It was supposed to be “bigger than Google” and was one day going to be worth $10 billion.

But instead, quite the opposite has happened to this Aussie tech company – and now there are fears it was a pyramid scheme all along.

Everyone who worked there has quit, the founder has died, and nobody can seem to find the so-called cutting-edge technology that was touted as the “saviour of the world”.

Gold Coast entrepreneur Alan Metcalfe launched Safe Worlds in 2010 and managed to raise $49 million from a pool of 600 people, mostly Australian mum and dad investors.

Alan claimed he had stumbled across the secret code to artificial intelligence while he was reading the bible.

With this code, he told investors his tech was going to revolutionise the global economy, and that his invention was going to be a combination of Google, YouTube and Amazon, only bigger and better.

But fast forward a few years and the start-up has essentially collapsed with investors trying desperately to discover where their money – in many cases their life savings – ended up.

News.com.au has launched The Missing $49 Million, our first ever multi-part investigative podcast series.

Lots of money has gone missing, no one seems to know where it is and I’m setting out to find it.

The series kicked off this week and each of the eight episodes will come out for free every week. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Available on Spotify here.

Available on Apple Podcasts here.

Do you know more? Get in touch | alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au

Tahlee-Joy Grace worked at Safe Worlds as a senior software developer in 2013 and said she was driven to quit because of the mounting red flags.

“The product was completely rubbish,” Tahlee-Joy said.

“So in a gist, it, what it sort of felt like was trying to do a half assed combination of Amazon and YouTube. So having lots of videos and selling products attached to those videos, but what the product really was, was a way to suck money out of gullible investors.

“That made me start questioning that this is a bit dodgy.”

The longer she worked there, the more she wanted to quit.

“Within a few months, I realised it was all just a big scam and I wanted to get out.”

No one works at Safe Worlds anymore.

After Alan Metcalfe died in 2017 from a heart attack, the company’s Brisbane offices closed shortly afterwards.

A Freedom of Information request to the Fair Work Ombudsman revealed that one full-time employee resigned from the company in 2016 but never received their final wages, entitlements and superannuation.

They were owed $41,000.

They tried unsuccessfully for three years to recover their lost money.

In 2019, this person lodged a formal complaint with the Fair Work Ombudsman.

Safe Worlds “haven’t done a single payment after I left,” the worker wrote. “Please help me get my unpaid salary”.

Michael Blake, a former all-time great footballer, got caught up in the Safe Worlds scheme and invested $300,000 of his family’s fortune.

He had made decent money from his time as a footballer for Sydney’s Manly in the 1970s and 1980s, and along with his family business, had some cash to put aside and invest into Alan’s Metcalfe’s tech start-up.

He now thinks he lost it all.

“I basically, over many years, became friends with Alan,” Michael, 63, said. “We probably ended up as close friends. I trusted him.”

In fact, Michael was one of the people who carried Alan’s coffin to the grave.

But when he looks back, he feels that Alan exploited him.

“Alan liked me because of my contacts and the contacts that my contacts had,” Michael said. “I feel as if I was a little bit used, probably.”

Michael recommended Safe Worlds to his friends and helped another $1 million flow into Alan’s hands.

“I’m kind of a bit taken aback because a lot of people invested in it, because they trusted me.”

Most of his friends put in around $5000 or $10,000. A handful put in $20,000 or more and he knows of one of his mates who invested $100,000.

But he put in more than all of them.

“When they find out how much that I’ve lost him it makes them feel better,” he said with a laugh.

This strategy to raise money landed on someone else’s radar.

By pure chance, Michael Blake happened to be friends with an investigative journalist, David Richardson, who works with former 60 Minutes host Liz Hayes at the Channel 9 offices.

And David Richardson decided to look a bit into the scheme around 2009, when Michael first got involved.

“My spidey senses were tingling something bad,” David said.

Safe Worlds “were not looking for big companies (to invest). And I thought, what’s going on? They were looking for the low hanging fruit.”

No big tech companies, venture capitalists or angel investors got behind the scheme. Only mum and dad investors – many of whom hadn’t even invested in anything before.

Once, Alan apparently got close to cinching a deal with senior members of the US defence.

But he refused to show them his AI algorithm, even though they offered to sign a nondisclosure agreement, and the whole deal never ended up going ahead.

David Richardson was also alarmed by the fact that Alan seemed to be pushing investors to recruit their friends and family to the Safe Worlds cause.

“Then this started to look like a pyramid scheme,” he said.

And after Alan died, investors discovered another major issue with the whole Safe Worlds business.

Alan had no heir to take over.

No one knew what was supposed to happen now that he was dead.

“As far as I understand, he had the algorithm in a safety secure box or something in the Cayman Islands,” Michael Blake said.

“And, that was for as protection, the protection of the algorithm.

“He was very protective of it. He always said, if it got in the wrong hands, it could destroy the world.”

Episode 1 of The Missing $49M is available to listen to now. An episode is coming out every week for the next eight weeks, from July 8.

Available on Spotify here.

Available on Apple Podcasts here.

alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au