Isaac Grossman, conned elderly, spent $1.3 million on private school, diamonds, a McLaren

A 47-year-old Parkland man collected $2.4 million from retired senior citizens and spent more than a million of it on gambling, sports cars, private school for his kids and payments on a waterfront home.

All of the above is in the admission of facts with Isaac Grossman’s guilty plea to mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, for which he was sentenced to seven years, three months last week.

As for what prosecutors wanted in forfeiture as bought with $1.3 million of the ill-gotten gains, they listed a 2012 McLaren MP4-12C, a 2015 Chevrolet Corvette, a 2015 Chevrolet Tahoe, and an “emerald fancy-yellow-colored 4.81-carat diamond ring.”

But a later filing said they either couldn’t find the items or that the forfeiture “would yield little to no monetary value.”

Grossman’s scheme, which ran from September 2014 through April 2018, involved Dragon-Click, a company Grossman registered with the state in July 2014 using his home address of 11883 NW 79th Ct.

Grossman’s pitch via phone, email and mailings bragged that Dragon-Click “was developing an internet application that would revolutionize internet shopping,” his admission of facts states.

If a user uploaded a picture of a product, the Dragon-Click app would find everyone selling it, give price comparisons and links to the sellers’ sites. Grossman told investors their money would be used for tech development, patents and the cost of any sale to Big Tech. He also claimed that sale to a Google, Apple or Amazon would be for more than $1 billion and explode investors’ money by two, three or even four times their original investment.

He also said he was a successful “entrepreneur, investor and hedge-fund manager.”

Lesson No. 1 in recognizing investor fraud: When it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Grossman left out that he’d been barred, permanently, from being a broker-dealer or even associating with a broker-dealer firm by the Financial Regulatory Authority, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission had banned him permanently and ordered $121,665 restitution over previous professional malpractice.

With such information manipulation, Grossman got $2.4 million from 26 investors. The individual example given in his admission of facts described how Grossman used misinformation and repeated phone calls to cajole $50,000 out of a 75-year-old retired man in Wisconsin.

As soon as that wire transfer hit his bank, Grossman wrote a $20,390 check to “lender I.C.,” identified in Broward County court documents as Ian Carmichael, for mortgage payments.

Online Broward County court documents say the monthly mortgage was $4,078. On April 26, 2013, Adrianna Grossman, Isaac Grossman’s then-wife, signed a promissory note at a 12% annual interest rate to make 59 interest-only monthly payments of $4,078 ending with a balloon payment of the $407,800 principal.

The court documents say the Grossmans began missing payments in October 2017. The foreclosure papers filed in February said they’d missed four consecutive payments, hadn’t paid property taxes for 2016 or 2017 and hadn’t kept the property properly insured.