October 6th, 2011 at 10:23am
A Tustin real estate broker who specialized in hard money lending has been convicted in by prosecutors in the Orange County District Attorney’s office of over four dozen counts of grand theft, filing false recorded documents and other felonies.
Mark Alan Helsing, 53, pleaded guilty to the above charges. Helsing operated several hard money businesses, which lend money for short terms at higher interest rates than the banks. Borrowers typically either need the funds for a “bridge loan” for construction or have bad credit. The victims were investors, whose money should have been used to pay off earlier investors instead of being used to make the loans, which indicates a Ponzi scheme, real estate investment fraud and hard money fraud.
The names of Helsing’s companies were Sea View Investments, HLHS Financial Services, Inc., Foothill Realty, and Sea View Mortgage.
Read the original article in the Los Angeles Times and OC Weekly.
October 6th, 2011 at 8:46am
A Roseville man who has been sentenced to prison admitted in his plea agreement that his real estate fraud was little more than a Ponzi scheme which required the services of an escrow company to distribute the ill-gotten gains (escrow fraud).
Royce Lee Newcomb, 49, will have to serve five years and 10 months in prison for soliciting several dozen investors to give him almost $3,000,000 which he told them he was using to invest in foreclosed properties. Instead, he instructed Barry Winnett of Contour Escrow Services to disburse those monies to himself, Winnett and earlier investors. Winnett does not have a license to carry out escrow services.
Barry Winnett pleaded guilty to wire fraud in January but is still awaiting sentencing.
Read more about Royce Newcomb in the Roseville Press Tribune.
September 20th, 2011 at 1:52pm
Five Sacramento-area residents have been charged by a federal grand jury for ripping off 180 investors to the tune of $26 million in what appears to be a Ponzi scheme.
Alleged ringleader, Michael Bolden, 57, is no stranger to law enforcement. Back in 1994, the former air traffic controller was sentenced to 21 months for falsifying tax documents in order to qualify for home loans (loan fraud).
Bolden ran Diversified Management Consultants Inc., or DMC, a firm that acted as an umbrella organization over half a dozen investment clubs. Many of the investors pulled equity out of their homes and some have had to file bankruptcy. Much of the investment money was used, according to the grand jury, by Bolden to buy luxury cars and pay for improvements to his home.
The other defendants are Christopher Jackson, 43; Victor Alvarado, 50; and Nicholo Arceo, 38, and his wife Erica Arceo, 43. Gary Bradford, 62, a sixth defendant who ran one of the investment clubs, has already pleaded guilty to six counts of fraud and will be sentenced in April 2012.
Read the original article in the Sacramento Bee.
September 2nd, 2011 at 9:43am
Kenneth Powell, 58, Kathryn Rose, 62, the former California radio hosts the “The Ken & Katie Shows”, a weekend series of radio infomercial shows hosted by Ventura radio station KVTA, are having their own money problems.
Powell, Rose and Paul Charles Lascola, 68, are all being held on $1 million bail after being accused of running a Ponzi scheme in a number of land deals. Investors were solicited at real estate investment seminars and promised returns of 12-14% if they placed their money in the construction of vacant lots in the city of Taft in the Central Valley. No building ever occurred and in fact there were either liens or the lots had been sold to other investors (real estate investment fraud).
Read the original articles in the Ventura County Star and the Silicon Valley Mercury News.
August 18th, 2011 at 5:22pm
The president of a real estate investment “club” that took in $2.2 million from investors has pleaded guilty to running a Ponzi scheme.
Garry Bradford, 62, ran the Millenium Capital Group in the Sacramento area between 2004 and 2008, purportedly to invest in commercial real estate. He admitted that the money he took in from investors was used to repay earlier investors. Many of the victims had pulled equity from their homes or cashed in their retirement plans in order to invest with Bradford, who promised 18% returns.
The case was prosecuted by the office of U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner and heard by U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell Jr.
Bradford could receive 20 years for each of the four counts of federal wire fraud for which he pleaded guilty and a $250,000 fine.
Read the original article in the Sacramento Bee.
July 29th, 2011 at 10:38am
Matthew “Beau” La Madrid, 44, of San Diego, who was convicted of a Ponzi scheme and various real estate fraud and mortgage fraud related crimes, has received 10 years in federal prison.
La Madrid was ordered to make restitution of $23.5 million to investors in his Plus Money Premium Return Funds, which prosecutors said was a Ponzi scheme.
He received $34 million by filing 94 fraudulent loan applications and another $3 million from his businesses Real Estate Investment Group and E&M Property Management. As with most Ponzi schemes, much of the monies were used to support La Madrid’s tastes for an extravagant lifestyle.
Read the original article in Courthouse News.
July 26th, 2011 at 8:58am
Barry Minkow, who went to prison in the 1980s after conning investors in a Ponzi scheme with his ZZZZ Best carpet cleaning company, is going back to prison.
Last week, Minkow, who became “born again” during his first prison stint and reinvented himself as a preacher at Community Bible Church in San Diego, was sentenced to five years in prison. Minkow’s other reinvention was the Fraud Discovery Institute, in which he claimed to have contacts with the FBI and other law enforcement, which were purportedly used to catch criminals.
Minkow pleaded guilty this May to conspiring to essentially ruin the stock shares of builder Lennar in order to force it to the table to settle a legal dispute with another developer in a private golf community in nearby Rancho Sante Fe. He went so far as to characterize Lennar as ”a financial crime in progress.” Of course, while he was condemning Lennar, he was also placing bets on its stock.
Barry Minkow’s sentencing by the judge includes an order to pay $583 million in restitution to Lennar.
Read the original article in the Los Angeles Times.
July 6th, 2011 at 11:19am
Three women have been charged in a Ponzi scheme that apparently targeted mostly working people.
Maricela Barajas (aka Maricela Torres), 41; Juliana Menefee, 50; and Eva Perez, 51, have been arrested and face multiple felony charges of grand theft and securities fraud. Barajas and Menefee were arrested after one of their alleged victims reported them Walnut/Diamond Bar Sheriff’s Station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Perez is already in prison on previous fraud charges.
The three women apparently gained the trust of their victims through their friendships and membership in the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) at the Armstrong Elementary School in the city of Diamond Bar. They told their investors that they had an exclusive franchise to sell Alta Dena dairy products at Disneyland and needed to raise capital in order to expand their business.
According to investigators at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Commercial Crimes Bureau, the suspects raised almost $14 million from 2008-2010 and returned about $10 million to the “investors.” About $2.5 million is unaccounted for and is presumed to have been used to fund private purchases, vacations, gambling, etc. of the suspects. The current estimated loss from the Ponzi scheme to the 40 victims is $1.5 million.
This post was published by a Nixle Alert from the L.A. County County Sheriff’s Department. The story is also published in the Diamond Bar Patch.
June 13th, 2011 at 7:04pm
Real estate broker
David Sparks has pleaded guilty to interstate wire fraud in federal court, ending a successful career in Orange County, including a stint as an Irvine planning commissioner.
Sparks defrauded 34 people out of more than $34 million in a Ponzi scheme, including his family, friends and clients.
A veteran real estate broker and former Irvine planning commissioner has agreed to plead guilty , admitting he cheated 34 people out of more than $4 million.
Sparks, 50, admitted he forged bank documents with phony escrow companies (escrow fraud) and made up progress reports that showed the victims’ investments were profitable.
The California Department of Real Estate’s website shows that David Sparks’ real estate license is still valid.
Read the original article in the Orange County Register / OC Register.
May 20th, 2011 at 9:50am
In one of the harshest sentences handed out in San Diego County, Thanh Viet “Jeremy” Cao, 30, of Rancho Santa Margarita received 30 years from U.S. District Judge Larry A. Burns. He was convicted by a jury in December 2010 on three counts of wire fraud related to a Ponzi scheme that prosecutors alleged defrauded nearly 200 investors out of some $12.4 million.
Cao was convicted for extortion and other charges in which he threatened to murder a former business associate who he claimed owed him money, as well as the associate’s wife and children.
Once he became the target of an investigation by authorities in 2007, Cao filed phony liens against the federal judges and investigators, Secret Service agents and prosecutors who were pursuing him. The named targets were U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, former U.S. Attorney Karen Hewitt, and Assistant U.S. Attorney John Owens.
Read the original article in SignOn San Diego.
