By Ann C. Logue
While the youngs are buying cryptocurrency, the olds prefer old-fashioned shiny metal. That might be why Jeffrey Santulan targeted retirees in what the SEC says was a multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme. Santulan owns a firm called Safeguard Metals which has one office in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills. Of course, Santulan claimed that it had offices in New York, London, and Beverly Hills and total assets under management of $11 billion. In his spare time, he also claimed to own a movie production company, Argonaut MG, that might have a $100 million deal with Netflix.
The SEC alleges that Santulan recruited customers, had them sell their existing retirement investments, then put the money into gold and silver coins held through self-directed IRAs. He and his salespeople allegedly mislead investors about the safety and liquidity of these investments, and he charged markups of about 64%. They worked the phones and found 450 victims in 26 states, ranking in a total of $67 million. The scheme ran from December 2017 until July of 2021.
Santulan claims to have been a troublemaking teenager who went to MIT and became a mentee of Grant Cardone, who runs a sales training business. He also says that he was an early investor in SoFi, Square (now Block), Tesla, and SpaceX. Santulan does not seem to be registered with FINRA or the NFA, nor does he have an active LinkedIn page. Until the SEC announced these charges, Santulan’s media presence seems limited to vanity and lifestyle publications that present him as an entrepreneurial genius and technology thought leader. I’ve seen this trick before; I can never decide if it’s enraging or pathetic.
Part of the Safeguard Metals sales pitch was that the federal government was going to shut down other retirement plans. Santulan’s program would thus help investors stay a step ahead with a self-directed IRA holding metals. Ironically, the government is discussing limits or even the elimination of self-directed IRAs because of their potential for use as a tax shelter by the very wealthy.
Regulators have been hovering around crypto, looking for angles they can use to increase oversight. This is a reminder that there’s plenty of fraud to be found in coins, which have been around for almost 3000 years.
Jan E. Davis
Go for “enraging.” As one of the more than 450 persons conned by this “lifestyle” entrepreneur I’m enraged. I do not expect to see a thin non-silver dime from our loss and am thankful that my husband and I were not as severely hurt as other, though six figures is a dent in our retirement. There are definitely people who lost all their saving and I’m sure have died secondary to the stress, shame, embarrassment. The con was well done and I’m sure there are victims who to this day have not recognized their loss and or are too embarrassed to come forward. I am following the case closely, hope to see him in Federal court, and trust he goes away for a long time as a common thief. Don’t believe the concept of “white collar” crime, he might as well have mugged me in an alley. I’m interested to see where the assets ended up, how many cars, boats, houses, trips, off shore accounts.