A developer who coerced more than $26 million in down payments from individuals who thought they were buying new condos at a Coachella resort was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in prison.
In 2015, Ruixue “Serena” Shi had proposed a 350-key hotel with 200 condos across 47 acres in Coachella — a property that was never built, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Shi, who ran a real estate firm in Beijing called Global Housing Buyer LLC, teamed up with SBE Entertainment, the Los Angeles-based hospitality company, to develop the project. But ran in trouble when she started raising equity to fund it.
She tricked more than 160 people into putting down payments on the condos — the majority of whom were investors from China. She often gave sales presentations at hotels and contacted individuals over the Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat.
Shi told victims that the money would be used to fund the Coachella project, but “intended to use victims’ money for her own personal experiences,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in October, when she pled guilty to one charge of wire fraud.
Shi spent $2.2 million from victims at a company that provides luxury travel and concierge services, as well as $300,000 on two luxury cars and hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-end clothing and restaurants.
Since then, the discredited developer has backtracked and said she wanted to withdraw her guilty plea, leading prosecutors to up their sentencing recommendation to 20 years in prison, according to the Times.
“I maintain my innocence,” she told U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner at her sentencing hearing on Monday.
The judge sided with the prosecutors, saying Shi should get the maximum because she did not accept responsibility for the crime.
Shi will also have to pay $36 million in restitution to victims, though the full amount of their losses was estimated at least $26 million and could have exceeded $40 million, prosecutors said.
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