Scammers!! How are they still able to operate? Oh right - idiots.

No but this is amazing and I have zero sympathy for all involved:

A rising actor, fake HBO deals and one of Hollywood’s most audacious Ponzi schemes by Michael Finnegan via Los Angeles Times.

Over the next two years, Russell and his partners made $80 million in loans to the actor’s company. They thought they were financing scores of deals to buy and sell film rights.

In reality, they’d been lured into what federal investigators describe as one of the most audacious Ponzi schemes in Hollywood history.

Horwitz collected $690 million from investors for movie deals authorities say were fictitious. The HBO and Netflix contracts he used to convince Russell and others that his business was legitimate were forgeries, the government says.

MA’AM.

For years, Horwitz kept the con going by using loans from one group of investors to repay what he’d borrowed from another, according to a federal criminal complaint. The investors are now trying to recover $235 million that he never repaid. 

The alleged scam opened a money spigot that enabled the actor to live like a studio boss in a lavish Westside home with a screening room, prosecutors say. Horwitz traveled by private jet.

Just emulating what he’s seen other execs do!!

His April 6 arrest on a fraud charge followed a century-old Hollywood tradition of accused swindlers running get-rich-quick schemes that exploit investors’ attraction to the glamour of a movie business they know little about.

Cuts both ways, baby!