Septuagenarian serial fraudster gets 25 years after latest schemes peddling CBD, hemp

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A serial fraudster who embarked on two schemes to defraud investors in a purported hemp farm and CBD bottling business while he was still under home detention from his previous fraud conviction was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Wednesday.

Mark Anderson, 70, pleaded guilty last year to scamming 45 investors, including many elderly victims, out of nearly $18 million with made-up stories about a hemp farm he owned and operated in Kern County, California, to produce CBD, or cannabidiol — a cannabis extract that doesn’t cause a person to get “high” and is purported to provide therapeutic benefits — and a bottling plant for CBD-infused avocado oil and pain cream, among other products.

U.S. District Judge Fernando Aenlle-Rocha imposed a sentence in excess what prosecutors with the U.S. Attorneys Office in Los Angeles asked for, calling Anderson an “incorrigible con man” who’s been convicted multiple times in a variety of Ponzi schemes.

The judge refused to credit Anderson for pleading guilty because he continued to dispute the amount of his victims’ losses, to which he had stipulated in his plea agreement, by blaming others and outside circumstances for some of those losses — and because he had contacted attorneys from some of his victims from jail with an offer of information to help them recover some of their money.

Those victims, the judge noted, didn’t file victim impact statement so as not to alienate Anderson.

“I cannot find by a preponderance of evidence that Mr. Anderson has accepted responsibility,” Aennle-Rocha said.

Neither was the judge persuaded by the argument of Brett Greenfield, Anderson’s attorney, that the geriatric criminal was entitled to a lower sentencing range on account of his diminished cognitive capacities, concluding that Anderson was conducting a sophisticated fraud scheme as recently as 2023 and that he was lucid enough at his change-of-plea hearing last year.

Anderson, who has been custody in a county jail since his arrest two years ago, said in a halting statement to the court that he was sorry for the losses that he had caused.

“It’s very sad for me,” he said. “So many people lost so much money. I didn’t set out to cause people to get hurt.”

Life savings lost

Some of Anderson’s victims who lost their life savings spoke at the four-hour sentencing hearing in downtown LA to recount how intricate and convincing Anderson’s lies were that even the lawyers they had retained to do due diligence on Anderson and his ventures were fooled.

One 75-year-old investment adviser recounted the guilt he’s experienced from convincing people who knew and trusted him to put their money into Anderson’s businesses.

“Nobody had ever lost money with me until I met that diabolical creature,” the financial adviser said, referring to Anderson as a department store Santa Clause on account of his unkempt hair and long beard. “He played me.”

A 74-year-old dentist from New Jersey said he lost $3.4 million, the bulk of his retirement savings, in Anderson’s fraud scheme.

“It took me 30 years to save, invest and grow that money,” he said. “I feel embarrassed and humiliated by having been exploited.”

In 2019, Anderson was released from a federal prison in Texas, where he was serving a 135-month sentence for defrauding investors in Ponzi-type scheme related to a largely fictitious oil business. He was allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence at his Beverly Hills, California, home per the Elderly Offender Pilot Project.

But not long after he was back at home, Anderson, claiming to be a third or fourth generation farmer, pitched his fictitious hemp farm to a potential investor in Arkansas. This investor was so enthralled by Anderson’s pitch that he brought in additional investors, and when Anderson returned 10% in “profits” in just a few months, those investors plowed even more money in the non-existent farm.

“I lived in a million-dollar home in Arkansas, now I live in a home worth less than $100,000 that I inherited,” the investor said at the sentencing hearing.

The attorney he hired to make sure Anderson and his business were legitimate, the investor told the judge, was so impressed with the documentation the con man provided that he, too, invested in the business.

“This defendant deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kerry Quinn said, asking for a sentence of 245 months. “He will go out and do it again if he’s ever released from custody.”

As part of his plea agreement, Anderson has forfeited a house in Ojai, California, and slue of expensive and exotic cars, including a 2008 Ferrari F430, a 1929 Ford Model A, a 1965 Pontiac Grand Prix, and a 1968 Ford Mustang GT.

The whereabouts of the bulk of the $18 million he stole is still a mystery, however.

In response to questions from the judge how much there was potentially available for restitution to Anderson’s victims, Quinn said that he was quite sophisticated in funneling the money away quickly through small transactions that weren’t traceable.

The prosecutor noted that in his previous convictions, Anderson was also ordered to pay restitution to his victims and that the amount he ended up paying was “pennies.”

Anderson is a disbarred attorney whose fraud schemes date back to the 1980s when persuaded as many as 2,000 investors to put their money in partnerships to purchase and restore historic buildings around the country. He was sentenced to 7 years prison for that scheme and ordered to pay $6.8 million in restitution.

He was also convicted in several state court cases of grand theft, preparing false evidence in civil lawsuits, as well as forging documents to obtain a mortgage loan, the sentences for which run concurrent with his federal prison sentence,.

When he got out, he embarked a new scheme in the early to mid-2000s soliciting investments in a misdescribed oil business, through he was he stole over $9 million from more than 20 victims. He was convicted of wire fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 135 months.

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