Tag Archives: real story

The Most Expensive Rehab in the World

Paracelsus in Switzerland is the most expensive rehab in the world, serving a clientele of royalty, politicians, oligarchs, business tycoons and A-list celebrities. Forget the £20,000-a-month celebrities spend at The Priory in Surrey, or the £41,700 they shell out for 45 days at the Meadows in Arizona – a five-week residential rehab here costs a whopping £315,000 – about ten times the average UK annual salary.

Staying at a lakeside villa in Zurich with 24/7 limousine transportation, a personal chef, a butler and a concierge, clients have access to a five-star hotel spa and a live-in therapist (who sleeps in the spare room). Activities include tennis, yoga, martial arts, weightlifting, massage and more.

Writer and model Sydney Lima see if it could help her kick her partying lifestyle. But while she was there, she uncovered a strange, unexpected world.

The Psychedelic Boom

The UK is experiencing a psychedelic renaissance. Young people in England and Wales are taking three times more LSD than they did five years ago, scientists at top universities are claiming hallucinogens can revolutionise how we treat mental illness and the use of magic mushrooms has been increasing by around 40 percent year on year.

Music festivals are awash with recreational trippers, but we also see how psychedelics have become a new health craze by attending a shamanic magic mushroom ceremony in which 50 people trip out in a London warehouse. Despite studies showing that psychedelics are some of the safest drugs you can take, we meet one person who spilled a bottle of acid on himself and never stopped hallucinating.

What is making this new generation of drug takers so interested in self-transformation? And as the self-help trend grows, what happens when thousands of people start trying to solve their mental health problems themselves by taking powerful hallucinogens in unregulated settings?

The Arranged Gay Marriage Scam

The Arranged Gay Marriage Bureau provides a revolutionary arranged marriage system exclusively for gay men and women. With over 3,700 clients worldwide, its founder Urvi Shah claims to fulfil people’s dreams and help find them a partner for a substantial fee. After seeing impressive testimonies and stories about the Bureau in the media, Reeta Loi uses the service to attempt to find a partner and follows the journey of Keith as he searches for a husband. Urvi’s assurances that she personally picks out a suitable partner for each of her clients, leads them to start the process with great optimism. But as the months go by, the reality becomes clear that Reeta and the other people using the service are being scammed.

The Custom Gun Artist

77-year-old Arturo Rojas’ guns designs can be sold for up to $60,000 per custom job. Arturo balances his time engraving guns and working as a dishwasher at his family’s Mexican restaurant in Dallas. We spent a day with this legendary Texas gun artist.

Inside the Deadliest City in Honduras

Burying the dead in Honduras’ deadliest city can be a competitive business. In San Pedro Sula, Edgardo Simon runs a funeral service that works around the clock. The violence never stops.

Escaping Brazil’s Deadliest Gangs

In the middle of the most violent regional capital in Brazil, a brutal gang war is being fought over control of the drug supply routes of the Northwestern Amazon region. Poverty and coercion force many young men into a life of crime where the only ways to escape are incarceration or death.

But amidst the carnage, there is a glimmer of hope – the “91” is a group of former gang lords turned pastors, who offer salvation to gang members who want to leave the criminal life. Their standing in the gang community, forged out of years of service and hard-fought respect, mean that only they can vouch for criminals looking to trade crime for the path of God.

How I Smuggled Cocaine to Escape Student Debt

Like many millennials across the country, Luke graduated college owing thousands of dollars in student loan debt – $130,000, to be exact.

With no job and no money in the bank, Luke devised a desperate plan: he would smuggle cocaine from Panama to the United States to pay off his student loans.

Sugar and Slavery: Britain’s Bitter Legacy

Sugar was once so valuable it was called “white gold.” For centuries, Britain’s sweet tooth drove the world economy and helped build its colonial empire—at the cost of millions of enslaved Africans forced to work on plantations in the West Indies and America. At the center of the trade was Bristol, where men like Edward Colston grew rich from investments.

Zing Tsjeng travels there to uncover the human cost behind our addiction to sugar and reveal the enduring legacy of colonial exploitation, from financial institutions to the food on our tables.

The Dark History of Britain’s Mansions

Zing Tsjeng investigates how many of the UK’s beloved country homes are steeped in colonial and slave trade connections. The answer? A lot of them.

Once a symbol of aristocratic power and influence, now these country manors are visited by millions of tourists every year. But lurking behind the fancy exteriors are legacies of Britain’s colonial past, with many built or bought with the profits of forced labour. Heritage organisations have started to work on research projects to understand the true context of these country homes.

The houses themselves have stood for centuries, let them stand with a deeper knowledge and understanding of their – unairbrushed – historical context.

Inside the World of Fetish Porn

Taji Ameen landed a job as a Production Assistant for Anatomik Media, a custom fetish video company which produces fully personalized videos curated to the fantasy of one private client.

His first day of work was on a production entitled “Birthday Party Massacre”, a video made to satisfy a client’s unique desires including feet, stockings, sploshing, destruction, humiliation and inflatables.

Taji was on hand to complete various tasks and responsibilities from collecting cakes, to assisting star of the film Casey Calvert and her fellow performers, to picking up the aftermath.

Miami’s Luxury Car Hustle

The car business in general is a tough business. The car rental business, even more so. Anybody who finds out they can make money and drive a Ferrari, I mean, they’re diving in head first,” says Matt Cruz, owner of MVP Exotic Rentals, a legitimate luxury car rental business based in Miami.

But when everybody wants to be a celebrity, how do you tell the difference between faking it and making it? The game is finesse, and with the allure of getting behind the wheel of the world’s most expensive cars, who wouldn’t want to play?

Master of Fakes: The Max Forger Story

For 40 years ‘Max the Forger’ specialised in faking the world’s most expensive art and selling it for a fortune. In this episode of Fakes, Frauds & Scammers, he tells us how he made his paintings look like famous antiques.