{"id":546,"date":"2007-03-09T17:10:59","date_gmt":"2007-03-09T22:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/2007\/03\/09\/pinnacle-development-partners-charged-with-running-a-ponzi-scheme\/"},"modified":"2011-08-17T23:12:41","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T04:12:41","slug":"pinnacle-development-partners-charged-with-running-a-ponzi-scheme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/pinnacle-development-partners-charged-with-running-a-ponzi-scheme\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinnacle Development Partners Charged With Running a Ponzi Scheme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"times\">Pinnacle Development Partners LLC has been charged with running a Ponzi scheme that took $69 million from over 2,000 investors. The top man, Gene O&#8217;Neal was charged with 19 counts of federal mail and wire fraud.<\/p>\n<p class=\"times\">In 2006, Pinnacle advertised 25% returns in 60 days (which equals a 280% annual return).\u00a0 The company claimed it earned such high returns by purchasing distressed real estate and quickly selling it at a profit.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p class=\"times\">While the company claimed to have sold over 100 such properties, a federal receiver says that Pinnacle really only acquired 21 properties, and never sold them outside Pinnacle&#8217;s various partnerships. The federal indictment says that investment &#8220;returns&#8221; were paid from new investor funds, and this type of scam is generally referred to as a Ponzi scheme.<\/p>\n<p class=\"times\">Barry Minkow, fraud investigator (and ex-con of ZZZZ Best fame) helped expose the company and its scam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pinnacle Development Partners LLC has been charged with running a Ponzi scheme that took $69 million from over 2,000 investors. The top man, Gene O&#8217;Neal was charged with 19 counts of federal mail and wire fraud. In 2006, Pinnacle advertised [&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],"tags":[830,1612,1155],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ponzi-schemes","tag-barry-minkow","tag-pinnacle-development-partners","tag-zzzz-best"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-8O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","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=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}