Man Sentenced to Nine Years in Prison For Scamming Elderly
The Sun in California reports that a Riverside, CA man has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for felony charges of grand theft, elder abuse and filing false documents after the man allegedly conducted a Ponzi scheme. 39-year-old Ronald Paul Shade pled guilty to 29 felony counts of the aforementioned charges and had to pay $3.5M in compensation to the victims of the Ponzi scheme.
Shade ran the scheme from 2006 until 2008. Police discovered Shade’s scheme when one of the victims, an elderly person in Victorville, CA, spoke with the District Attorney’s Real Estate Fraud Department in California. Shade reportedly stole a total of $14 million through this scam.
This type of scheme has consistently been used against people but these schemes never last very long. A Ponzi scheme is a scam that attracts investors to invest a certain amount of money under the impression that those investors will get a large return from their investment. Although these schemes fall apart because they are used for a long period of time, perpetrators still manage to steal large amounts of money. Financial schemes are consistently used by perpetrators of elder abuse because they are often able to make the scam seem real using jargon and words that people not involved in investment banking or finance may not understand. This makes it easy for perpetrators to steal large sums of money from investors. Unfortunately, many elderly people become victims of these types of schemes. The worst part is that those elderly victims often lose very large sums of money and they are never able to get that money back.
