BOSTON – A former New England Patriots player and a former bank vice president were sentenced in Boston in connection with an investment scheme that took in over $35 million by making fraudulent loans to professional athletes.
Will D. Allen, 38, of Davie, Fla., and Susan Daub, 56, of Coral Spring, Fla., were each sentenced to six years in prison, three years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution in the amount of approximately $16.8 million.
In November 2016, Allen and Daub each pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy and one count of money laundering. In June 2015, Allen and Daub were arrested on criminal charges after being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2015.
Between 2012 and April 2015, Allen and Daub defrauded investors out of millions of dollars by claiming that the funds would be used to back high-interest, short-term loans to professional athletes through Capital Financial Partners (CFP), Allen and Daub’s Massachusetts-based company. While CFP did make some loans to athletes, Allen and Daub also diverted millions of investor dollars to themselves and other business ventures. In total, Allen and Daub took in over $35 million in investments. To date, they have repaid less than $22 million.
As part of the fraud, Allen and Daub collected money from investors to fund fictitious loans, then used the money, in part, to pay themselves. Other times, Allen and Daub told some investors that the loans CFP made to professional athletes were larger than they actually were, allowing Allen and Daub to collect more money from investors than they were lending out to athletes. To keep investors from discovering their fraud, Allen and Daub used newly invested money to make payments to existing investors, which they falsely characterized as interest and principal payments from athlete borrowers.
