Fair Lawn Ponzi Schemer Sentenced

A Fair Lawn woman who owned a purported wholesale merchandise business and plead guilty to wire fraud in September for running a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme was sentenced Wednesday to 37 months in prison, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced in a press release.

From December 2008 through September 2010, Jennifer Devine, 40, solicited money from investors in New Jersey and across the United States for her company Devine Wholesale, under the guise that funds would go toward the wholesale clothing and electronics business, according to court documents.

Devine admitted that she promised returns of up to 25 percent per investment and showed some investors fake inventory lists of the products she claimed to be reselling, prompting them to commit more than $8 million to her business.

Instead of using the investor money to purchase clothing or electronics, however, Devine admitted that she used most of it to make principal and interest payments to existing investors. The rest she used for personal expenses like a cruise and luxury retail store purchases.

Devine admitted that investors lost more than $2 million as a result of her operation.

In addition to the prison term, Devine was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $2 million in restitution to her victims.