Actor Zach Avery is sentenced to 20 years in prison
The Ponzi scheme became recognized, thanks to the actor.
The 35-year-old actor, whose real name is Zachary Horwitz, earned people's trust with his fame in the world of entertainment. The actor worked on You're Not Alone in 2020 and The Devil Below in 2021.
Little by little with his jobs in certain companies, the actor asked friends, colleagues and family for money, to supposedly invest money in HBO and Netflix, which turned out to be completely false.
After pleading guilty, he was convicted in federal court in downtown Los Angeles last year of cheating with $650 million in pyramid schemes.
Therefore, the judge determined in his sentence an economic restitution of 230 million dollars. In his statements in the District Court he was lost and defined himself as a broken and imperfect man.
Avery's defense requested remission of arguments that referred to claims that the actor suffers from addiction problems and bipolar disorder.
use of money
In 2014, he started his Ponzi scheme in which he claimed that he had connections with large entertainment companies and that he could receive movie titles to be broadcast abroad and license the properties to HBO and the Netflix streaming platform.
Avery used the money he received to pay for his luxurious life in Hollywood, with luxury cars, rented yachts, parties in Las Vegas, private planes and a 5.7 million dollar mansion that includes a swimming pool, gym and a private screening room located on the outside of Beverly Hills.
A total of $6.9 million in credit card bills, an FBI affidavit recorded. In addition, he spent $345,000 on chartered boats, planes, and more than $604,000 on Audi and Merceds-Benz vehicles.
Statements
Prosecutors claimed the man designed the largest known pyramid scheme I met in the district's history.
Three victims attended court, including Robert Henny, a screenwriter who took a gamble on the Ponzi scheme and invested $1.8 million. In statements he described it as an endless nightmare.
A 73-year-old widow, she said Avery stole a third of her retirement account, and the trust of entrusting her investments to someone else. She declared that she lost her husband, a Vietnam veteran, due to the effects of Agent Orange and that now, she alone takes care of her 46-year-old daughter, with special needs.
An unidentified 64-year-old man explained that he lost $1.4 million in this scam and therefore had to go back to work to pay for housing and food. After this you will not be able to recover. In addition, he assured that a large part of that money was the inheritance of his mother's death, for this reason, he cries every day of anguish.
He also stopped seeing his friends out of shame at the financial loss and ended by saying that if it weren't for his spiritual beliefs, he would have killed himself by now.
Horwitz took it upon himself to lie to and mislead an Illinois investor into putting up $1.4 million in December 2018 for a deal that would offer international distribution rights to the real-life documentary investigating collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
In the documents that were presented in the case, it was explained that the defendant created copies of license and distribution agreements with fictitious or forged signatures, to give them to his victims.
To appease investors, he blamed companies and created fake emails with the addresses "@netflix.com" and "@hbo.com."