A federal jury in Philadelphia convicted a Colorado man for his role as the deal-closer in a $54 million Ponzi scheme where investors poured their money into a bogus Main Line green energy company started by two local Temple University graduates.
Wayde McKelvy of Centennial, Colo., and co-conspirators Troy Wragg and Amanda Knorr lured more than 300 investors with the promise of huge returns, as high as 484 percent, for securities investments in supposedly profitable business ventures in real estate and green energy. In reality, prosecutors said the company, Mantria Corp. was a Ponzi scheme in which new investment funds were used to pay “returns” to early investors, and the business generated meager revenues and no actual profits.
Wragg and Knorr, who met as Temple students, formed Mantria shortly after graduating from Temple University where they met and began dating. The company operated out of Bala Cynwyd and claimed to sell real estate and “green energy” products, like biochar – a form of charcoal produced by plant matter. Prosecutors said the biochar was never actually in production.
The two then teamed up with McKelvy – who once called the allegations “ridiculous” – from 2005 through 2010 so they could raise the funds through the Colorado man’s “Speed of Wealth” seminars, which advised potential investors to liquidate other assets, like their retirement accounts, and put the money into Mantria.
Read more at the Denver Business Journal: https://bit.ly/2CNHMOa
