Many heard about Financial Advisory Consultants through fellow churchgoers, although professional athletes and at least one movie actor are said to be investors.

As their own retirement accounts sagged with the stock market, they marveled at Lewis' reports of consistent returns of 40 percent and more from one fund and 20 percent from another, year in and year out for two decades.

They scrambled to give him money, pushing aside any caution or doubts as they saw fellow investors withdraw as much as $250,000.

Their financial future came crashing down this week, when a federal judge froze the company's assets and the FBI carted away documents and computers from Lewis' three-room Orange County office suite.

No charges have been filed, but the FBI alleges Lewis was operating a Ponzi scheme, in which early investors are paid with money from later investors. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission says the "fraudulent scheme" involved $813 million from more than 5,200 investors.

"It's a house of cards," said Barry Minkow, himself imprisoned once for seven years for defrauding investors through his ZZZZ Best carpet cleaning company. "It will go down as the longest-running Ponzi scheme in history, and the mutual fund that didn't exist."

Minkow, who now works as an anti-fraud investigator for San Diego-based Fraud Discovery Institute, provided state and federal regulators with documents questioning Lewis' legitimacy, prompting an investigation and story by The Associated Press earlier this month.

The FBI's search warrant and the SEC's civil complaint listed the same warning signs as the AP story: 57-year-old Lewis was investing tens of millions of dollars for clients and claiming extraordinary financial returns without being licensed or regulated, as required.

Moreover, the El Toro-based firm never provided clients with any details on how it invested their money. Since June, Lewis has been delaying withdrawal requests with the false excuse that millions of dollars in investments have been frozen by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Yet investor after investor told the AP they missed or ignored the warning signs in what the FBI and other scam experts said appears to be a classic case of affinity fraud.

"He's a family man, he's a religious man, he goes to church every Sunday. He sent us pictures of his grandchildren," said Tom Parsa of Irvine. "This is devastating, devastating news."

Parsa was vacationing in Mexico when he heard that more than $3 million invested by his family was in jeopardy.

"We always likened him to a poor man's Warren Buffett," said Kevin Haugh, 47, of Woodbridge, Va. He sent Lewis $30,000 three weeks ago to add to the roughly $2 million that three generations of his family had squirreled away.

Lewis has not responded to multiple telephone messages left by the AP over three weeks, nor to letters sent to him by registered mail and overnight delivery. His attorney, Douglas J. Pettibone, also did not return repeated telephone messages.

At the same time that Lewis began spreading what federal investigators call the bogus "Homeland Security freeze" story last summer and delaying withdrawal requests by more than 150 investors, he raised the minimum investment from $25,000 to $100,000 for his growth fund and from $10,000 to $25,000 for his income fund.

Lewis has blocked most withdrawals from his funds since June, yet he withdrew $3 million from his own account on July 1, SEC records show.

He "continues to live well," his administrative assistant, Mary Lopez, told federal investigators last week.

Lopez, who has worked with Lewis since 1997, told investigators that Lewis not only has a home in Laguna Niguel, but a vacation home in Palm Desert and a membership in the nearby Indian Ridge Country Club, where the initiation fee goes for $95,000 and the monthly fee is $785.

He owns at least one Mercedes Benz automobile and is awaiting delivery of another, Lopez said in a sworn statement to the SEC.

The firm operated with no more than three employees, and Lewis rarely showed up at the office after the first year that Lopez worked there, she said. Lopez said Lewis told her he was trading Swiss francs on his own time and account. The only funds that flowed into the firm were from investors themselves.

In six years, Lopez saw no business activity or any indication of the lucrative projects Lewis wrote about in his monthly newsletters. Clients accepted the newsletters and Lewis' monthly statements as the only evidence they needed that investments were soaring in good times and bad.

Many of Lewis' investors learned of Financial Advisory Consultants through friends at church, and were eager to get in on a semi-secret investment opportunity that appeared open only to a lucky few. Many considered Lewis a friend, some attending weddings and funerals with him.

Clients say Lewis is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, and his first clients came from that community. But over the years, he added investors from churches of many other denominations.