Mug Shot Monday – Small Business Loan Broker Gets 18 Years

March 31, 2014

By Bob Coleman
Editor, Coleman Report

As the credit markets dried up in 2008, a Philadelphia loan broker pocketed a cool $1 million a year from ripping off 2,000 business owners in up front loan fees.

Now, Andrew Bogdanoff will be spending 18 years and four months in jail saying, “Greed and arrogance took over my life. I’ve lost everything I had – everything I worked my whole life to obtain.”

Reports the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Joseph DiStefano…..

“Promising to line up financing, Bogdanoff and Remington collected up-front fees of more than $10,000. Once the money had been paid, prosecutors said, the company had no intention of finding backers and intentionally found faults with the proposed developments to justify their failure to find funding.

“In court Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney David L. Axelrod described Bogdanoff’s firm as just one of a growing number of financiers targeting middle-class investors in the loosely regulated market. Unlike large corporations that can rely on federally regulated banks for funding, Remington’s clients were ‘by and large dreamers whom Bogdanoff and his coconspirators preyed upon for their own benefit,’ Axelrod said…’Google ‘project funding’ and you get a lot of companies that look a lot like Remington. Remington isn’t the first to steal money like this, and it won’t be the last.’…Even after his arrest in 2012, he aligned himself with a new firm based in Australia and continued to defraud new marks under a pseudonym, prosecutors said,”