A con man caught. The man who swindled millions of dollars from people thinking they were investing in Arizona and in other locales was sentenced to eight years in prison and is required to pay nearly $8.5 million in restitution. Edgar Bias, 51, admitted that between June 1998 and Jul7 2003, he stole just about $10 million from people thinking they were investing in a Ponzi scheme.
In this type of scheme, money that comes in from new investors to the group goes to pay those investors who got in earlier. Eventually the money runs out. Instead, Bias who is from Houston, Texas, and Dennis Cope, who used to live in Mesa, allegedly used the money o travel and stay in luxurious hotels, eat at fine restaurants, and buy jewelry.
The two got people to invest in restaurants and pipeline projects that didn’t exist. Cope who used to teach at a high school seminary will be sentence on December 1, 2008. Bias has been convicted before in New York. He served 18 months in a state prison for fraud and then in another year for the same scam.
Bias will be in jail for over a year and when he is out, he has to pay about $500/month to dozens of the people he hoodwinked. Victims of Bias feel that the sentence isn’t enough “closure†for them seeing that some of them lost their entire life saving’s as well as their homes.
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