{"id":39,"date":"2006-01-06T10:49:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-06T16:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/wordpress\/?p=39"},"modified":"2011-11-19T22:49:09","modified_gmt":"2011-11-20T04:49:09","slug":"milwaukee-fraud-convicted-con-artist-gets-30-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/milwaukee-fraud-convicted-con-artist-gets-30-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Milwaukee Fraud: Convicted Con Artist Gets 30 years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Leslie John Hamilton was sentenced to 30 years in prison for masterminding a pyramid scheme that he claimed was an investment in rare coins. The scheme involved over 300 victims, who lost more than $10 million.<\/p>\n<p>Hamilton was convicted by a federal jury on 28 counts of mail fraud and wire fraud, after representing himself as a master coin grader. He claimed that he bought coins below market value, and then resold them for a profit. Investors were promised returns of 8% to 150%. In reality, investors were paid &#8220;returns&#8221; on their money via collections from new investors, typical of a traditional Ponzi scheme.<\/p>\n<p>The fraudster continues to claim that he is not guilty, and is the target of a government conspiracy.<\/p>\n<p>Read the full story <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jsonline.com\/news\/metro\/jan06\/383086.asp\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leslie John Hamilton was sentenced to 30 years in prison for masterminding a pyramid scheme that he claimed was an investment in rare coins. The scheme involved over 300 victims, who lost more than $10 million. Hamilton was convicted by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1186,184],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ponzi-schemes","category-pyramid-schemes-mlm"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}