A 53-year-old mortgage broker was gunned down last week outside his Las Vegas area home, according to a story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal (The Journal). Court documents indicate that Richard Wood was accused of bilking millions of dollars from dozens of investors in a nationwide Ponzi scheme.
Lt. Wayne Petersen was quoted as saying, “This was not a random act. He was obviously targeted for a specific reason. Money can be a big motivator.”
The Journal story said that Federal bankruptcy documents filed against Richard Wood in 1999 claim he defrauded investors of $4 million to $6 million by swaying participants in finance seminars he taught across the country to invest in bogus ventures. According to federal court documents, Wood’s investors forced him into involuntary bankruptcy proceedings in October 1999.
The Journal went on to say that Wood’s victims say he used funds paid by later investors to disburse artificially high returns to his original investors, which lured more investors into the scheme. Wood then began evading his investors and making up elaborate stories about the fake ventures while secretly storing the money in offshore bank accounts, according to attorneys representing some of Wood’s creditors. A mortgage company recently initiated foreclosure proceedings on the house where Wood was shot because he stopped making payments on the $500,000 he owed the company.
