27-Year-Old New Trier Grad Admits To $9.6 Million Fraud Scheme

CHICAGO — A North Shore native who bragged of betting tens of millions of dollars on sports admitted Wednesday to fraud charges. The 2010 New Trier High School grad previously posted images of an extravagant lifestyle, winning betting slips and celebrity acquaintances to more than 170,000 social media followers. He is now set to be spend up to about 6 years in federal prison, according to his plea agreement.

Rob Gorodetsky, 27, of Northbrook, was charged just over two weeks earlier with one count of wire fraud and one count of filing a false tax return in connection with what federal prosecutors described as a "scheme to defraud" a single investor.

From February 2014 to April 2018, Gorodetsky "fraudulently obtained" more than $9.6 million from the investor with a bank account in New York, identified in charging documents only as "Individual A," through a series of lies about what the money would be used for and what kind of returns the investment was generating, according to the plea agreement.

Claiming to be a successful day trader, Gorodetsky initially siphoned off more than 77 percent of the investor's initial $953,000 investment, which was supposed into go to the stock market, according to his guilty plea.

Then, Gorodetsky "falsely represented" to the investor that the purported investment in stocks had more than doubled within about a month, according to the plea agreement.

Telling the investor he could make more money in sports betting, Gorodetsky said he would start wagering the investment, which he falsely claimed had grown to $2 million in July 2014, on sporting events.

Gorodetsky managed to convince the investor to give him another $8.74 million to wager on various sporting events between July 2014 and November 2017, according to the plea. Instead, he admitted using the bulk of it for unrelated purposes, including using more than $2.2 million of the investor's money to pay for his living expenses, the cost of travel, entertainment and assets such as jewelry and luxury cars.

A 2017 profile in USA Today said Gorodetsky traveled with an entourage that included a pickup artist, enforcer and financial manager who were not named in the piece. Additionally, he told the paper, he spent $2,500 on Louis Vuitton shoes, $6,000 on a hoodie and $47,000 on a watch he wore during the interview.

The profile — titled, "Is this the future face of sports gambling?" — detailed the ostentatious lifestyle of the then-25-year-old Gorodetsky, who claimed to have gambled with pop star Drake, NFL player Odell Beckham Jr., the wife of former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and various NBA players.

The Glencoe native began gambling in middle school by taking bets from classmates and began trading stocks worth tens of thousands of dollars on his father's Ameritrade account, according to the profile. Gorodetsky's father is a radiologist and his mother works in real estate, the Chicago Tribune reported. His parents, who immigrated from Estonia, told USA Today their son had made up to $500,000 in profits on the trades during high school.

At New Trier, Gorodetsky was suspended after administrators learned of the poker games he was running, he told USA Today. After less than a semester at the University of Arizona, Gorodetsky dropped out to pursue a career as a professional gambler.

In 2014, Gorodetsky was ordered by a judge to pay $59,000 to a mother and son in New York, Linda Joseph and professional poker player Jeremy Joseph, who sued him over allegations of financial mismanagement, according to USA Today and the Tribune. In 2017, Ms. Joseph said that she and her son had yet to receive the money Gorodetsky was ordered to pay.

During the years leading up to the newspaper profile, Gorodetsky had been sending the investor fake account statements and balances, according to the charges he admitted to. Gorodetsky also admitted to knowingly filing false tax returns when he claimed to have made only $10,520 in 2016.

The government's tax loss was more than $2.65 million. The fraud scheme cost the investor more than $7 million, according to the plea agreement.

Chris Gair, Gorodetsky's attorney, declined to comment after his client entered a guilty plea in federal court in Chicago, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Gorodetsky's sentencing hearing was scheduled for April 29.