Sandy Winick has pled guilty to conspiracy charges in a U.S. court, in connection with an alleged advance fee scheme the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York announced on Friday.
Winick, 57, has pled guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has not yet been sentenced in the case, and faces a maximum of 20 years on that charge.
Last year, Winick was permanently banned and fined $750,000 by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) in connection with the same schemes that are the source of the U.S. charges.
See: OSC issues reasons for sanctions in American Heritage case
According to U.S. authorities, in one scheme, several defendants, including Winick, engaged in an international “pump and dump” operation involving penny stocks. The other scheme used boiler rooms to get penny stock investors, including many of the victims in the first scheme, to pay advance fees that would purportedly allow them to sell their stocks and recover any losses. “In reality, Winick and his co-conspirators simply stole the fees without providing any services, fraudulently extracting more than five million dollars from their victims,” the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation says in a statement.
As part of the advance fee scheme, Winick established boiler rooms in various locations around the world, including Canada, Thailand, and China, and planned to open one in Brooklyn, U.S. authorities say.
Winick was extradited from Thailand to face charges in the U.S., and is the seventh defendant to plead guilty in this case. Nine people were charged in connection with the two related schemes.