He was 55 years old. Successful. Financially stable. By every reasonable measure, Greg was the last man you’d expect to hand half a million dollars in cash to a cult.
Within months of joining Love Has Won, he’d sell his condo, liquidate his 401K, and personally hand Amy Carlson — “Mother God” — $420,000 in a black duffel bag.
And just months later, he’d leave with nothing.
I’m Andrew-Ryan Profaci. I built Love Has Won’s brand infrastructure when it was still called FirstContactGroundCrewTeam. I’m the only Father God Amy ever left the cult to be with. And I’m the one she trusted with private things she said to no one else.
This is what I watched happen to Greg. From the inside.
How Cults Take Money From People Who Should Know Better
The myth says cult victims are weak, gullible, broken. The truth is the opposite. The people most vulnerable to cult financial exploitation are the ones who are doing well — successful enough to have something to give, and searching for something bigger to give it to.
Greg fit the profile exactly. He had the savings. He had the search. Mother God knew how to translate the second into a transfer of the first.
It happens in stages. Never all at once:
- Love-bombing. You arrive. They make you feel chosen. You weren’t a stranger walking into a room — you were always meant to be there.
- Spiritual debt. They’ve given you something invisible: meaning, family, divine purpose. Eventually, the bill comes due.
- The sunk-cost trap. The more you give, the harder it becomes to admit you were wrong about giving in the first place.
- Devotion-as-currency. If you don’t keep giving — your time, your devotion, your money — it’s evidence you’re “still attached to your ego.” And nobody attached to their ego becomes Father God.
Greg fell into every single one. Smiling.
The Perfect Target
I met Greg in 2015. We were living in a rented house in Northern California. He’d been a name in the Love Has Won chatroom for a while — a 55-year-old man in Washington State, looking for something bigger than himself.
Like every person who found their way to Love Has Won, what Greg was actually looking for was meaning.
Mother God could spot that from a mile away.
She was attracted to him, in her way. Not romantically — she was attracted to his openness. The child-like quality. He reminded her of who she still was deep down: the young woman searching for her own place in the universe, before she became God.
She groomed him slowly. Private conversations. Flattery. “Divine messages” that always seemed to confirm what he already wanted to believe.
And then she said the words every desperate seeker in that house wanted to hear:
“You are special. You have a higher purpose. You are meant to be Father God.”
Greg believed her completely. I’d already told him she’d say exactly this. He still couldn’t see what was coming.
My Replacement
At the time, I was still in a relationship with Amy. I shared her bed every night.
But behind my back, she was already arranging my replacement.
I overheard her one evening, talking to the team in hushed whispers.
“Greg is the new Father God. He’s fully committed.”
I confronted her immediately.
“Greg is replacing me?”
She smiled. “Not in our relationship, baby. Just in the role. You understand, don’t you?”
Of course I understood. The titles weren’t real. Father God was a role, a costume the cult needed someone to wear at any given moment. Mine was being handed off.
But the smile got me. Because I knew what the smile was. It was the same smile she gave every Father God before me, and the same one she’d give every Father God after. The role moved on. The “you and me, baby” stayed where I was — until it didn’t.
I wasn’t angry at Greg. None of this was his fault. He didn’t even know it was happening.
So I tried to save him.
“He’s Fully Committed”
Greg wasn’t impossible to like — quite the opposite. Warm smile, lean build, infectious positivity. He genuinely believed that if he gave up everything, abandoned his old life, and surrendered fully to the mission, something divine would emerge.
Mother God encouraged every bit of it.
One day she pulled me aside.
“Greg has decided to sell his home. We’re taking a trip to Washington so he can put it on the market.”
I almost laughed. “He just got here.”
“He’s fully committed,” she said. “That’s what devotion looks like.”
That’s when I knew.
The thing is — Mother God didn’t have to talk Greg into any of it. She mentioned the idea once. Greg ran with the rest. He proposed selling the condo. He proposed liquidating the 401K. He proposed every escalation himself.
That’s the part most people don’t understand about cult financial exploitation. The mark builds the trap. The leader just opens the door.
The Road Trip to Financial Ruin
The three of us — Mother God, Greg, and me — climbed into Greg’s Honda Accord and drove from Northern California to Washington.
Greg was giddy the entire drive. Bobbing to the radio. Laughing. Floating.
“I’m finally letting go of my ego,” he told me. “This is what full surrender looks like.”
In the rearview mirror, I watched him sway in the back seat — happy as a man on his way to a wedding. Amy met my eyes from the passenger seat and smiled. She knew exactly what I was thinking.
She was about to feed.
I’d warned Greg. I’d warned him the day she first told him he was Father God. I’d warned him a dozen times since. I’d told him every Father God before him left with nothing — every single one except for Miguel, who only stayed because his name was on the cult’s bank account.
I even told him about the Love Has Won hoax with the “Quantums” — the moment that proved this whole “Mother God” thing was fraud built on top of fraud. He heard it. It didn’t change a thing.
He kept dancing in the back seat, all the way to financial oblivion.
The Knock at the Door
We arrived at Greg’s condo two days before it happened.
His place was nice. Clean, well-maintained — a stark contrast to anything the cult ever touched. The kind of home a man builds when he’s spent twenty years being responsible.
Two days in, there was a knock at the door.
Police.
“We received a call from Greg’s family. They’re worried he’s being held against his will.”
Greg, smiling, walked the officer through the conversation. He was here by choice. This was his path. He was with Mother God. Everything was going to be alright.
The officer left. There wasn’t much else he could do.
This is what families don’t understand when they call the police on a member of a cult. The member is going to convince the officer they’re fine. And on paper, they are fine. They have to be choosing it. That’s the whole point of the trap.
What I watched in that house was the rise of one of the most infamous cults of the 21st century — written by the only insider who tried to stop it from the inside.
$420,000 in a Black Duffel Bag
Within a few weeks, Greg had:
- Sold his condo
- Liquidated his 401K
- Withdrawn nearly half a million dollars in physical cash
At Mother God’s insistence, the money came out of the bank in $100 bills.
A black duffel bag. Stuffed.
He carried it through the front door of the rented house in California. Set it down at Amy’s feet. Smiled the way a child smiles when they’ve brought home a perfect report card.
“This is my commitment to love.”
$420,000 — gone in an instant.
His entire working life. Every dollar he’d saved since he was 35. Every month of overtime. Every promotion. Every moment of restraint when his coworkers were buying cars.
In a duffel bag. To a 40-year-old woman who told him she was God.
He was never going to see any of it again. From that point on, he had to ask if he wanted to buy himself food or a t-shirt. The money wasn’t his anymore. Poof.
Then — Just Months Later — He Left With Nothing
Reality always catches up.
The devotion fades. The doubts creep in. Things stop feeling chosen and start feeling shoved at you. Greg started seeing what I had spent months trying to point out. The roles. The names. The titles. None of it was real.
By then, Amy had already moved on. She’d left Greg behind in California with Miguel and a couple of other members who were also in the process of leaving. A few weeks before, I had walked away myself.
Now Mother God was leaving too — and where she was going was Florida.
To live with me.
Amy Carlson and Andrew-Ryan Profaci in Florida — the only Father God she ever left the cult for. Previously unpublished. Amy Carlson and Andrew-Ryan Profaci in Florida — the only Father God she ever left the cult for. Previously unpublished.
She crossed the country with $40,000 in cash in her purse, plus access to the rest of the duffel bag through Miguel Lamboy, whose legal name was the only one on the cult’s accounts.
When Greg saw what had really happened, he couldn’t unsee it.
He left the cult penniless. No home. No retirement. No way to recover what he had handed over in a smile.
He never responded to my messages after that.
I don’t blame him.
But he knows I tried.
What This Story Is Really About
Greg wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t weak. He was successful, generous, and sincere — and that was exactly the profile.
Cults aren’t powered by stupidity. They’re powered by hunger for meaning. The most effective cult financial exploitation in the world isn’t aimed at the gullible. It’s aimed at the smart, the responsible, and the searching.
Mother God didn’t take Greg’s money the way a thief takes a wallet. She built him a story so big he couldn’t see anything outside it, and inside that story, handing over $420,000 wasn’t a loss. It was a gift to God.
Greg wasn’t the first. He wasn’t the last. He was just the most expensive.
Love Has Won kept finding men willing to pay to be God — until the day Amy Carlson died wrapped in Christmas lights in a back room in Crestone, Colorado.
I watched her find them. I watched her take their money. I watched it end.
This is one of the stories I tell in full inside The War on Love.
The War on Love is the only insider memoir of the Love Has Won cult — written by the man who built it, then walked away. As seen on HBO, Dateline NBC, VICE, and Rolling Stone.
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