The ringleader of a $300 million Ponzi scheme that targeted veterans and the elderly pleaded guilty and was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison.
Scott A. Kohn, a 68-year-old from Newport, California, was indicted in 2019 in South Carolina for a nationwide fraud conspiracy operated through his corporation Future Income Payments LLC from 2011 to 2018.
“Kohn and his co-conspirators reached across the country to steal from veterans and seniors who desperately needed their money,” said U.S. Attorney Adair F. Boroughs for the District of South Carolina in a statement Thursday. “These hundreds of millions in losses will reverberate through the victims’ lives long after the defendants serve well-deserved federal prison sentences.”
Kohn and his co-conspirators recruited pension holders — most of them veterans — in dire financial circumstances and offered them lump-sum payments in exchange for the rights to their monthly pensions and disability benefits, according to court documents.
While FIP framed these transactions as sales, they were essentially loans with exorbitant interest rates, sometimes as high as 240%. Moreover, the buying and selling of military benefits is illegal under federal law.
The conspiracy then sought out retirees looking for safe investments and promised them reliable “structured cash flows” — really just the veterans’ monthly pension payments.
As state regulators began clamping down on FIP and pensioners struggled to pay the extremely…
