An account from one investor

The following was given to us in a recorded interview in September 2026. The person who gave it asked us to write it up rather than write it himself, and agreed on that call to its publication.

His name, the names of everyone else he mentioned, and the details that would identify him have been removed at our discretion. Quotations are his own words. “*@#$!*” stands in for an expletive; “[…]” marks words cut for length or a false start, and never a word we are covering up.

He is a financial advisor. He was in his late twenties when this started, running what he describes as a successful practice, and he was introduced to Mr. Pacquing through a private members’ organization in Los Angeles. Someone else in that organization had already invested — a man who worked as a private investigator. That mattered to him at the time.

“I was like, okay, well, if he’s trusting this guy and he’s a private investigator, like, the guy’s gotta be legit. No way is he gonna scam a private investigator.”

They had lunch in Beverly Hills. The pitch was for a marketing company — a way to make the clothes and products in Instagram posts clickable and purchasable directly. He thought it was a genuinely good idea, and at the time nobody was doing it.

The first ask was $10,000, structured as a convertible note, with an equity grant on top. He signed contracts. He still has them.

Then the asks kept coming.

“What started off at 10,000 led to another 5,000, led to another 10,000… And these stories just kept adding up.”

Asked what it came to in the end, he put the total somewhere in the range of $70,000 to $80,000. We publish a range rather than the figure he gave us, because an exact number is one more detail that would help identify him. It is his own estimate, given from memory, and we have not yet reconciled it against the ledger he provided.

Each ask arrived with a reason. Money was needed to open a trust account, so that the trust account could unlock funding from a different investor, and so on. He describes a rhythm that went on for years:

“Every single week it was something. Every single week. He always answered my phone call. He always called me back. He was always responsive. But every single week, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get the money Tuesday. Oh, we’re gonna get the money Friday.’”

He says the responsiveness is what kept him in. He never felt stonewalled. He felt like he had a friend who was always one week away from making everyone whole — and each new payment was framed as the small thing standing between him and repayment of the larger amount he had already put in. “I’ll give five to get 50 back” is how he put it.

At one point Mr. Pacquing was sleeping on his couch. He let it happen deliberately: if he was close enough, he thought, he could help get the deal done, see what was actually happening, and get his money back.

The business eventually changed shape. The marketing company gave way to a second proposition, one involving what he was told were pre-approved relationships with banking platforms. The structure, as it was described to him, was that a holder of hard assets — gold, precious metals, diamonds — would pledge them as collateral, the pledge would be leveraged through these platforms at a multiple of three to five times, the original asset holder would get their asset back, and the upside would be split. He understood it to be tied to charitable or non-profit purposes.

Even at his most generous, he does not arrive anywhere kind:

“I think he was legitimately really trying to do it. The problem was he wasn’t successful, and he kept asking people for more and more and more […] money, and he really wasn’t truly honest.”

That is the most charitable reading on offer, and he applies it to the venture rather than to the man. What he describes next does not fit a business that simply failed.

Two specific things ended it.

The wire receipt. He was told the money had been sent and asked for proof. He received what appeared to be a wire receipt from a major bank. He took the wire ticket number to a bank in person and was told, in his words, “this is not legitimate.” No money ever arrived.

The credit card. He says he provided a credit card on the understanding it would be held on file and not charged. Roughly $15,000 in charges for a hotel stay followed. He was told it had been a mistake, that it was supposed to have been someone else’s card, and that he would be repaid. He describes being told a wire was coming from the company’s CFO, and emailing about it repeatedly. It never came, and the balance damaged his credit.

The only money he ever got back was approximately $2,000, sent by a person presented to him as the company’s chief financial officer. He tried to call that person afterward and never got a return call. He says he does not know whether that person was real.

He consulted a lawyer — a friend, who offered to take it on pro bono. He did not proceed. Filing costs alone ran to a few thousand dollars, and by that point he had found out how many times Mr. Pacquing had filed for bankruptcy. He says he came to the view that the signed contracts were worth very little in practice:

“It costs probably more to actually sue someone than you’re probably gonna get back, especially if you don’t know if they have any assets.”

He estimates the whole thing consumed three or four years of his life. He has written the money off. He says the lasting damage was not financial:

“This guy put me in a *@#$!* depression.”

One thing he wants on the record: when Mr. Pacquing asked to be introduced to his professional network, he made the introductions — and then told the people he had introduced not to invest until he had been repaid first. As far as he knows, none of them put in any money.

He extends that much credit and no more. He was not asked what he thought should happen to Mr. Pacquing; he volunteered it, twice:

“I do want him to go to jail. I really do. […] He did this to a lot of people.”

“He needs to go to jail […] so he can stop doing this to people.”

He is not expecting to recover anything, and said so plainly. What he wanted was for the next person to have something to find:

“At least we can have something when someone else is gonna try and give him money — do a quick Google search.”

What we have checked, and what we have not

Checked. The two company names he gave us, spoken from memory in the interview, match companies that appear in judgments already documented on this site — the marketing company named in a 2021 default judgment, and the company named jointly in two federal judgments from 2023. He was not shown those records before he named the companies. He also referred to repeated bankruptcy filings, which is consistent with what the public record shows. The judgments themselves, with the courts, dockets and dates, are set out on the main page.

Documented. He has given us his signed contracts from the period, an itemized ledger of the payments he made, his correspondence, and a background report he commissioned in 2023. We hold those documents and have not yet checked this account against them line by line. We are not publishing them, and we will not publish them without his agreement.

If you recognise any of this, or if you believe anything on this page is inaccurate, we would like to hear from you. Write to info@FPacquingInquiry.com or call or text (213) 734-4104; calls are recorded for quality purposes.