Texas AG sues group accused of targeting Black community in multimillion-dollar scam

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against “Blessings in No Time,” a scam in which people were promised a “blessing” of money eight times the amount of their donation if they contributed to the organization.

The founders of the group from Prosper, Texas, are accused of promoting the pyramid scheme and scamming tens of millions of dollars from people primarily in the Black community in Texas and across the country, according to the lawsuit filed in District Court in Collin County. People were promised if they gave money to BINT, they would receive eight times that amount in return if they recruited other people to join, the suit says.

Victims paid between $1,400 to $1,425 and were promised a return of over $11,200 each if they recruited others, Paxton said in a news release Tuesday. BINT also promised each person the right to receive a full refund, but this was also false, he said. BINT owners admitted their refund account is empty even as many refund requests have gone unpaid, Paxton said.

One victim of the scheme said BINT presented itself as a “Godly, ALL-Black, socially conscious gifting community that came about on the tail-end of a lot of this past summer protest,” according to a statement included in the suit.

The person brought in six of their family members, according to the suit, and BINT showed the family “heavily documented refunding guarantees.” But they never got their money back, and the family lost a total of $32,000. The scam caused rifts in the family and the initial contributor said in their statement that they at one point “considered suicide because I brought my family into this financial slaughter.”

“This was my first encounter with gifting circles,” the person’s statement said. “I am ashamed I believed them.”

The suit includes requests for a temporary asset freeze and injunction against BINT to keep the company from continuing to ask for donations.

“BINT scammed Texans out of money by exploiting their deeply-held religious faith during a national crisis,” Paxton said in the news release about the suit. “This is despicable behavior, and BINT will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”