Robert Lenard Booth Convicted Of Defrauding Investors Of Nearly $2 Million

Jury Convicts Robert Lenard Booth for Conspiracies to Commit Securities Fraud, Wire Fraud, and Money Laundering

NEW YORK — The Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (J5) welcomed the guilty verdict of a jury in the case of Robert Lenard Booth today. Booth was found guilty on all counts of a three-count Indictment that charged him with defrauding victim investors in countries around the world and laundering the proceeds of the fraud.

“Robert Lenard Booth stole his victims’ lifesavings and moved the money around the world to hide his elaborate fraud,” sad U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “He thought he could get away with it. Today the jury showed him he was wrong.”

From June 2019 through August 2021, Booth ran a boiler room operation that impersonated Manhattan-based brokerage firms and sold investors nearly $2 million in securities that they never received. To deceive investors, Booth and his co-conspirators created fake identities and false and misleading webpages, email addresses, and phone numbers. On phone calls with investors, Booth and others pretended to be licensed brokers, lied, and used high-pressure tactics to pitch stocks for American companies. They followed up by sending the victims false paperwork to confirm the alleged stock purchases and trades.

The victims were directed to wire payments—sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars—to shell company accounts in New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The funds were laundered and distributed to Booth and his co-conspirators.

Booth was convicted of conspiracies to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. He faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison and a maximum fine of $500,000 or twice the gross gain or gross loss from the offense.

Formerly a resident of Brooklyn, New York, Booth, 68, relocated overseas and spent years operating his scheme from Thailand and Panama. In August 2021, Booth flew from Thailand into JFK International Airport and was arrested on arrival.

The U.S. Attorney praised the outstanding investigative work of the Special Agents of the United States Attorney’s Office, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division in partnership with the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (J5). The J5 works together to gather information, share intelligence and conduct coordinated operations against transnational financial crimes. The J5 includes the Australian Taxation Office, the Canadian Revenue Agency, the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs from the U.K. and IRS-CI from the U.S.

For more information about the J5, please visit www.irs.gov/j5.

JUSTIN COLE [email protected] 202-768-2110

For more information about the J5, please visit https://j5taxglobal.org