James Michael Nicholson (born 1966) is an American fraudster and was the head of the investment firm Westgate Capital Management. The headquarters of Westgate Capital was located in Pearl River, New York. Nicholson was arrested on February 25, 2009, by the FBI [1] and charged by the SEC for allegedly "defraud[ing] hundreds of investors of millions of dollars". [2] Nicholson was indicted by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, on April 23, 2009, and was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to defrauding investors in the Ponzi scheme. Nicholson is serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Otisville, a medium security facility for male offenders located on the outskirts of Otisville, New York. His projected release date is April 7, 2043, when he will be 76 years old. [3] [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.
Affinity fraud is a form of investment fraud in which the fraudster preys upon members of identifiable groups, such as religious or ethnic communities, language minorities, the elderly, or professional groups. The fraudsters who promote affinity scams frequently are – or successfully pretend to be – members of the group. They often enlist respected community or religious leaders from within the group to spread the word about the scheme, by convincing those people that a fraudulent investment is legitimate and worthwhile. Many times, those leaders become unwitting victims of the fraudster's ruse.
Robert Allen Stanford is an American financial fraudster, former financier, and sponsor of professional sports. He is serving a 110-year federal prison sentence, having been convicted in 2012 of fraud, on charges that his investment company was the vehicle for a massive Ponzi scheme.
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.
Craig Harris Carton is an American radio personality. He is the co-host of the Carton and Roberts sports radio program on WFAN (AM) in New York City, and previously co-hosted Boomer and Carton on the station from 2007 to 2017.
Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American fraudster and financier who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion. He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He advanced the proliferation of electronic trading platforms and the concept of payment for order flow, which has been described as a "legal kickback".
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.
Stephen Walsh is an American former money manager who pleaded guilty to securities fraud.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former NASDAQ chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Steven Jude Hoffenberg is the former founder, Chief Executive Officer, 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 SEC considered his financial crimes to be "one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history" prior to Bernie Madoff's crimes a decade later.
Laura Pendergest-Holt is a convicted Ponzi scheme perpetrator, financier, and former chief investment officer of Stanford Financial Group, who was charged with a civil charge of fraud on February 17, 2009. On May 12, 2009, Pendergest-Holt was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of a criminal complaint of obstructing a fraud investigation and conspiracy to obstruct justice. In early 2009, Stanford Financial became the subject of several fraud investigations, and on February 17, 2009, Pendergest-Holt was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud and multiple violations of U.S. securities laws for alleged "massive ongoing fraud" involving $8 billion in certificates of deposit. The FBI raided three of Stanford's offices in Houston, Memphis, and Tupelo, Mississippi. On February 27, 2009, the SEC amended its complaint to describe the alleged fraud as a "massive Ponzi scheme". On June 21, 2012, she pleaded guilty to obstructing a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Stanford International Bank (SIB), the Antiguan offshore bank owned by Robert Allen Stanford. On September 13, 2012, Holt was sentenced to three years in prison, followed by three years of supervised probation. She was released on April 23, 2015.
Gary Allen Sorenson is a Canadian businessman who was arrested at Calgary International Airport on September 29, 2009 for an alleged role in a Ponzi scheme that scammed investors of more than C$300 million, the largest in Canada. On July 28, 2015 Gary Sorenson, 71, and Milowe Brost, 61, were sentenced in a Calgary courtroom to 12 years in prison for their elaborate, multimillion-dollar fraud.
Timothy Shawn Durham Sr. is an American lawyer and financier convicted in 2012 of the largest white collar crime in Indiana history. His investment firm Obsidian Enterprises invested in a number of companies, including wireless device company BrightPoint and comedy brand National Lampoon, Incorporated, where Durham served as CEO. In 2012, Durham was sentenced to 50 years in prison in connection with a Ponzi scheme that defrauded 5,400 investors, many of them elderly, of approximately $216 million, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
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.
Bar Works was a New York City company that provided shared office space in a former bar and restaurant premises. For $25,000, investors could buy desks at Bar Works locations and then lease them back to the company. It has been noted that elements of the investment program are akin to a Ponzi scheme.
Bitconnect was an open-source cryptocurrency that was connected with a high-yield investment program, a type of Ponzi scheme. After the platform administrators closed the earning platform on January 16, 2018, and refunded the users' investments in BCC following a 92% coin value crash, confidence was lost and the value of the coin plummeted to below $1 from a previous high of nearly $525.
Zachary Joseph Horwitz, known professionally as Zach Avery, is an American convicted felon and former actor. In 2021, he was arrested on charges of defrauding investors of $227 million through a Ponzi scheme. He pled guilty to securities fraud and was sentenced to twenty years in prison on February 14, 2022.