Portland, Oregon, real estate investment advisors Robert Christensen, a residential loan officer and loan originator, and Anthony Matic, a real estate agent, have been sentenced to prison for their role in a Ponzi scheme that defrauded commercial lenders out of more than $7 million and individual investors out of more than $10 million.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon, the pair told investors that they would use the funds to “purchase and renovated undervalued residential real estate properties,” then rent them out “to generate income and refinance the properties to extract any increased value from the renovations.”
Investors were promised repayment of their initial investment, along with 8 percent to 15 percent interest within periods as short as 30 to 90 days.
When they were unable to pay early investors as promised, they used new investments to keep the business solvent. When they were unable to raise money from new investors, they began “submitting loan applications with false financial information to different commercial lenders and based on their misrepresentations, received millions of dollars in loans.”
According to a filing from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Christensen and Matic used investor money to pay for “at least one vacation, gifts, casino trips, massages, personal expenses, a whiskey club membership and cryotherapy.”
Christensen and Matic each pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Christensen pleaded guilty to one additional count of money laundering. Christensen received a sentence of 63 months in federal prison, while Matic’s sentence was for 33 months. The men were previously ordered to pay $5,374,482 plus separate penalties of $200,000 each in a separate SEC civil case in 2023.
Victim impact statements published by Realtor.com showed the scale of the fraud, with investors saying they “live in fear of their financial future every day” and will “never be able to retire.”
One victim, identified only by the initials D.P., said that Christensen, who was a personal friend, reached out to her after the death of her husband, telling her she could “double her money” by investing with him. Subsequently her life savings was “stripped,” resulting in “countless sleepless nights these past years, depression and anxiety.”
