The chief executive and founder of an Atlanta-based financial consulting firm is also the leader of a $300 million Ponzi scheme who used investors’ cash to fund his own luxurious lifestyle, according to federal regulators. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday charged CEO and founder Todd Burkhalter for violating antifraud protections. Both Burkhalter’s assets and those of his company’s — which the SEC alleges is its founder’s “alter ego” — have been frozen.
Over the past four years, Burkhalter sold unregistered securities, which he described as a “bridge loan opportunity promising 10% in 3 months,” according to the SEC’s filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
By the end of June, more than 2,000 people had invested more than $300 million. Drive Planning’s team of more than 100 sales agents encouraged people to tap their savings for the securities and claimed that the company pooled the investments and loaned the money out to property developers to make profits. In reality, money from new investors was used to pay returns to existing investors and fund Burkhalter’s lifestyle, the complaint says.
[T]he defendants’ business was nothing more than a classic Ponzi scheme, using new investor money to pay returns to existing investors, with Burkhalter stealing millions to fund a lavish lifestyle,” Nekia Hackworth Jones, the director of the SEC’s Atlanta office, said in a statement. In a section of the.