A Rhode Island woman who operated a property preservation and field services business will spend the next eight years in prison after admitting that she used that business to defraud dozens of individuals out of millions of dollars by operating what amounted to a Ponzi scheme.
According to the Department of Justice, Monique Brady owned and operated a property preservation company called MNB. Brady was accused last year of running the Ponzi scheme, and later pleaded guilty to the charges.
According to a release from DOJ, between 2014 and summer 2018, Brady used her business to solicit private investors to invest funds for large scale rehabilitation of properties with the promise that investors would receive half of the profits.
Brady also admitted to that she told potential investors that her company had secured contracts to perform large-scale rehabilitation projects on foreclosed properties in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, when in many cases, this was not true.
Of the 171 properties for which Brady ostensibly obtained investor fund for rehabilitation projects, 98 were for properties her company was never hired to preserve, and on which no work was ever performed.
To convince the potential investors that MNB had secured contracts for large rehabilitation projects, Brady provided fraudulent emails supposedly from a national property rehabilitation company, which claimed Brady had been approved to rehabilitate a property.
Brady also admitted to including fraudulent itemizations of work to be performed and used the identity of an actual employee of the national property rehabilitation company in an attempt to make the emails appear authentic.
Brady collected more than $10 million in investor funds, some of which she used for personal expenditures, according to DOJ.
As part of her guilty plea, Brady also admitted to attempting to obstruct an Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation by asking investors to delete or destroy all email correspondence, texts, and documents relating to their investments in MNB rehabilitation projects after the IRS told Brady she was under investigation.
On July 11, 2019, Brady pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and obstructing an IRS investigation.
In addition to the term of imprisonment, U.S. District Court Judge John J. McConnell Jr. ordered Brady to serve three years of supervised release and to pay $4.78 million in restitution.
