by Structured Settlement Watchdog
Last week I heard from yet another individual who has been scammed by what appears to be a Ponzi scheme associated with Dan Cevallos, of Advanced Funding.
The Dan Cevallos and Advanced Funding Scam
The Dan Cevallos and Advanced Funding Scam was very simple but devastating to his victims, a number of whom I’ve spoken to and referred to lawyers
- “Buy” a victim’s structured settlement or lottery payments through a structured settlement factoring or lottery factoring transaction
- Pay the seller only some amount of cash while convincing the seller to invest the rest of the money in a “fund” purported to earn 10%
- The “fund” would make payments to the seller so it would seems normal for a period of time.
- Then the payments would stop, when the fund did not have the funds from other victims to pay the first victims.
Dan Cevallos History
- Dan Cevallos was censured, fined $75,000 and barred from FINRA in 1997, for among other things, falsifying order tickets.
- Cevallos pled guilty to, and served prison time for, wire fraud for selling non-existent vending machines before the Honorable Judge Richard Conway Casey of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2002.
- Then Dan Cevallos moved on to preying upon and defrauding innocents with a bogus investment.
- Cevallos, according to a source bought the Brooklyn home that featured at the Manero house in the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever. In a bizarre twist 4 decades later his victims were left financially “Stayin’ Alive”
In October 2019, Woodbridge’s Robert Shapiro was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his ill-gotten gains. Todd Dyer, another convicted felon and two time loser, now serving 15 years for fraud after a 2017 conviction. ‘tt. He almost got a structured settlement factoring exchange off the ground. Thankfully Dyer didn’t. My source has been told that Cevallos “isn’t big enough” to be able to do anything about. If that is true, what a pity.
If you were a victim of Dan Cevallos’ or Advance Funding structured settlement annuitant, or lottery winner, investment scam as described above please contact me.
Related Reading
Advance Funding and Dan Cevallos| Was it a Ponzi Scheme? May 11, 2018
Seniors’ Investment in Advance Funding Lottery Payment Nightmare | No Statements in 2 Years | Slow Pay October 5, 2018
Advance Funding | Lottery and Structured Settlement Factoring Company Beginning to Look A lot More Like A Ponzi Scheme January 12, 2019