Barry Minkow Net Worth, Income, Salary, Earnings, Biography

Barry Jay Minkow (born March 17, 1967) is a former businessman, preacher, and convicted criminal who is now serving a prison sentence. His first business venture was ZZZZ Best (pronounced “Zee Best”), which looked to be an enormously successful carpet-cleaning and restoration firm while he was still in high school. It was, in fact, a ruse to solicit money for a huge Ponzi scam of enormous proportions. It collapsed in 1987, causing investors and lenders to lose a total of $100 million. It was one of the biggest investment scams ever perpetrated by a single individual, as well as one of the largest accounting frauds ever committed in the history of accounting. The technique is often cited as an example of accounting fraud in academic settings.

Following his release from prison, Minkow went on to work as a pastor and fraud investigator in San Diego, where he also lectured at schools about ethics. In 2011, he confessed to conspiring to artificially depress the stock price of homebuilder Lennar and was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to depress the stock price. Upon his admission of defrauding his own church three years after his arrest, he was sentenced to an extra five years behind bars. Following his offences, he risks having to make reparation payments totaling $612 million—a sum that would most certainly need him to work for the rest of his life in order to repay.

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