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Wealth Assistants’ Victims Sue Law Firm And Three Banks
Banks Law Office previously announced that it filed a putative class action lawsuit on behalf of victims of Wealth Assistants, a fraudulent enterprise whose scheme involved offering “passive income” to people who invested in Amazon e-commerce stores that Wealth Assistants managed.
Banks Law Office filed a motion to amend the complaint. The defendants in the “proposed second amended complaint” include Marker Law, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and First Citizens Bank. A summary of the proposed second amended complaint is below.
Summary of Proposed Second Amended Complaint
Wealth Assistants is a fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Day family: Max K. Day, Max O. Day, Michael Day, and Jared Day. They are career criminals who have perpetrated similar schemes for decades, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from their victims.
Wealth Assistants obtained more than $50 million by defrauding more than 600 individuals.
Specifically, Wealth Assistants advertised that it would provide its clients with substantial income by setting up and managing lucrative online Amazon stores that the clients would own. But Wealth Assistants did not provide the promised services. Instead, it used the fees it collected from Plaintiffs and its other clients for the benefit of the Human Defendants.
Wealth Assistants’ clients would pay it an upfront fee of up to $125,000 to set up an online Amazon store in the client’s name and manage it. After that, the client would pay for the store’s inventory, along with certain other smaller fees. In return, the individual would be entitled to collect between 50 percent and 70 percent of the online store’s gross profits.
Wealth Assistants advertised that the profits of an online store it managed should grow to more than $10,000 per month by the end of the store’s first year.
Hundreds of individuals purchased the business opportunity Wealth Assistants offered. Most of these purchasers were middle class, and many had to use all their retirement savings or take out home equity loans to make the purchase.
Wealth Assistants never intended to follow through on its promises.
Some of Wealth Assistants’ clients never even received an online store after paying the fee. Others received stores (which themselves are valueless and can be easily and freely set up), but their stores were never stocked with any inventory. Others paid Wealth Assistants for inventory after receiving inventory invoices from Wealth Assistants that turned out to be fake; the inventory never actually appeared in their stores.
Ultimately, the vast majority of Wealth Assistants’ clients have received less than $10,000 in profits from their online stores, and many never received a single dollar of revenue from their stores (if they received stores at all).
Wealth Assistants perpetuated its fraudulent enterprise for as long as it could. When Plaintiffs and other individuals complained, Wealth Assistants invented excuses. It blamed “supply chain disruption,” for example. It asked its clients for patience.
Realizing that its fraud was being exposed, Wealth Assistants shut down. In October of 2023, Wealth Assistants announced to all of its clients that it was going out of business. The announcement told Plaintiffs that they would not receive further services and would not receive their money back.
Throughout this fraudulent scheme, instead of using the money collected from Wealth Assistants’ clients to provide the promised services, Wealth Assistants used much of the money it collected from its clients for the benefit of the Human Defendants. For example, Wealth Assistants’ CEO, Ryan Carroll, has flaunted his new Lamborghini.
Proficient Supply LLC is an entity that operated a scam nearly identical to Wealth Assistants’ scam beginning in 2020, before Wealth Assistants ever existed. Proficient Supply was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in 2022, but a few months later, it was acquired by Wealth Assistants. Thereafter, as part of Wealth Assistants, it accepted payments from the Wealth Assistants Entity Defendants in transactions that served the sole purpose of helping Wealth Assistants conceal assets. Because of the intermingled assets, common ownership, and lack of distinct operations, Proficient Supply LLC is another alter ego of the Wealth Assistants Entity Defendants.
The Quantum-Wholesale Partnership Defendants—led by Defendants Troy Marchand and Bonnie Nichols—worked for Wealth Assistants and helped it carry out its fraudulent scheme. They also helped Wealth Assistants conceal its assets from Defendants by accepting fraudulent transfers totaling more than $1 million in the months before Wealth Assistants went out of business.
Defendant Travis Marker—acting through his two law offices, Defendant Law Office of Travis R. Marker and Defendant Parlay Law Group—served as an “escrow agent” to help Wealth Assistants conceal the proceeds of its fraudulent scheme. In particular, Travis Marker shipped credit card readers to many of Wealth Assistants’ clients for those clients to pay Wealth Assistants by making small discrete payments into different credit card readers. Those payments went to Travis Marker’s “escrow account,” and he would then pass those payments from the escrow accounts to undisclosed Wealth Assistants bank accounts, which helped prevent Plaintiffs from recovering the money that Wealth Assistants stole from them.
Defendant Bank of America operated bank accounts held by Wealth Assistants and Defendant Ryan Carroll. Bank of America quickly realized that Defendant Ryan Carroll was using those bank accounts to perpetrate a fraud because of blatant red flags, and in November of 2022, Bank of America froze some of those bank accounts. But instead of making efforts to return those funds to the individuals the funds had been stolen from, Bank of America simply wrote a cashier’s check to Wealth Assistants for more than $3.7 million so that it could conceal that money elsewhere. Even more egregiously, Bank of America continued operating many bank accounts held by Defendant Ryan Carroll after it had frozen Wealth Assistants’ accounts, and Bank of America continued helping Ryan Carroll conceal the proceeds of the Wealth Assistants fraudulent scheme.
Defendant Reyhan Pasinli is the owner and operator of Defendant Total Apps. Pasinli and Total Apps orchestrated Wealth Assistants’ Payment Processing Strategy (which, as explained below, aimed to conceal the proceeds of the fraudulent scheme and avoid money-laundering detection) by helping Wealth Assistants set up merchant bank accounts, recruiting other merchants to use their bank accounts in furtherance of Wealth Assistants’ Payment Processing Strategy, and serving as the “gateway” for transactions involving the various merchant accounts controlled by Wealth Assistants. Pasinli has long helped the Day family defendants conceal the proceeds of their various fraudulent schemes, and he knew that Wealth Assistants was a fraudulent scheme.
Total Apps is a registered independent sales organization of Wells Fargo Bank and, upon information and belief, Total Apps acted as Wells Fargo’s agent when it orchestrated Wealth Assistants’ Payment Processing Strategy. Therefore, Wells Fargo is vicariously liable for Total Apps’ participation in the fraudulent scheme.
Even if Total Apps were not associated with Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo would still be liable because it knowingly operated many Wealth Assistants bank accounts despite knowing of Wealth Assistants’ plan to fraudulently disperse its assets and conceal them from creditors.
First Citizens Bank knowingly operated a bank account for Providence Oak Properties, one of the Wealth Assistants Entity Defendants. First Citizens knew that the Providence Oak Properties bank account was being used for money laundering because—although Providence Oak Properties was purportedly a construction company—each of the wire transfers out of the Providence Oak Properties bank account explained that Providence Oak Properties was simply accepting transfers of cash and then wiring the cash back to the sender after deducting a fee. First Citizens Bank also did not keep records of the millions of dollars in transfers of money into the First Citizens Bank account.