The Feds Found a Box Spring Stuffed With 20 Million Dollars
It’s cash from the TelexFree pyramid scheme.

Sometimes, when I don’t know what to write about, I type the word “money” into Google and search the news tab. (This is also how I do This Week in Pods.)
Today, Google gave me this:
Photo of $20M seized in box spring following arrest of Brazilian national in scheme to launder proceeds of TelexFree https://t.co/ulmFXtI9mr
First, I love that the URL includes “go USA,” like it’s a cheer.
Second, the story behind this box spring full of money is incredible. It involves pyramid schemes, suitcases containing $2.2 million, and this bed, which I’m assuming someone probably slept on? The room looks lived-in, after all—and not all that extravagantly furnished, considering that it appears to contain the type of clock radio you can buy at Target.
Also: is that a Dasani bottle in the upper left? As Claire Christoff reminds us:
What Your Favorite Brand of Bottled Water Says About You
Dasani tastes like the water that’s left over after you boil hot dogs. No one drinks Dasani because they like it; they drink it because it’s there. It’s always there.
What was the TelexFree pyramid scheme all about? Here’s the summary:
Here's What $20 Million Stashed Inside a Mattress Looks Like
[Cleber Rene Rizerio Rocha], the Feds say, had been acting as a courier in an alleged plot to launder millions gained from unwitting customers who were paying a $1,425 fee to act as agents of a phone company called TelexFree. Their task was to help post online ads, but the ads were never actually published, according to a Boston Globe report. Instead, the heads of TelexFree simply pocketed the fee money. The Globe said the scheme ensnared nearly 1 million people around the world before collapsing in 2014.
People paid $1,425 to work for TelexFree in the hope that they’d earn returns on the (fake) online ads they placed. They were giving a fraudulent company real money for the ability to do meaningless work towards a nonexistent paycheck.
So… yeah. That happened. All of it.
Now I’m curious whether they built the box spring themselves or hacked an existing product. I couldn’t find anything that looked like their box spring on Ikea, and the ones I saw on Amazon had metal supports instead of wood. This must be a DIY, right? That staple gun work is really uneven.
And—considering the apparent lack of headboard—that bed might not even have been all that comfortable, and the stacks of money probably gave off an unpleasant smell. I guess sleeping on $20 million only sounds pleasant when you don’t consider the logistics involved.
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