The lead investment promoter of what has been dubbed “the largest green scam” in history, and started by two Temple University graduates out of an office near Philadelphia, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role.
Wayde McKelvy, formerly of Denver, Colorado and Sunnyside, Florida, was convicted of duping dozens of retirement-age investors out of their life savings for a piece of a company called Mantria Corp., which was based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Mantria claimed to be on the precipice of a new clean energy revolution that involved “biochar.”
The company, founded in the mid-2000s by Temple grads Troy Wragg and Amanda Knorr only a couple years out of college, also claimed it was building one of the largest housing developments in Tennessee.
Neither the biochar nor the housing development ever came close to fruition.
Instead, with the help of McKelvy’s “Speed of Wealth” fundraising seminars, Wragg and Knorr raised as much as $54 million in the late 2000s and built a massive Ponzi scheme to pay off early investors. Eventually, the Securities Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania caught on to the scheme.
“This case is a classic example of the warning: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” Acting U.S. Attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania Jennifer Arbittier Williams said. “McKelvy is nothing more than a twenty-first century snake oil salesman, with all of the trappings to make him…
