Jail time —

Man gets 10 years in prison after perpetrating website sales scam

John Winston Boone stole $1.3M from 18 people, over domains like paloalto.org.

Man gets 10 years in prison after perpetrating website sales scam

A California man was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison after engaging in a years-long scheme to defraud people who responded to his ads selling domain names and websites that he claimed continually generated revenue.

Federal prosecutors alleged that John Winston Boone scammed 18 people for approximately $1.3 million—providing false PayPal records to his victims to illustrate this profitability. Initially, Boone plead not guilty, but later changed his plea in late 2013.

United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II, who was the same judge in a 2013 Los Angeles Prenda hearing, called the defendant’s conduct "cruel and callous." Judge Wright also noted that Boone "showed a lack of humanity that was so base and so depraved."

In a November 2014 sentencing memo, prosecutors called Boone a "financial predator, a master manipulator and a pathological liar who will do or say anything to steal money from his victims."

In one instance, Boone sold paloalto.org and paloaltoblog.org to a woman for $76,000—she ended up suing him. Boone counter sued and won a civil judgements of $40,000. Another victim ended up spending $100,000 on saltlakecity.org.

As Lisa Feldman, an Assistant United States Attorney, wrote in that memo:

Defendant has been honing and perfecting his fraud skills for over 30 years, during which he has sustained convictions for fraud, theft, forgery and perjury, and has been repeatedly sued. He is so arrogant and narcissistic that even after the FBI executed a federal search warrant at his resident and advised him of its fraud investigation, the evidence shows that defendant went on to embezzle from two different employers (Ricoh and Casto Travel), for which he is now facing state felony charges. There is also evidence that he fabricated an email for a district attorney investigator in connection with the criminal investigation of the Ricoh embezzlement in an effort to falsely show that the payments he stole were authorized by his boss.

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Channel Ars Technica