A prison inmate serving time for running a Ponzi scheme has been charged with managing a $10 million nationwide real estate fraud scheme while he was incarcerated.
According to court documents, Seth Adam Depiano of Clovis, California, was sentenced in 2018 to more than 12 years in prison for running a $24 million fraud scheme. But while serving that sentence in federal prisons in the states of Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Florida in 2021 and 2022, Depiano managed a real estate fraud scheme utilizing a network of co-conspirators located across the country. While using contraband phones and computers and hiding behind fictitious identities “Marcus Lazaro” and “Steven Baron Sr.,” Depiano posed as a real estate broker who represented clients who wanted to sell property.
Depiano, who is not a real estate broker, marketed and sold properties he did not own and did not have the authority to sell. He used his co-conspirators to meet with potential investors, to conduct financial transactions, and conduct other activities on his behalf. In total, Depiano and his co-conspirators obtained approximately $10 million from victims in California, Nevada and elsewhere.
After receiving the money from the duped investors, Depiano and his co-conspirators laundered the funds through Las Vegas casinos and other businesses. They also formed shell companies to purchase and hold real estate using victim funds, and wired victim funds overseas. Once Depiano and his co-conspirators had received the victim funds, they laundered the money through Las Vegas casinos, using international wire transfers and shell companies, purchased properties, and invested in legitimate businesses.
Depiano has been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and aggravated identity theft. Depiano is still incarcerated and his next court date is scheduled for July 16. If convicted, Depiano faces a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison wire fraud and mail fraud, plus a mandatory minimum penalty of two years consecutive for aggravated identity theft.
Photograph: FotografiaBasica / Getty Images
Sounds like a prison reform program gone off the rails. Nobody was mongering his calls or emails?
The prison guards were probably paid off. And maybe he was in a prison for white collar inmates where he could run his business. They do have these prisons, they don t want the public to know this
I know of such a Federal prison in Pennsylvania where a prisoner ran his RE business from there in the 1990’s
Why didn’t he just become a realtor and sell properties legit?? It sounds like he could sell anything. What he did from a prison cell was harder than actually selling a property the old-fashioned and legal way.
Easier to get a listing that is not on a real property and there is no real owner to convince to hire you. The Investors seemed pretty stupid to not check up on the listing, the fake realtor, or to confirm the real owner of the property for sale, etc.
Sorry people got ripped off, but it sure sounds like the investor buyers may have been either unimaginably stupid, or, I question if those investors were part of a more elaborate money laundering scheme?
More on money laundering in next post.
Real estate remains a very attractive way to launder money. Other money cleaner avenues are expensive cars, art, jewelry, casinos, and cryptocurrency.
If you wonder why corruption appears to be very profitable, it’s because the U.S. and other nations make it so damned easy with ineffective laws that are difficult to enforce or under-funded oversight agencies that do not have the personnel or resources to enforce those laws, and that is NOT an accident.
Also, the many types of “ownership” of businesses, LLCs, Corporations, etc., and how one business can own layers of other businesses has created a Russian-Nesting-Doll system of hidden ownerships, so tracing where corrupt money originates become nearly impossible. Add to that the off-shore bank accounts where money is hidden and hard to regulate, and you have a veritable hearty stew of tastiness that wets the appetite of anyone who has a naughty bone to chew upon.
Big industries also funnel money to known criminals (often leaders of nations). Such money is often in the form of direct bribes to corrupt leaders and oligarchs around the world.
Exxon Mobile is one of those companies that admitted this in Senate hearings regarding their oil operations in the waters off of west Africa.
While citizens around the world suffer from this corrupt money system, there is the expanding impacts as cleaned money competes with legitimately earned money.
Laundered funds are used to buy up vast quantities of real estate, including many homes, farm lands, commercial businesses, mineral & water rights, etc., thus driving up those costs for honest workers.
There is a ton of Billionaire worshipping in the U.S. and elsewhere, so I don’t see that we will change our laws to limit corporate business activities where corruption is apparent, nor do I see the U.S. willing to limit ownership types (corporations, LLCs, etc), or to bust up monopolies, nor has our country been willing to stop the endless corporate lobbying by big businesses and foreign entities that hide within the corporate veil.
Sorry to sound so negative, but the gleeful rise of crypto only shows that our nation seems to love corruption (as do many other nations). We know where corrupt people are hiding and buying, yet little seems to be changing.
Being a criminal and running a business from jail is nothing new.
The biggest kidnapping in U.S. history was in 1972.
Many (older) readers may remember this.
A bus with 26 children was abducted and then buried 100 miles north in Chowchilla California. I remember watching this event unfold in the news. I was 13 years old. It was one in a series of horrors in the murder-rich decades of the 1960’s thru 1980’s, with serial killers seeming to be everywhere. But this crime was against children, a lot of them all at once.
No matter. Jail time is business and money-making time for big time criminals.
The head planner of this crime, Frederick Newhall Woods, was jailed but also conducted business from jail, though he did not obtain the necessary permission from the Warden to do so, and that infraction delayed his parole a little bit.
Frederick was paroled in 2022.
Fred (the dread) was one of 3 young men, all from wealthy, prominent families, all white who rationalized that their families’ big money was just not enough to cover their debts.
Psychos know no class boundaries.
His family trust was not altered to cut him out of the family fortune (his cut of it).
Nope, these parents seemed to think this crime against children was not worth severing their nasty child’s access to money. That says something about why these men felt entitled to commit crimes.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chowchilla-bus-kidnapping-frederick-woods-ran-a-gold-mine-and-christmas-tree-farm-from-prison/
Money Laundering thru real estate, cars, art, etc.
Malibu Mansion & Money Laundering (son of an African dictator is busy cleaning funds)
This was closely tracked by many news organizations.
I was one agent who called this out when I inquired about where the money originated for the purchase of this Malibu Mansion. All I got was angry eyes from my managers and confused looks from other agents.
No one in the real estate world around me seemed to care or even want to look deeper.
The Malibu Mansion case turned into a Senate investigation and a Los Angeles court case against the buyer. A settlement required the mansion be sold, but not other assets.
The U.S., France, England are at the top of the list in turning a blind eye as profits make for convenient blindnesses from many in the real estate and banking world.
Once oil or other resources come into play in other nations, money laundering often follows, with the U.S., Canada, several western European nations, some Asian cities being eager recipients to launder money.
https://www.dailynews.com/2010/02/20/malibu-mansion-bought-with-funds-from-african-nation-report-says/
Court Cases & Settlements against son of African dictator.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/23/africa/france-trial-teodoro-nguema-obiang-mangue/index.html
Governments delay & fail to act against corruption in real estate & other laundering activities.
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/archive/secret-documents-reveal-multi-million-dollar-shopping-spree-african-dictators-son-us/
2006 Spotlight on corruption coming to the U.S. via son of African dictator
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/10/equatorialguinea.danglaister
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/archive/secret-documents-reveal-multi-million-dollar-shopping-spree-african-dictators-son-us/