Actor who faked Netflix and HBO deals in $650m Hollywood Ponzi scheme gets 20 years in prison

Zachary Horwitz has been ordered to pay victims back $230m

(Alamy Stock Photo)

An actor who made up HBO and Netflix movie deals to land $650m (£480m) from investors in a Ponzi scheme has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Zachary Horwitz, 35, was ordered by a judge on Monday to pay $230m in restitution to more than 250 victims of what prosecutors called the biggest scam of its kind in Hollywood history.

The FBI found that Horwitz had spent the stolen money on a $5.7m home in the city’s Beverlywood area, $706,000 on interior decorations and $605,000 on Mercedes Benz and Audi cars.

They also said that he shelled out $345,000 on private jet and yacht hires, $174,000 on a Los Angeles party consultant and $136,000 at Las Vegas casinos and nightclubs. Prosecutors said that, in total, he had made more than $6.9m of charges on his American Express card.

The actor, who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in October, began the Ponzi scheme in 2014 telling investors that his company, 1inMM Capital, was using their money to buy the foreign distribution rights to movies such as Slasher Party or Satanic Panic and reselling them at a profit to streaming companies for distribution in other world markets.

Horwitz, who had appeared in several movies as Zach Avery, ran the scheme for seven years and took the money he brought in to repay old investors at profits of 25 per cent to 40 per cent.

When the scheme collapsed, $230m was found missing, but prosecutors have acknowledged that the chance of anyone being substantially paid back is “close to zero”.

After Horwitz’s arrest, his wife Mallory sought a divorce, saying that her now-ex-husband was “deceiving and manipulating me and everyone around him, and he is not the person that I believed he was”.

A prosecution memo stated that some of Horwitz’s first victims were friends from the University of Indiana.

“He began by betraying the trust of his own friends, people who lowered their guard because they could not possibly imagine that someone they had known for years would unflinchingly swindle them and their families out of their life savings,” they wrote.

“His Ponzi scheme was not an aberration from an otherwise law-abiding existence,” assistant US attorneys Alexander Schwab and David Chao told Judge Mark C Scarsi in the memo.

“The lie, which he sustained for years, was the core of his identity. He was a professional criminal; and, unfortunately for his victims, he was very good at his job,” they wrote.

Horwitz’s attorney, Anthony Pacheco, stated in court papers that the actor was “an upstanding man who was hindered by mental health issues” and now feels “deep remorse” for his actions.