A teacher who said she lost everything in a plan to “flip” US real estate has admitted she’d previously fallen for a pyramid scheme.Lawyer Charles Richardson suggested in the Supreme Court that Dianne Laird, 45, had a history of making high-risk investments.Mr Richardson added that Ms Laird must have known what she was doing when she poured her savings of $345,000 into a scheme that never paid off.Ms Laird told the court yesterday that her 2009 investment in quick resales of foreclosed US housing had ended up ruining her life.Cedric Oates, 41, denies a charge of making a statement that he knew was false, misleading or deceptive, to induce her to part with her money.“It’s all I think about,” an emotional Ms Laird told prosecutor Nicole Smith.“It’s like my mind’s consumed and overwhelmed with it. I’m having problems sleeping, I have anxiety on and off.”She added that she’s had to spend $38,000 on legal fees in her bid to recover the lost money.“I trusted Cedric Oates as my friend and my coach, and I believe that he definitely misled me, deceived me and lied to me from the very beginning — from day one,” she said.Mr Oates’ counsel doesn’t dispute that he and a US colleague had been buying foreclosed houses and selling them on during the collapse of the US housing market.In a conversation with Mr Oates that Ms Laird taped on May 23, 2010, she could be heard pleading that she’d been told she would have her money back by April of that year.“You and Mike went back on the deal,” Ms Laird told him, referring to Mr Oates’ American associate Michael Hopkins.Mr Oates, who was unaware he was being recorded at his Lighthouse Lane, Southampton apartment, answered her: “Normally the turnaround is two months at the most.”On the 25-minute recording played for the jury, Ms Laird then said: “This is really serious — we are moving back to Canada and we need that money.”Assuring her that “you have not lost your money”, Mr Oates could then be heard asking Ms Laird if her boyfriend knew of their arrangement.“Anybody not involved directly and looking from the outside is going to blow up,” he added.On the recording, Ms Laird said she had denied to her boyfriend that she’d made the investment.Yesterday in court, she told the prosecutor that Mr Oates had been nervous, fidgety and “appeared a bit uncomfortable”, avoiding looking her in the eye when they discussed the scheme that day.The court has heard that after Ms Laird finished paying into Mr Oates’ US bank account, his American associate appeared to pursue several different properties that she claimed to be unaware of.On the recording, Mr Oates could be heard discussing the purchase of $110,000 worth of land.In court, Ms Laird said: “Why? How could $110,000 be used at this late date, when they had been promising me, giving me definite dates they would have the money?”She said she received “various conflicting stories” from the two men — including an account of a deal called “the Deer Tongue property”, in which a deal by Mr Hopkins was scotched after “an older lady that was supposed to buy” was abruptly dissuaded by her son.In his cross-examination, Mr Richardson, who represents Mr Oates, suggested the former Dellwood physical education teacher had cherry-picked through her e-mail exchanges with Mr Oates, passing on to police only her “favourites”.Ms Laird insisted she had furnished police with “every single one”, but conceded that some sent to her work address at the school had been deleted.Mr Richardson took her to task for giving evidence that Mr Oates had tried to reassure her by saying that his wife’s godfather and father-in-law were good friends with then-Premier Dr Ewart Brown.He said Mr Oates’ reference to Dr Brown concerned “funding for the Island Games — it had nothing to do with your investment”.Looking at e-mails from April 29 and 30 of 2009, when Ms Laird and Mr Oates were discussing the possibility of meeting up with the women’s basketball team that he coached, Mr Richardson said there was no mention by his client of any investments.He suggested the “flipping” investment idea had come from Ms Laird, rather than Mr Oates — which she denied.Mr Richardson then asked if she recalled “telling Cedric how you got in trouble with your boyfriend”.“I’m going to suggest that you told Cedric you’d invested money in something crazy before, and your boyfriend was angry with you over it.”Ms Laird responded: “I invested in something very small that didn’t work — a pyramid scheme, when I first moved to this Island.“That’s the only thing I could think of that police were involved in. I gave $2,000, as other teachers did.”Mr Richardson also suggested Ms Laird had not been so innocent of the risks involved in “flipping” as her evidence implied.“Flipping involves buying a house that someone else has not been able to pay their mortgage on.“Then you put a little money into it, and you sell it for a huge profit,” he said. “Usually, depending on market forces, you can get rid of it in one to three months. But whether you do depends on market forces, and you knew that.”Ms Laird answered: “I spoke to Cedric about this, and he assured me this was the best time, because foreclosures were going for cheaper.”“That was what you knew, of your own personal knowledge, because there was so much money involved.”Ms Laird maintained that she had not researched the details of flipping, but relied instead on her friend’s advice, saying that Mr Oates had been “bugging” her over making the investment.Asked Mr Richardson: “Your version is you gave up $345,000 into a mortgage flipping scenario, and you never even did any research of your own?”Saying she didn’t recall, Ms Laird conceded she may have Googled the topic.“Basically I was going off what Cedric said, that convinced me this was going to be a great money making opportunity,” she said.The trial continues on Monday.