Donald Anthony Walker Young, who is known as Tony Young or Walker Young, was the owner of Acorn Investments and Acorn II L.P.. He was indicted, [1] [2] pleaded guilty and was sentenced for running a $25 million Ponzi scheme.
Young was raised in Fitzgerald, Georgia. He used a fabricated life story to work his way into the Atlanta and then the Chester County, Pennsylvania, polo scene, where he met many of his victims. [3] Before being shaken and ultimately brought down by a $20 million withdrawal of funds in 2008, prior to his indictment, Young also acquired vacation homes in Northeast Harbor, Maine and Palm Beach, Florida and encountered prospective and ultimate victims in these locales as well. He pleaded guilty in July, 2010, to mail fraud and money laundering. In May, 2011, he was sentenced to 17+1⁄2 years in prison. [4]
Reed Eliot Slatkin was an initial investor and co-founder of EarthLink and the perpetrator of one of the largest Ponzi schemes in the United States since that conducted by Charles Ponzi himself.
James Galante is an American convicted felon and associate of the Genovese crime family, owner of the defunct Danbury Trashers minor-league hockey team and a defunct racecar team fielding cars for Ted Christopher, and ex-CEO of Automated Waste Disposal (AWD), a company that holds waste disposal contracts for most of western Connecticut and Westchester and Putnam counties in New York.
The Federal Correctional Complex, Butner is a United States federal prison complex for men near Butner, North Carolina. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. FCC Butner is about 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Raleigh, the state capital. It includes the Bureau's largest medical complex, which operates a drug treatment program and specializes in oncology and behavioral science. Among its inmates was Bernie Madoff, who was convicted for perpetrating the largest Ponzi scheme in history. He died at the prison in April 2021.
Michael Eugene Kelly was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico who operated a number of fraudulent resort enterprises and the Avanti Motor Corporation. In 2007, with 23 others, he was accused by the FBI and the United States Attorney's Office of operating an enormous Ponzi scheme that defrauded over a thousand elderly and senior citizens of their retirement money. It was later disclosed that 7,000 victims from throughout the U.S. lost more than $342 million.
Samuel Israel III is an American fraudster and former hedge fund manager for the Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which he founded in 1996. In 2008, Israel was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $300 million for defrauding his investors.
Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American fraudster and financier who was the mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion. He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business.
Nicholas Cosmo is an American former businessman and white-collar criminal. He was arrested January 26, 2009 on charges of an estimated $370–413 million Ponzi scheme. Cosmo conducted the scheme using his company Agape World Inc. in Hauppauge, New York, which claimed to make its profits via commercial bridge lending. Authorities arrested him in Hicksville, New York.
Steven Jude Hoffenberg was an American businessman and fraudster. He was the founder, CEO, president, and chairman of Towers Financial Corporation, a debt collection agency, which was later discovered to be a Ponzi scheme. In 1993, he rescued the New York Post from bankruptcy, and briefly owned the paper. Towers Financial collapsed in 1993, and in 1995 Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to bilking investors out of $475 million. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, plus a $1 million fine and $463 million in restitution. The U.S. SEC considered his financial crimes to be "one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history".
Norman Allen Adie is a former theater owner/operator/developer and confessed Ponzi schemer, presently inmate number 64354-054 in the Federal Detention Center (FDC) in Miami, Florida. Born in Scotland, Adie began his career in London with the Rank Organization and Twentieth Century Fox before moving to the United States to work at Radio City Music Hall.
In 2005, Dale Graybill and his wife Shirley were charged in Connecticut with mail fraud and tax fraud. They had previously been charged in Alabama with securities fraud. They pleaded guilty to all of these.
Claud Roderick "Rick" Koerber is an American convicted felon who was found guilty in federal court of orchestrating and running a $100 million Ponzi scheme, one of the largest in Utah's history. Koerber took in $100 million from 2004 to 2008 by promising his victims returns of 24% to 60% annually, but spent $50 million on Ponzi payments to prior investors, and also bought luxury items to give his scheme an appearance of profitability.
United States v. Scheinberg, No. 1:10-cr-00336 (2011), is a United States federal criminal case against the founders of the three largest online poker companies, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus, and a handful of their associates, which alleges that the defendants violated the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and engaged in bank fraud and money laundering to process transfers to and from their customers. A companion civil case, United States v. PokerStars, et al., 11 Civ. 2564 (2011), included Full Tilt and Cereus as defendants and seeks the recovery of forfeiture equalling approximately $3 billion in assets belonging to the companies. After the indictment was unsealed on April 15, 2011, a date quickly dubbed Black Friday by the online poker community, PokerStars and Full Tilt stopped offering real money play to their United States customers. Three years after the start of the poker boom in 2003, the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for illegal online gambling a crime; however, the defendant companies remained in the U.S. market in the belief that the law did not cover poker. A former payment processor for the companies turned state's evidence after initially being charged with violating UIGEA himself. On September 20, the civil suit was amended claiming individual fraud by Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson and Rafael Furst.
Frank Elroy Vennes Jr. is an American multimillionaire and convicted felon.
The Mantria Corporation Ponzi scheme has been described as the "biggest green energy scam" in United States history. A Federal judge in the Securities and Exchange Commission's civil case found Mantria had scammed more than $54.5 million “by egregiously, recklessly, knowingly, and shamelessly perpetrating a fraudulent scheme” that used “misrepresentations, omissions, and blatant lies to induce unsuspecting and unwitting victim investors to liquidate the equity in their homes and take out bank loans to invest in Defendants’ scheme, which was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.” On November 16, 2009, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged four people who targeted those nearing retirement age who were seeking real estate and "green" investments. Many of these securities were offered by Mantria Corporation.
Brian Kim is an American former hedge fund manager. He founded the now-defunct Liquid Capital Management LLC, which focused on futures trading.
DC Solar Solutions Inc., trading as DC Solar, was a Benicia, California solar power supplier company whose owners lived lavishly on ill-gotten gains in Martinez. The company was shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2018 after it turned out to be a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Woodbridge Securities was a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme run by CEO Robert H. Shapiro. The fraud scammed approximately 8,400 victims of retail investors, many of them elderly.
Obinwanne Okeke also known as Invictus Obi is a Nigerian entrepreneur and convicted fraudster who is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence in the United States for internet fraud that caused $11M losses to his victims. After initially pleading guilty, on February 16, 2021, Okeke was sentenced to ten years in prison. Until his arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation following a 13-month investigation, Okeke was a globally-renowned businessman who had investments in oil and gas, agriculture, private equity, alternative energy, telecom and real estate. He operated his holdings under the 'Invictus Group'. Invictus Group operated in three African countries including Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia. He holds a master's degree in International business and Counter-terrorism from Monash University, Australia.