U.S. District Court in Seattle<\/a> to wire fraud and money laundering,\u00a0 announced U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan.\u00a0 Anthony C. Morris, 48, the pastor of New Covenant Christian Center admitted his fraud was a \u2018Ponzi\u2019 scheme where early investors were\u00a0 paid off from the money taken from later investors.\u00a0 Morris is scheduled to be sentenced by\u00a0 U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones on April 6, 2012.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nAccording to the plea agreement and charges filed in the case, between 2003 and April\u00a0 2011, Morris convinced various investors to provide him money based on false and fraudulent\u00a0 representations.\u00a0 Morris told various investors that their money would be placed in an\u00a0 overseas trading program, or used to invest in property for his church.\u00a0 Morris represented that\u00a0 the investments would provide a high rate of return in a short period of time.\u00a0 Morris promised\u00a0 to return investor money in as little as a few days or a few weeks, with returns of as much as 400\u00a0 percent.\u00a0 All these representations were false, and in fact MORRIS simply used the funds from\u00a0 later investors to pay off earlier investors.\u00a0 Some of the money went for Morris\u2019 expenses and\u00a0 for the expenses of his church.\u00a0 In one 2007 instance described in the plea agreement, a victim\u00a0 provided Morris with a $30,000 loan for investment purposes, on the promise that Morris would repay him, with interest, in 30 days.\u00a0 Despite repeated promises the money was never repaid.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Under the terms of the plea agreement, the exact amount of restitution is still being\u00a0 calculated, but Morris has agreed to pay the full amount determined by the court.\u00a0 Wire fraud\u00a0 is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and money laundering is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The case was investigated by the FBI and Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).\u00a0 The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Carl Blackstone and Matthew Diggs.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pastor took $1.6 million from 24 parishioners, claiming he was investing for quick returns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-6752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6752"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=6752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}