The owner of two Orange County companies tricked at least 11 victims into giving him $1.5 million for short-term loan investments but converted the funds mostly into personal use, according to the Santa Ana branch of the U.S. Attorney’s office.
J. Michael Clancy ran two unlawful Lake Forest operations—Multiplied Equities LP and Quantum Capital California LP—for a two-year period that ended in July 2016.
“Clancy promised to use investors’ funds to make short-term loans secured by investment properties,” Assistant United States Attorney Jennifer L. Waier stated in her complaint. “He promised to sell the loans to outside investors, thereby earning profits.”
Instead, the businessman converted the investments to “operate a house flipping scheme, to purchase a personal residence [in Silverado, CA], to repay other investors and for his own personal purposes,” Waier said.
Clancy, who was born in 1962, swiftly pleaded guilty in the Ponzi scheme and now faces a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse will preside.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.