INDIANAPOLIS – A federal grand jury has charged Brian Simms, 44, of Lebanon, Indiana, with six counts of Wire Fraud. Simms was arrested yesterday and made his initial appearance in federal court in Indianapolis yesterday afternoon.
According to court documents, Simms was a licensed insurance broker with his company Brendanwood Financial Brokerage LLC. Simms was not licensed to sell securities nor registered to provide financial advising services. Nevertheless, beginning in 2013, Simms began inducing clients to cash out or liquidate their traditional and long-term insurance products and investments and reinvest the funds with Simms at Brendanwood. Simms allegedly made materially false and fraudulent pretenses, claims, representations, and promises to victim investors that he would invest their funds in investment products—when, in fact, he intended to use their funds for his own personal benefit. Rather than investing the victim investors’ in investment products as promised, Simms used the funds to pay business expenses related to Brendanwood such as payroll for its employees, or for his own personal expenditures, including payments to credit cards, Amazon, grocery stores, gasoline, restaurants, and utilities.
To conceal his scheme Simms created false financial statements. Simms also misappropriated victim investors’ money to make limited, Ponzi-type payments to other victim investors. Simms mislead the victim investors to believe that payments he made to them…
