A 62-year-old Laguna Niguel financial planner was sentenced Friday to more than nine years and four months in prison after being found guilty of defrauding victims of nearly $500,000 from their retirement accounts.
A jury on Sept. 29 convicted Robert Barth of two counts of using an untrue statement in the purchase or sale of a security, three counts of grand theft and one count of theft from an elder, Orange County District Attorney’s Office Chief of Staff Susan Kang Schroeder said.
“At the time of the crimes, Barth was a certified financial planner and acted as a financial advisor to the victims and gained their trust and friendship,” she said, adding that one of the victims considered Barth his best friend “while others participated in various activities with the defendant or knew him through their children and grandchildren’s school.”
According to prosecutors, Barth in 2003 fraudulently persuaded two victims to roll their retirement funds into self-directed IRAs that he promised would be invested in California Mortgage Notes, Schroeder said.
“The defendant directed the IRA trust administrator to transfer the victims’ money into a bank account that Barth controlled,” she said.
The victims were notified several years later that there were no mortgage notes and their entire IRA investment was lost.
In similar move, Barth in 2008 got two victims, one of them “an elder,” to roll their retirement funds into self-directed IRAs he controlled, claiming the money would be invested in a company called Coachella Valley Entitlement, LLC, but he did not inform the victims that he had just established the company mere weeks before and that he was its CEO, secretary, CFO and sole director, Schroeder said.
“Within a week of the first investment, Barth transferred over one- third of (the) funds into other bank accounts he controlled or withdrew the funds as cash,” she said. “Within four months of the first investment, Barth had used for his own purposes both victims’ entire investments.”
Victims lost a combined $492,000 in the 2003 and 2008 schemes, Schroeder said.
The case was investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by Deputy District Attorney Megan Wagner of the District Attorney’s Office’s Major Fraud Unit, Schroeder said.
—City News Service