Posted on 11/07/2023 8:48:19 AM PST by dennisw
Conman Russell Dwayne Lewis, who posed as billionaire astrologer, is jailed for eight and a half years for stealing $3.8m from victims including widow with four children: Fraudster also put in fake $290m bid for dept store Lord & Taylor Lewis, 53, scammed friends and employees out of millions between 2016 and 2020 He used fake names and told lies about his background, claiming at one point that he had a PhD and had worked for the CIA He claimed he had used his astrology skills to help pick the jury for the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial
A conman who posed as a billionaire rabbi astrologer to defraud victims - including a widow with four children - out of $3.8million has been jailed for eight-and-a-half years.
Russell Dwayne Lewis, 53, told 'increasingly fantastical and outrageous lies', including allegedly making a phony $290 million bid to buy department store Lord & Taylor in his schemes to defraud friends and employees.
He was sentenced by U.S. District Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain to 102 months in prison for frauds between 2016 and 2020. He's also been ordered to pay back $3.8million.
Lewis used a number of aliases and stolen identities - including Ari Getz and Clifford Ari Getz Cohen - to pose as a billionaire businessman and convince people to 'invest' in his schemes.
Despite being a high-school graduate from Texas, his victims claim he told them he had grown up in London, earned a PHD in theoretical mathematics and statistics and operated a secretive family investment firm, Neviim Equity, in Beverly Hills.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
“A conman who posed as a billionaire rabbi astrologer”
You and Hamas cannot blame the Jews for this one. He claimed he was a rabbi. There is no such as a Jew named Dwayne or Wayne. IOW he was a Christian faking it as a rabbi astrologer billionaire (millionaire don’t cut it anymore)
DWAYNE -—
He also falsely claimed that he was a rabbi and boasted that he was worth between $10billion and $30billion on different occasions, according to court documents.
Prosecutors claimed he stole the identity of a man named Clifford Getz, forged a passport and used the Social Security number of a 13-year-old boy from Ohio.
He told his victims ‘brazen lies’ claiming to have worked for the CIA, the Secret Service and the LAPD and saying that he was an expert astrologer and had used his knowledge to help pick the jury for the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial.
Using his fake identity, he defrauded one businessman out of over $3million, and a widow out of over $550,000, driving both of them ‘into destitution and bankruptcy’ according to prosecutors.
He met the widow with four children in 2016 through his purported astrological reading services. She paid Lewis for a reading and he provided her with advice over the course of several months.
He allegedly told her he was a billionaire and that it was ‘in her chart’ to get her mortgage paid off, convincing her to send him approximately $555,000 for him
He should have used his astrology skills to see they were closing in on him to arrest him.
Anyone dumb enough to fall for this guy’s crap pretty much deserves to lose their money.
The saying “There’s a sucker born every minute” comes to mind.
How is he not any different than any other fraud “new age” guru or such.
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