A Montana man was sentenced to 87 months in prison Tuesday for his role in a multimillion-dollar international investment-fraud conspiracy.
Sean Finn, 51, or Whitefish was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Kent J. Dawson of the District of Nevada. According to a media release, Finn was ordered to pay $6,075,000 in restitution and to forfeit $830,000.
Back in February, Finn was convicted by a jury of one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, four counts of wire fraud and four counts of securities fraud. He was acquitted of one count of wire fraud.
"According to the evidence presented at trial, Finn conspired with others in the United States and Switzerland to promote investments and loan instruments that he knew to be fictitious," the release said. "Finn and his co-conspirators told victims that, for an up-front payment ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, a Swiss company known as Malom Group AG (Malom), whose name stood for “Make A Lot Of Money,” would provide access to lucrative investment opportunities and substantial cash loans."
The release continued, "The evidence showed that to effectuate this scheme, the defendant and his co-conspirators provided victims with fabricated bank documents purporting to show that Malom held hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas bank accounts, as well as documents falsely stating that Malom had previously closed similar deals. The evidence showed that when victims wired their money into an escrow account controlled by the co-conspirators, the money was released and disbursed to, among others, Finn for his own personal use. The evidence further showed that shortly before he was indicted in 2013, Finn fled to Canada, where he was arrested in 2014 and ultimately extradited back to the United States in 2018. According to the evidence presented at trial, losses to the victims from the scheme totaled more than $3.8 million."
Finn was charged along with five other defendants. Two of the other defendants were found guilty in multiple charges in 2015, a third pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud in 2015 while two remain at-large outside of the U.S.
The FBI's Las Vegas Field Office investigated the case.
