I just uploaded the complete text from Melquist’s affidavit, sworn to in court in October of 2007. These are his own words under the influence of a lawyer.
Truth is elusive. (Look for the military planes that fly him around.)
I took the greyhound down to the courthouse in Lane County yesterday. After about a half hour in the archives room, I was able to uncover Melquist’s affidavits filed in case numbers 10-90-04412, -04413, and -04414. These three documents are nearly identical and were all filed in support of a motion to drop charges on him. (The claim seems to be that the authorities had plenty of chances to extradite him from Pennsylvania back to Oregon, but never did, and therefore he did not get his speedy trial.) In the affidavit he admits to several run-ins with the law way back when he was in college in the 90s. Here’s a snippet to hold us until I can get these scanned in:
“Beginning in 1990, I was in and out of Centre County Prison and Lackawanna County Prison a number of times; mostly serving sentence for Bad Checks, but never for more than 30 days, until 1992.
“On April 29th, 1992, I was arrested in Lakawanna Co. I remember this date because it was the first day of the Los Angeles riots. I was held as a fugitive for 14 days and released. Oregon did not extradite….
“On November 30, 1992, I pled guilty to 3 Counts of Bad Checks and 1 Count of Theft by Receiving in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. I was held in custody until my sentencing on March 30, 1993. In May, the sentencing judge allowed me to participate in the work release program starting on July 1, 1993….
“After my release, I was placed on parole through September 3, 2004….”
More later.
Yesterday, I went down to the courthouses in Multnomah and Washington Counties. I systematically went through the public records and recorded filing dates, case numbers, and other information. This morning I used that information to update Melquist’s Rap Sheet. There are 33 lines in it now. I’d still like to fill out the descriptions a bit more, but a casual glance gives you the scope of this guy’s shady history. All these are from the state of Oregon.
I’d be interested if readers have information from other states.
After leaving the Portland area, Melquist ended up eventually in Las Vegas where he started his scamming again. Read the story about Purple Valley now.
Troy Allen Melquist works by gaining your confidence and getting you to invest money, directly or indirectly, in a business.
If you are working with him at a company, he might convince you to leave and start up a new venture with him. He will tell you that he has expertise and experience in an area and connections to people who have resources. At the beginning his ideas will seem legitimate, but a basic background check should raise suspicions. The fact that most people are not suspicious by nature and don’t check him out allows his scams to fly under the radar long enough for you to get hooked in. In the beginning phases, he’ll contribute small amounts of money and legitimate help in an effort to bolster your confidence in him.
However, at some point in the new venture things will start to go wrong. Of course, most start ups experience many typical problems related to (for example) technical projects getting out of control, or just basic cash flow issues. It may be difficult to determine if the problems you are facing are the typical types of problems, or stories that he will spin as a part of a deliberate scam to siphon funds out of your business. Melquist will position himself in your new venture to (a) have access to some technical project you don’t understand completely, and (b) have access to the money coming into that project (from you or from your clients).
As you get suspicious of his activities, he will first blame the problems on technical issues or the other ordinary things that go wrong with businesses. Then he’ll start to blame other people, often investors who promised money but haven’t delivered yet, as he did with “Butch” in the Purple Valley episode. Or he’ll route information through previously unheard of third parties, as he did with the accountant “Natalia” in the RedcellX scam. These investors and associates will as likely as not be completely fictional people. He’ll go to great lengths to string people along at this stage. Analyzing Melquist’s outbox showed that he attempted to carry on dialogs between his “Natalia” persona and several RedcellX employees for a few weeks. This is an effort to buy time.
If those runarounds don’t work, he’ll get emotional and tell you a story to gain your sympathy or just to throw you off guard. These storied may be true or false. I don’t know if he has prostate cancer (a claim he made in the Purple Valley scam). But I have confirmed that his daughter does have a serious medical condition.
Once he sees that you’ve seen through him, he’ll start to play hardball by threatening legal action. His fake “lawyer” (actually himself) will send you a phony cease and desist letter. He may threaten to sue people or organizations around you. He may make threats of violence against people you know and care about. (So far he has not carried through on any of these actions.) He is simply trying to frighten you into backing down — and also to get you to start weighing the costs of prosecuting him in the hopes that you’d rather cut your losses and give up.
He doesn’t like publicity of any of this, because his methods require that people trust him, which in turn means that his past needs to remain hidden from his future victims. When we published the RedcellX story on our website and got the local weekly to name him as rogue of the week, these activities were what effectively put an end to that scam.