Ponzi Schemes

October 19, 2020

Investment adviser representative Paul Horton Smith, Sr. of eGate, LLC and his companies, Northstar Communications, LLC and Planning Services, Inc., have been ordered to pay over $4 million in disgorgement and $383,000 in prejudgment interest for defrauding at least 35 investors of more than $5.6 million.  According to the SEC, Horton and his companies targeted retirees and pre-retirees in Southern California, promising them guaranteed interest payments but paying the “interest” with new investor funds.  SEC

July 28, 2020

Savraj Gata-Aura, a British citizen, has been sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to forfeit nearly $3 million for his role in a massive Ponzi scheme involving coworking space Bar Works that defrauded over 800 investors of more than $40 million.  Together with fellow British citizen Renwick Haddow—who was widely reported to be disqualified from serving as the director of a U.K. company and was managing Bar Works under the alias “Jonathan Black”—Gata-Aura solicited investors by making material misrepresentations about Bar Works’ management and the company’s financial condition.  Haddow is due to be sentenced later this year.  USAO SDNY

July 10, 2020

A 70-year-old man in North Carolina who pleaded guilty to orchestrating a $22 million Ponzi scheme through his company, Oodles Inc., has been sentenced to 17.5 years in prison and ordered to pay $17 million in restitution.  Hal H. Brown Jr. singlehandedly defrauded at least 60 victims—including family, friends, neighbors, and fellow church members—by falsely representing that Oodles owned hundreds of millions of dollars in rights to religious-themed family shows and movies.  To bolster his claims, Brown developed marketing material, falsified bank statements and company agreements, and impersonated employees of media companies.  USAO WDNC

April 1, 2020

A Christian concert promoter and his business have settled with the SEC over charges of defrauding 145 investors of $3 million.  According to a press release, Jeffrey Wall of Maine and his business, The Lighthouse Events LLC, had promised investors that investments intended to promote Christian music concerts were “secured” and “guaranteed,” when in fact they were being used to pay off debt and make payments to earlier investors.  Each of the defendants have since been ordered to pay nearly $1.6 million each in civil penalties, $1.6 million in disgorgement, and over $200,000 in prejudgment interest.  SEC

February 11, 2020

Property developer Monique Brady of Rhode Island has been sentenced to 8 years in prison and ordered to pay $4.8 million in restitution for defrauding 23 investors of $10.3 million in a Ponzi scheme that ran from 2014 to 2018.  Brady told investors, many of them her own family, friends, and business associates, that her property rehabilitation business, MNB LLC, had secured contracts to perform large scale rehabilitation work on foreclosed properties in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.  To entice investors, Brady promised a 50% return on profits and showed forged emails that purported to show the contracts were valid.  In reality, however, the jobs she was hired to do were menial and paid less than $1,000, and she was using investor funds to finance an extravagant lifestyle.  When she became the subject of a federal investigation, she told investors to delete all records of their investments with her company, then met with federal officials to request that they investigate her investors for usury, before attempting to abscond to Vietnam.  DOJ; USAO RI

January 31, 2020

A former financial adviser, Li Lin Hsu, AKA Yilin Hsu Lee, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay $5.3 million in restitution to the 20 victims of her $8.1 million Ponzi scheme.  Hsu began her scheme in 2014 while employed at Ameriprise Financial, promising victim investors, including her own relatives, that their funds would go toward low risk municipal bonds when in fact they were going toward homes in affluent neighborhoods, a luxury car, a luxury vacation, and luxury goods for Hsu herself. When Ameriprise discovered the misconduct in 2015, Hsu was fired and then barred by FINRA from working in the investment business, but not before she began her own companies, American Trading Group LLC and American Capital Republic, Inc, where she managed to defraud additional investors.  USAO CDCA

January 9, 2020

After being charged with defrauding brokerage customers in May 2018 and pleading guilty in December 2018, a former registered investment advisor, Steven Pagartanis, has been sentenced to over 14 years in prison and ordered to pay $6.5 million for orchestrating the 18-year, $13 million fraud.  Pagartanis had targeted elderly women and promised an 8% return on investments.  However, he secretly laundered their investments and used the money on personal expenses, causing investors to lose over $9 million in total.   USAO EDNY

November 21, 2019

Jin K. Chung was sentenced to 10 years in prison following his guilty plea on charges related to a foreign exchange trading scam he created and ran.  Chung started two companies, SNC Asset Management, Inc., and SNC Investments, Inc., advertising them as highly successful foreign exchange trading firms and promising investors annual returns between 24% and 36%.  Hundreds of individual investors opened accounts with SNC; Chung deposited their money bank accounts he controlled and sent them phony statements.  In his guilty plea, Chung acknowledged that more than 400 victims lost over $60 million as a result of his scam.  Chung was originally charged in 2009, but not extradited from South Korea until 2019.  USAO ND Cal

October 29, 2019

The co-defendant of a man recently sentenced for orchestrating the largest Ponzi scheme ever charged in Maryland has been sentenced to 14 years in prison and ordered to pay at least $189 million in restitution.  To facilitate the scheme to sell fake consumer debt portfolios, Jay Ledford create fake sales agreements, tax returns, and other documents to co-defendant Kevin Merrill, knowing they would be used to defraud investors.  When the two were arrested in 2018 with fellow co-conspirator Cameron Jezierski, the five-year scheme had already raked in over $396 million, with only 14% actually used to purchase consumer debt portfolios.  USAO MD