The Expert Podcast

Many times our clients like to ask us what kind of cases do you work on, and what are the results you get? Well, here's a case that, if you remember back a few years ago, we talked about in the state of New Jersey. There was a company called NRI (National Realty Investment Advisors). This company was advertising all over the place—Fox News, CNBC, CNN, ESPN—they were advertising all over the airwaves about this investment where you could put money in and make a lot of profit. We had some investors contact us that were skeptical about it, and we did an investigation.

We found that it appeared to be a Ponzi scheme. In fact, one of their executives had previous convictions for fraud. One of their investors had been admonished by the SEC, allegedly for doing unregistered securities. Another of their executives actually changed the spelling of their last name so they couldn't be identified as someone with a history. We wrote reports and gave all this to investors, and it started a domino effect where investors who hadn’t put money in yet were pulling away from the company, and investors who had put money in were starting to get scared and filing reports with the Attorney General and the SEC. Our investigative case started a lot of this.

Well, now, a few years later, the whole thing has blown up, and these people are now being sentenced. There was a conviction back earlier this year, and the chief executive is going to get 12 years in prison. He's going to have to pay back restitution. They stole $650 million. The whole thing was a Ponzi scheme, and he admitted it in court.

This was a big case. This was a company that represented that they were buying real estate all over the East Coast of the United States—from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida. They had supposedly all these properties in Florida, and we did some research on these properties too. They weren’t exactly what they were represented to be. We did financial investigations and analysis on these properties, and they weren’t investments; they were just properties that were flat out there.

So make sure you do your due diligence. Anytime somebody offers more than is reasonable, you know, the “if it’s too good to be true” kind of thing, make sure that you do investigations on the principles. That was the easiest thing on this case—we did investigations on the principles of this company. We found one with a prior regulatory admonishment, one with a criminal history, and one that was changing their name on their records for this new company.

We like to see when these cases come to fruition. Sometimes it takes a while; this one took two and a half, three years to get to this point. But now, the company’s been busted, the money’s been redistributed, and people are going to prison. People have been convicted, and this is what we like to see—so no more victims are at risk.

If you're involved with an investment you’re not sure about, or you’re thinking about an investment, you can click the link below to have investigations done, or we can even do a consultation with you to kind of give you an idea of what you might be looking at. If you found this video helpful, be sure to click on other videos on our channel to see if there’s further information that could give you more insight into resolving your particular situation.