Last Moment of Clarity / Lionsgate
At the height of the streaming wars in the last few years of the 2010s, the mania to develop new content was so great that one man, Zachary Joseph Horwitz, leveraged the hype to swindle $650 million out of investors.
Horwitz, whose stage name is Zach Avery, is an aspiring actor who has a dozen or so film credits to his name — most notably 2020’s Last Moment of Clarity alongside Succession actor Brian Cox, which wasn’t exactly a hit. However, the $6 million home he purchased in Beverlywood, the neighborhood just south of Beverly Hills, was purchased with the money he schemed out of five investor groups and more than 250 people, promising big gains.
And on Monday, Horwitz was sentenced to 20 years in prison for essentially running a Ponzi scheme. U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi, who delivered the sentence, also ordered Horwitz to pay back a whopping sum of $230,361,884 that he kept from the scheme, according to NBC News.
Horwitz defrauded his investors by claiming that he could buy movie rights from producers and turn them into easy cash by selling the rights to HBO, Netflix, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. To gain trust, he produced fraudulent documents, including agreements to hand over the rights to his firm, and promised as much as 45 percent in returns. But unfortunately, the 35-year-old actor used his newest cash investments to make those payments to earlier investors, including interest.
In 2013 he set up a firm…
