Wayne Reed Ogden - Encore!
It’s been a busy week for the courts system as another real estate fraud indictment was handed out, this time to Wayne Reed Ogden. Unlike some of the other fraudsters profiled on this site who were first timers, Ogden has a history of this sort of thing.
In the 90’s Ogden made headlines for bilking investors out of $7 million dollars in a real estate investment scheme. He was convicted of the crime in 1998 and paroled in 2000. Most of his victims were friends and neighbors of the former Eagle Scout.
In 2002, Ogden solicited investment funds to buy a property in Colorado called Kiowa. The property was purchased as planned, but Ogden continued to solicit investors. The Deseret News reports -
By October 2002, Ogden allegedly had convinced enough investors with
promises of returns of 12 percent up to 100 percent on their investments. According to the indictment, Ogden had failed to disclose that quit claim deeds issued to investors as security for their money were pledged to multiple investors.
The indictment states Ogden then transferred millions of dollars from investor accounts and a trust account to his own control to be used for separate business and personal interests. Prosecutors say Ogden did this by submitting fake “investor instructions” to a local title company, which controlled the trust account.New investors paid old investors until the money ran out. Disgruntled investors began suing Ogden in 2003 for up to $9 million. The scheme is reported to have taken $1.7 million in funds.
Since beginning this new scam in 2002, Wayne Ogden has been in and out of prison for parole violations multiple times. He is currently in the Washington County Jail for passing a bad check in the amount of $27,000.
It’s hard to believe people continue to fall for these investment scams. I would suggest the Ogden case is another example of “fool me once, shame on you…fool me twice, shame on me,” but he concealed his identity in documents in case anybody checked up on him. He used names Reed Ogden and Wayne Reed as well as two companies: Empire Investment Group and Rocky Mountain Properties to perpetrate this fraud.
I fear we’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to real estate fraud schemes in Utah. Our state has always been on the top of the list when it comes to this sort of crime and I believe rising home values have masked a lot of schemes. Regardless of who you’re dealing with in an investment, you have to perform your own due diligence. If somebody is offering you unbelievable returns on investment, you’d better look very closely.