For more than a decade, Jay Lucas raised $50 million from over 200 investors by presenting himself as a builder of early-stage wellness companies. The SEC now alleges the building was a stage set, and the investors were the ones holding it up.
Tyler Bossetti raised more than $23 million through Facebook and YouTube by promising investors guaranteed returns of thirty percent or more on real estate deals that mostly did not exist. He spent four years building the machine. He will spend six years in federal prison accounting for it.
The Department of Justice just opened the compensation window for OneCoin victims, but the math is brutal before you even file a claim. Here is what actually happened to your money, where it went, and what forty million dollars means when four billion is already gone.
Two hundred and seventy-two investors put money into a California real estate fund that promised steady monthly income from rental homes. The SEC alleges the monthly checks kept coming only because fresh investors were paying for them, and the people running the fund knew it from nearly the beginning.
The SEC just released its best enforcement number in history, and the headline is almost entirely one man who ran a Ponzi scheme before some of the people reading this were old enough to vote. What the number underneath that number looks like is a different story altogether.