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Somers resident Douglas Castle, who already served time in prison for bilking investors in 2003, has been sentenced to 50 months behind bars after pleading guilty to wire fraud on July 26 in White Plains federal court.
On June 25, 2003, Castle was sentenced in federal court to 34 months in prison and three years of supervised release for his conviction on an investment fraud scheme that caused investor losses of over $1.2 million. Five years later, he concocted a second scheme that he was sentenced for this week.
From 2014 to 2017, Castle, the owner of Global Edge Technologies Group, admitted to defrauding at least three more investors - including an aging widow - of more than $800,000, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said. Castle encouraged his victims to invest with him in a firm that didn’t exist, and instead used his victims’ money for personal use, cash withdrawals and eventually overseas transfers to people in Ghana who were actually perpetuating their own scheme on Castle.
Berman said that on June 8, 2016, Castle participated in a voluntary interview with the FBI, when he lied about a source of a transfer of the widow’s money that he made to a Ghanaian bank account.
Following that meeting, Castle continued to lie to his victims to raise more money. When Castle came to realize he would not receive a multi-million dollar return in exchange for transferring his and his victims’ money, Berman said Castle “attempted to preclude his victims from reporting the fraud to law enforcement by falsely claiming that he was already working with the FBI and multiple other law enforcement agencies on their behalf to recover their funds.
In addition to his prison time, Castle, 64, was sentenced to three years of supervised release, must forfeit $825,000 and pay $849,800 in restitution.
"Douglas E. Castle took money from investors under false pretenses, lied to the FBI, and then lied to victims by telling them he was working with the FBI," Berman stated. "Now he has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for his litany of lies.”
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