$200 million Ponzi scheme nets Florida woman 20-year prison sentence

A Florida woman who pleaded guilty in a Ponzi scheme that raked in nearly $200 million was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison.

Johanna Garcia, 41, of Broward County, received the maximum possible sentence for one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud. Twenty-eight other counts from her indictment were dismissed, according to court filings in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Judge Jose Martinez also sentenced Garcia to three years of supervised release and a $100 special assessment, plus additional restitution that will be determined March 3, according to the case docket.

Garcia controlled MJ Capital Funding, which fraudulently solicited investors to fund its purported business of providing short-term, high-cost loans called merchant cash advances, or MCAs, federal prosecutors said in a press release.

She and her co-conspirators made “false statements and fraudulent representations” to investors about the nature of their investment and how the money would be used, the prosecutors said.

Investors were told that their money would fund MCAs and that returns on their investment would be paid from the profits of the MCA business. Garcia and her co-conspirators falsely promised significant returns at an annual rate of 120%, according to the indictment.

But her company “made few loans and failed to earn anywhere near the profits it needed to pay the investors the promised returns,” prosecutors said in Tuesday’s release.

“As a result, Garcia paid investors by running a large Ponzi fraud scheme, paying existing investors using new investor funds while misappropriating millions of dollars for her own personal benefit.”

The fraudulent conspiracy, which took place between October 2020 and August 2021, netted at least $190.7 million. Of that total, investors lost nearly $90 million, prosecutors said.

In 2021, investors in MJ Capital filed a lawsuit accusing Wells Fargo Bank of aiding the fraud scheme by failing to follow its own anti-money-laundering policies. The bank in March 2023 agreed to settle the suit for $26.6 million, Law360 reported.

Garcia’s partner, Pavel Ramon Ruiz Hernandez, was charged in August 2022 and pleaded guilty in April 2023 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He was sentenced in September 2023 to nine years and two months in prison, plus three years of supervised release.

Prosecutors said Tuesday that after MJ Capital was shut down by the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Garcia, Ruiz Hernandez and others launched a new, similar Ponzi scheme in fall 2021.

Garcia led this new scheme from its start, “up until her arrest [in August 2023], and after, while in Bureau of Prisons custody,” according to prosecutors.

The new scheme — using entities called New Beginning Global Funding LLC and New Beginning Capital Funding LLC, among others — involved Garcia and her partners telling investors that they would be funding commercial loans.

“In truth, the money raised was used to pay off previous investors, and fund Garcia and her coconspirators’ lifestyles,” prosecutors said.

In a Nov. 27 sentencing memo, Garcia’s attorneys suggested that Ruiz Hernandez was effectively the true leader of the scheme. They also argued that Garcia’s subsequent conduct through New Beginning, “though deeply misguided and plainly wrong, was motivated by a desire to pay back her former investors.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office, in its own memo filed Monday, rejected that characterization and urged the judge to sentence Garcia to 240 months’ imprisonment.

“The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Garcia was the leader/organizer of the two Ponzi schemes that defrauded over 15,400 victims out of an actual loss amount of nearly $90 million,” prosecutors wrote.

Attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office representing Garcia did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the sentence.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.