Zachary Horwitz dreamed of making it big in Hollywood, but his most convincing role would be that of a real-life business man as he swindled his closest friends.
Horwitz ran Hollywood’s largest Ponzi scheme, raising at least $650 million with bogus claims that investors were buying licensing rights to films that would later be sold to streaming giants like Netflix and HBO.
In reality, his company never acquired any film rights and didn’t have distribution agreements with either company. Instead, prosecutors say Horwitz used the money to fund his own lavish lifestyle and pay returns to other investors to keep up the mirage.
“This one is tragic, because it started off as imaginary, continued as imaginary and then grew so large,” Alexander Loftus, a civil attorney with Loftus & Eisenberg, LTD told CNBC’s “American Greed” in an episode airing Tuesday, of the numerous victims of the scheme.
Horwitz was sentenced to 20 years behind bars in February and ordered to pay more than $230 million in restitution to his victims after pleading guilty in October of 2021 to one count of securities fraud, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.
“Defendant Zachary Horwitz portrayed himself as a Hollywood success story,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “He branded himself as an…
