A Swiss man with ties to Las Vegas pleaded guilty to securities fraud Tuesday after he and several others defrauded victims out of close to $6 million as part of a vast scheme, federal officials said.
Martin Schlaepfer, 67, is scheduled to be sentenced in June, according to a news release from the United States Department of Justice. He faces up to 20 years in a federal prison, according to the DOJ.
Schlaepfer was indicted in 2013 but lived overseas before he was arrested in Italy in September 2024 pursuant to an Interpol Red Notice and extradited to the United States last year, the department said.
Three of Schlaepfer’s co-conspirators — Anthony Brandel, James Warras and Sean Finn — were found guilty of conspiracy and multiple counts of wire fraud and securities fraud following separate jury trials in 2015 and 2020. Each were sentenced to over seven years in prison.
A fourth defendant, Joseph Micelli, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud in 2015 and was sentenced to five years in prison. A fifth defendant, Hans-Jurg Lips, remains at large outside the U.S.
The Justice Department’s Fraud Section alleged that investors were lured by promises of astronomical returns into contributing $100,000 to $1.2 million to a phony Swiss company called the Malom Group.
Securities & Exchange Commission court filings said the Malom Group, an acronym for “make a lot of money,” bilked 30 investors out of more than $11 million between 2009 and 2011. Schlaepfer, the justice department said, identified himself to victims as the chief executive officer of the Malom Group.
Beginning as early as October 2009, Schlaepfer and his co-conspirators in Switzerland and Las Vegas orchestrated a scheme in which they sold investments they knew to be fictitious, the department said.
Schlaepfer and the others told victims that, for an up-front payment, Malom would provide access to investment opportunities and substantial cash loans. Victims were given fabricated bank documents purporting to show that Malom held hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas bank accounts, officials said.
When victims wired their money into an escrow account controlled by the co-conspirators, however, the money was released and disbursed to, among others, Schlaepfer for his own personal use, federal officials said.
The FBI will continue to investigate the case, the department said.
Contact Bryan Horwath at bhorwath@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BryanHorwath on X.
