Former real estate investment guru Rick Koerber frequently used investors’ own monies to send interest payments back to them and told his bookkeeper that running a Ponzi scheme was not illegal in Utah, according to testimony at Koerber’s federal court trial.
Koerber’s former bookkeeper, Forrest Allen, told a jury on Wednesday that Koerber’s companies were using investor funds to make interest payments on millions of dollars of investments or loans that poured into the Utah County operation from 2004 to 2007.
“I would say it was very common,” Allen testified during the trial, in which Koerber faces 18 charges of fraud, money laundering and tax evasion.