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On Saturday, December 16, a British national has appeared before a federal court in Brooklyn in the United States for defrauding investors of nearly $100 million in a Ponzi-like scheme on nonexistent luxury wines.
Recently extradited from Morocco, where he was arrested in 2022, Stephen Burton is said to have acted through a wine company. He entered the national territory using a false Zimbabwean passport, American authorities said.
The co-accused, James Wellesley, remains the subject of extradition proceedings in the United Kingdom. If convicted, they each face up to 20 years in prison. The scam operations earned them a total of $99 million.
The extradition of the main suspect and his indictment were announced by Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and James Smith, Deputy Director in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the New York Field Office (FBI).
At the same time, they thanked the Moroccan authorities for their fruitful cooperation. The Department of Justice's Office of International Affairs also provided significant assistance in securing the arrest and extradition of the accused from Morocco.
The indictment indicates that from June 2017 and until February 2019, the defendants acted as directors of a company. They solicited investors at professional conferences organized in the United States and abroad. The defendants told their victims that they were negotiating loans between investors and wealthy wine collectors. They promised that investors would receive regular interest from borrowers. Investigations then demonstrated that «wealthy wine collectors» did not really exist and that the company in question did not have the stock of wines supposed to guarantee the loans.
As for the American authorities, the case is being handled by the FBI's Corporate and Securities Fraud Section.
