Federal prosecutors announced Tuesday that a 41-year-old Clark County man was sentenced to more than three years in prison for defrauding investors here and abroad who believed they were funding a clean-energy company.
Isaac Benjamin Voss was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Portland to 37 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Oregon.
Voss faced up to two decades in prison, prosecutors previously said. He pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in March.
Voss defrauded domestic and foreign investors, some of whom believed their support would serve as a shortcut to citizenship.
He made a deal with a Canadian scientist and entrepreneur in 2007 to raise funds for the development of a technology that would supposedly extract electricity and petroleum-equivalent fuels from carbon-based materials.
His company, XFuels, was used to obtain money from people across Oregon, California and Washington over a four-year period beginning in 2011, prosecutors said.
Those West Coast investors were tricked into handing over their cash because of elaborate marketing materials produced by Voss, including fliers, brochures and a website containing false information about XFuels, the promised technology and the investment opportunity, prosecutors said.
“To reduce the perceived risk of the venture, Voss told investors that more than 90 percent of the project’s funding would come from other institutional and private lenders and that he had commissioned an independent, third-party feasibility study that guaranteed the project’s commercial viability,” wrote public affairs officer Kevin Sonoff in the prosecutors’ release.
The feasibility study was based on unvalidated information produced by Voss, prosecutors said.
Additionally, Voss hosted seminars where he promised a half-million dollar investment in his company would qualify foreign investors for employment based, or EB-5 visas. He further promised to hold the invested money in trust until the government approved their visas. Some of the investors apparently applied for the visas due to the promise; federal prosecutors said all of the applications were denied.
