Serial scammer accused of defrauding real estate pros

A 54-year-old man has been indicted on 18 felony counts of securities fraud by a Colorado grand jury. His victims have been described as a group of “sophisticated, knowledgeable real estate professionals.”

The Colorado Attorney General’s Office alleges that Sean McClay lied to real estate investors and swindled them out of $1.4 million of the nearly $4 million he’d raised from 17 individuals for fix-and-flip property investments.

According to the indictment, McClay spent $1.5 million on real estate acquisitions and $947,000 on property renovations, keeping the remaining funds and spending them on personal expenses and cash withdrawals.

This is not McClay’s first brush with the law, nor is it his first time allegedly helping himself to funds with which he’d been entrusted. In 2017, McClay was charged with stealing funds from a high school football booster club in Wisconsin. He was also charged with embezzlement for stealing money from a machine shop. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and avoided prison time in those incidents.

Yet another company associated with McClay, Peak 360 Services, a construction company, was implicated in a 2021 lawsuit that alleged “breach of contract, negligence, fraud, unjust enrichment” and other charges related to the construction of a fire station in Lake County, Colorado. On Dec. 24, 2025, the county was awarded $473,107 in damages plus attorney’s fees, costs and statutory interest.

“If any of us would have had the brains just to Google his name, we would have seen previous articles about him stealing,” Denver Realtor Sandi Hewins told BusinessDen. “But none of us had the brains to do that.”

According to prosecutors, McClay’s largest victim lost $400,000, and his smallest lost $25,000. Hewins lost $50,000 and described a conference call in which a woman cried over the loss of her retirement savings in the scheme.

Email Christy Murdock