It would appear that some Perth Mormons fell for a Ponzi scheme.

A woman has defrauded Perth residents of more than $4 million by selling shares in a bogus land development she called `Mormonville’, police say.

West Australian Police fraud officers, who have charged the 50-year-old registered finance broker on 24 fraud-related counts, say many of the woman’s victims were pensioners.

They said the woman, from Canning Vale in Perth’s south, set up “illusory schemes” in 2007 to fund her personal investments and affairs.

“She tricked people to invest by offering exceptionally high rates of returns with little or no risk to invested money,” a police spokeswoman said on Friday.

The initial schemes allegedly involved selling investments in part-shares of land but later evolved into a scheme advertised as Mormonville, which claimed to be a village-type development for members of the woman’s church.

Anyone can fall for a scam, religious or not. All it takes is a lack of critical thinking or just lack of experience in detecting frauds. But it’s easy to get people’s guard down by appealing to shared values, especially religious ones. I guess once you’ve found a group of religious believers, you can assume a certain level of gullibility right off the bat.

And all to make a Mormon village. It’s too bad the victims were pensioners, but I can’t say I sympathise much with a desire to establish religious tribalism.