. Families that lose $5,000 or more to I2G are families with reduced capacity to maintain property, to pay utility bills that keep homes efficient, to absorb the cost of local environmental compliance when it affects their small businesses. Financial predation compresses the margins that buffer communities against degradation at every level.
I2G’s digital product portfolio, including the promised online casino, fantasy sports platform, and sports book, also represents a sector that carries its own environmental footprint. Data centers and server infrastructure for online gambling platforms require substantial energy consumption. I2G contracted with a third-party vendor to operate its casino. The infrastructure that powered even a small, fraudulent gambling operation consumes real resources. While the casino was a fraction of what was promised, the scheme’s architecture, had it succeeded at scale, would have built a substantial digital footprint on top of an extraction of community wealth. The concurring opinion notes that I2G’s timing, operating from 2013 to 2014, preceded the legal expansion of online gambling in the US following Murphy v. NCAA (2018). Had the scheme scaled to its projected 7,000-plus Emperor tier target, the environmental costs of a large-scale illegal gambling operation running on falsely obtained investor capital would have been real.
Public Health
The public health consequences of financial fraud are documented and measurable. The academic and clinical literature on financial victimization links significant monetary loss to elevated rates of depression, anxiety disorders, sleep disruption, and, in severe cases, suicidal ideation. I2G extracted money from approximately 7,000 distributor packages by end of 2013, with the scheme continuing through 2014. With 96% of participants losing money, the pool of financially injured individuals numbers in the thousands. These are not marginal losses for most of them. The Emperor entry cost alone was $5,000, a sum that represents weeks or months of take-home pay for median-income households.
The psychological harm of this particular scheme carries an additional dimension that generic financial loss does not. I2G’s victims were not passive investors who bought a stock that tanked. They were actively recruited. They attended conferences. They watched people they were supposed to trust hold up six-figure checks and promise passive income. They were told by a person on a stage that Britney Spears had endorsed the product they were investing in. The fraud was personal, interpersonal, and conducted in community settings. The betrayal of that personal trust compounds the psychological impact of the financial loss. Research on affinity fraud, the type of fraud that uses social and community trust as its primary recruitment mechanism, consistently shows higher rates of psychological harm than impersonal investment fraud, precisely because the victim’s trust in their community network is damaged alongside their finances.
The recruiting structure of I2G also has a documented secondary health consequence: it recruited from within social networks. The “downline” model means that a distributor brought in their friends, family members, and community contacts. The court record shows Hosseinipour using YouTube Hangouts, a format designed to feel intimate and conversational, to recruit viewers. When the scheme collapsed and the losses became real, the social networks that had been used as recruiting channels became networks of shared financial trauma. Relationships between people who had recruited each other into losses carry a specific and lasting harm that money alone cannot measure.
The concurring opinion’s explicit acknowledgment that “pyramid schemes will always result in a financial loss to the individuals who are last to join” is particularly relevant to public health. The mathematical inevitability of loss for later joiners means that I2G was always going to produce a large population of financially injured people. This was not a business that went wrong. It was a mechanism for producing harm, operating on a timeline determined only by when recruitment slowed enough to stop the cash flow.
Economic Inequality
The wealth transfer mechanics of I2G are, in the court’s own words, the definition of a scheme that “consume[s] its own participants.” The $34 million that flowed through I2G did not circulate broadly. The court record is explicit: most of the money went to the company’s top tier, including the three defendants. The trial record includes ten witnesses who testified that they bought Emperor packages solely for the casino revenue promise, with no intention of recruiting. These were ordinary investors, not insiders. They paid $5,000 or more apiece and received, at most, a few months of $90 casino checks before their returns collapsed. The defendants received millions. The math of that transfer is the math of economic inequality compressed into a single corporate structure.
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