Friday, February 18, 2011

Football Fraudster

You've probably heard about how one of Bernie Madoff's biggest victims was the Wilpon family, owners of the New York Mets. There's a story out of Texas that's sort of the reverse of this: rather than preying on millionaire sports figures, a Ponzi schemer named Kurt Barton enlisted famous athletes to help him sell worthless investments. Barton was indicted Tuesday on more than 3o charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.

Barton got two different Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks, Ty Detmer and Chris Weinke, to help bring in new investors to his schemes. He also convinced Jeff Blake, a onetime NFL quarterback with the Bengals and several other teams, to send an email to over 100 of his fellow NFL vets, claiming that Barton had gotten him annual returns of 32 percent. That's even better than Madoff!

It's not clear just how successful all this was. At one point, Barton showed a client a statement from E-Trade that supposedly showed he had a $3 million account with the online trader - but on closer inspection, the amount of money in the account was just $3,161.17.

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