I truly am sorry for everyone that has lost money. But the blame does rest on Gene O'Neal and his company Pinnacle and everyone that was involved in the scam. You should NOT blame the SEC, WSJ, or Hays Consulting - they are trying to do the right thing, whether it is reporting the story, bringing the culprits to justice or taking control of what assets are left to return to the investors.
I did my due diligence on Pinnacle after recieving their initial investment package and after 3 minutes of research online, I found numerous discrepancies and red flags. What I found especially alarming was that the properties Pinnacle and Gene O'Neal were purchasing were just being sold back to another Pinnicle entity under Gene O'Neal's control at inflated prices. That right there is a PONZI. When I questioned the consultant, what happens if the property is not sold within the 60 days? He said it does not matter if the property sells or not, Pinnacle will still pay you your return and principal if you request it. Now I'm thinking in my head - how can that be if the property is not sold -- where the heck is my return coming from - only one place NEW INVESTORS.
http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/ponzi/
I truly hope that the investors recover their investments and that justice is brought to Gene O'Neal and everyone that was involved.
This is quite an unbelievable feeling right now. I was supposed to receive my return on Oct. 10th, and now I find out about all this. I was told the same as the rest of you, that my return was being "processed" and it would be a few days. I am in utter shock.
I sincerely hope Mr. Hays and his organization does their very best to resolve this situation quickly and efficiently. All of us here have one thing in common:
we want our money back!
It is nice to know there are others out there in my same situation.
4. He fired almost ALL of his employees around the beginning of the year and hired an entire new staff. He had just obtain an HR manager 2 months ago. So basically everyone who was there working for him came February 2006 and later. Why he fired his entire staff but a couple is beyond my knowledge and when I ask was told to nothing.
Damnpinn,
There's no reason to suspect you lack a college education from how you wrote.
The most important question: Who were the select staff members that survived the February cleansing?
I address this to O'neal, Rogge, Charise, the others:
You know the truth. You know what actually happened.
You can't escape from it. You are the one witness of everything you've ever done. You know what you did...
If you're reading this now, you've also read the angst and frustration of everyone else on this site. What are you going to do now? Let this spin on as long as it takes and try to save your own hide?
If you're guilty, you'll be prosecuted either way. Why not try to do the honorable thing? It might actually help to reduce your time. The jury will look on this favorably if you made a genuine effort to cooperate.
Speak up now and resolve this whole fiasco as soon as possible. You have nothing to lose. If you're innocent, prove it! If not, cooperate with the receiver now and help make our losses minimal. This doesn't have to take months.
Do the right thing! Help us innocent schmucks who once believed in you get as much back of our hard-earned money as possible, before most of the assets are swallowed up in legal fees.
You still have a chance to redeem yourself. You have nothing to lose. If you're going to prison, this could only make it better for you. Do you really want all these enemies for the rest of your life?
What do you want your children and grandchildren to say about you?
Do the right thing. You know what it is......
Do it now!
Santacruz,
do you really think these people would be spending their time reading expressions of our anguish on this site? Gene is probably planning his escape from the country if he has not done so already.
On a different note, I saw an attorney post some info about the actual ponzi scheme and ramifications to people that made money off of it and then it dissappeared. If anyone else saw it, could that be true?
Well looks like we all got duped. Glad I only invested 5 K. **** definitely hit the fan and I am glad I never got any of my friends to invest in this debacle. I was pretty hesitant to begin with though and kinda thought I might lose the money. I first invested 5 k with them in may and rolled in over once and then got a check for 7800. However I invested another 5k that was to be due for the return on the 12th. I am just curious with the SEC and everything if they are going to make the investors that came out with profits return monies? My net loss is 2200 now, which is small compared to what I was thinking about investing and now I am very glad it is only 2200. I don't blame the losses on Gene or Pinnacle. All of us on here were the ones that signed the check to em, so Its our own damn fault and we should just eat it and take responsibilty for our actions. I mean hell it definitely sounded to good to be true and that it was. I guess since their assets are frozen there is now way in hell I will be seeing that return. oh well I will live on.
Yes, it is true. It is under 11 USC Section 547. Any payments that were made 90 days before the date of bankruptcy filing can be un-wound by the trustee/receiver. However, I am not sure if there has really been a "petition date of bankruptcy" in this case, because I know very little about the relatinoship between this situation and a standard chapter 7 bankruptcy. So, if for legal purpose, there has been no petition date for the next three months,, then no one is at risk of getting their money being collected back by the trustee. However, if the day of the assets being frozen is the "date of petition," anyone who had received a petition the 90 days before that is at risk of getting their money collected by the trustee.
There are a few exceptions that limit the trustee's ability to unwind some of the past transactions, although I am not sure how they would apply. The only one that may seem to apply would be the "ordinary course" exception, Section 547(c)(2). If any of you have attorneys, they may be able to give you advice regarding this provision.
I am going thru the receivers numbers in my head & other factors as well & am setting myself up to expect hopefully a 25% reimbursment of my net loss.. heres what Im thinking.. bear in mind I dont know how many investors net loss dollars exist or value of the real estate:
cash in bank 14mil
21 properties @
$300,000 6.3mil
total assets 20.30mil
less expenses &
receiver fees -5mil
investor pot 15.3mil
Now if there was 60mil collected then the percentage equals 26% (15.3 divided by 60)...
Now the questions:
1. is $300k per property right?
2. is 5mil for expenses & rec'r fees right?
3. is 60mil collected right?
4. will they hopefully uncover other assets or maybe personal assets of oneal/others involved(chris kunkel should be included)
Again, this is just a very rough secenario but I do beleive a conservative one.. if i get back 25% or so, well.. better than zero... sorry to let anyone down who thinking they were maybe going to get back there full amount of even half.. the numbers just dont show that.. they show 25%(hopefully)
Taxum,
We need to consider is how much of that 60 mil was paid back or what was outstanding to investors at the time the SEC froze the accounts.
They said they planned on paying off all investors. It is my understanding they did not miss payments until they were closed down. Did they have enough to pay everyone back?
They did not take any new investors.
Is it possible that the amount owed was significantly less that what some of us think? We may not find that out for at least 2 months.
THe receiver indicated that there were about 2000 investors. Again, I would like to know how many of those cashed out.
Further, do multiple accounts applied to one investor count as 1 investor or more than 1.
25% or 50%? Who knows? We can drive ourselves crazy just trying to guess what the outcome of this fiasco will be. I truly hope that Receiver will try to expedite the process so as not rake up fees and expenses.
Taxum
i hope you are wrong. $5mil receiver fees is rediculos. if it comes to that much, in my opinion it is ripping off the investors. i still have a question, how is the guy a crook when there is that much cash in the bank and that much properties. in most cases when you deal with a crook there is little to nothing in assets for investor to recover. to receive 25% of our net loss, is also unreal. they have to come up with better numbers. they should have left the guy alone until he paid off investors. if the receiver and the legal teams got paid $5mil of our money, then they are the one who benefited from all this. it just does not make sense. this is a perfect example of the rich getting richer.
It's a shame that some want to believe that this was still on the up and up. I don't believe for a minute the the number of properties will be anywhere near the number being tossed around. I personally only know of 3 and the current status of those is questionable.
Anybody else curious about the number of wire transfers that occured on a daily basis and where that money was going?
Sure, some of you may have gotten some of your money, but this wasn't going to last much longer. Too much waste, free spending, etc.
It is a waste to speculate on numbers. THere are too many unknowns. We are going to have to be patient with the process.
The receiver is a true professional and we have to trust that they will do what is right.
However, there will be a cost and let's just expect it to be fair.
We are doing a lot of speculating here as to what the receiver's fees might be and what we might end up with etc. This is very understandable given the predicament we are all in.
I would like to pose a thought that perhaps we might be in for a favorable surprise as to what % of our loss we actually recoup. The reason I say this is because I don't think the vast majority of us actually rolled over our payments each time. So in coming up with a net loss figure per investor, I think it may be a lot less than maybe we think. I know of one investor who had multiple (several) six figures invested with Pinnacle but because he had been with them since late last year, had actually received almost 100% of his principal invested. In his case, say he had $500,000 expected back in payments from Pinnacle but had already received $450,000 in returns over the past year, his net loss would only be $50,000 - a lot less than we might think if you thought he was expecting $500,000 back from Pinnacle. There may be several investors out there like him not to mention others that may actually have been already paid back in full.
I challenge everyone on this site to simply go through the math and figure out what their TRUE NET LOSS is and post here. We can have RDC, REMY or OOKEVIN tabulate this to give us a rough estimate of what we think that number is while we wait on final calculations from the receiver. To make it easy, I suggest the Subject header simply say: My net loss is $XXXX and have nothing in the body of the post that way the leaders on this board could easily scan through the posts and come up with a rough estimate. See next post for an example.
FYI to calculate your net loss:
(1) Determine how much in principal (that is your own money not your original money plus any earnings/payments you might have received from Pinnacle) you have with Pinnacle.
(2) Calcuate the sum of the total return payments you may have received
(3) Subtract #2 above from #1. However see #4 below if it applies to you.
(4) If you for instance invested $5K, recived two payments of $1,250 each and then cashed out your account at $7,500 but later reinvested $7,500 in another contract, then your net loss here would be - $5,000 of your money invested less $2,500 in return payments you received which equals $2,500 Net Loss - I hope this makes sense
Thanks for your cooperation
:violin:
$168,000 lost (I subtracted returns received and referrals received)