TOMS RIVER — A Lavallette man arrested last year and accused of bilking investors out of millions of dollars was named in a 25-count indictment handed up by an Ocean County grand jury Thursday.
James Hankins Jr., 39, is accused of taking money from investors as part of a pyramid scheme and using the funds to make real estate purchases and cover his own lavish lifestyle expenses, including trips on private planes and home improvements, Ocean County Prosecutor Marlene Lynch Ford said.
Hankins, who has been free on $2 million bail since his arrest in March 2008, is alleged to have received as much as $12 million from investors to purchase viatical, or life settlements between March 2006 and November 2007. In a viatical settlement, investors purchase or are assigned a legal interest in the life insurance policy of a terminally ill person who seeks to cash out a portion of the policy before he or she dies.
Authorities claim, however, that Hankins never purchased a single life insurance policy and instead used the investment money for himself and to pay off initial supporters of his scheme.
An investigation into Hankins’s companies — Hankins Private Client Group LLC and Hankins Life Settlement LLC, both of Wall, and Hankins Group Ltd. of Island Heights — by the Monmouth and Ocean counties Prosecutor’s Offices began after he allegedly started writing bad checks to cover interest payments and refunded principals.
A lawsuit filed by the state Bureau of Securities in Monmouth County against Hankins and his companies the same day of his arrest accuses him of violating New Jersey’s Uniform Securities Law by defrauding investors, acting as a broker-dealer without registration, employing unregistered agents, acting as unregistered agents and selling unregistered securities.
He also is accused of fabricating bank account statements and representing himself on the Internet as a licensed life-settlement broker.
Source: App.com
