Jonathan Black In 2015, a man named Jonathan Black opened
a company called Bar Works with three men named Sam Aura, James Moore, and Renwick Robert
Haddow.
Haddow would name Jonathan Black as the company's CEO, and together these men would commit a
$57 million Ponzi scheme through the Bar Works company.
But why would Haddow name someone else as CEO rather than himself?
Both were British Citizens with extensive financial backgrounds and were interested
in scamming people.
In fact, both of them were also 50-year-old bald men who lived in New York.
Jonathan Black and Renwick Robert Haddow were the same person!
Do you see where this is going?
Renwick Robert Haddow Throughout Haddow’s life, he had been trying
to get plans off the ground.
In 2001, he struck a deal with publishers at Cosmopolitan to create a string of venues
that would combine beauty treatments, bars, and coffee shops.
He claimed that they’d have at least twenty outlets within two years.
In the end, they only opened one in Manchester, England, and the location didn’t reach their
financial target.
Haddow’s business closed shortly afterward, despite telling investors that business was
booming.
Shareholders lost their money, and the company left over $2 million in debt.
Haddow was then banned as a director in 2008.
In 2003, Haddow owned a business that invested in a glow-in-the-dark plastics project.
This also ended up with lawsuits in the UK courts.
Although Haddow was banned from being a director, that didn’t stop him from rebranding himself
as a consultant.
By 2015, Haddow had become connected to thirty different investment schemes.
In 2009, he posted promotional videos showing he had created a large rice production farm
in Sierra Leone.
He had at least 1,000 investors, but the issue was that they were paying for more land than
Haddow had actually owned.
By the time Britain discovered the scheme, he had stolen over $8 million.
While the investigation was taking place for the Sierra Leone scheme, Haddow was in jail
for another scheme.
Bar Works Bar Works was a company that used old bars
and restaurants and turned them into shared office spaces in New York.
Here, victims could enter into a leaseback investment where they spend at least $25,000
to buy a workspace and lease it back to Bar Works for ten years.
If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, it’s because it is.
Let’s put it into simpler terms.
Bar Works owns a restaurant.
They sell a portion of the restaurant to an investor for $25,000.
Then they get into a leaseback agreement where Bar Works pays the investor monthly to use
that part of the restaurant as office space over ten years.
The benefit to this was that Bar Works promised a 14% return on each investment.
That means that Bar Works would pay $3,500 annually for ten years, and the investor would
walk out of the agreement with a $10,000 profit.
Let’s compare this to a company called WeWork.
WeWork is a company that owns many buildings across the globe and rents out spaces to people
or companies to use as office space.
They brand themselves as trendy places where customers can go and network while they work.
There’s no investment involved, and the customers renting the sites are going and
using it.
WeWork doesn’t give an opportunity to be scammed.
On the other hand, Bar Works was selling leases for more workspaces than they actually owned.
Then when it came time to pay, they asked for extensions due to “productive restructuring.”
The delays in payments eventually led to no payments at all.
Investors started getting suspicious of Bar Works, but it was too late by that point.
Phone Boxes In 2016, Bar Works announced that it would
transform Britain’s old-school telephone boxes into tiny work spaces.
Each booth would have a 25-inch monitor, a wireless keyboard, a scanner, a printer, and
free coffee.
For only around $23 a month, you could use these pods if you worked on the go.
They expected at least ten thousand members by the end of that year.
This never came to light because in June of 2017, investors had started claiming that
Bar Works was a Ponzi scheme.
Now you might be wondering how so many people were able to be scammed.
Indeed they could’ve seen that the locations they were purchasing were nonexistent.
Bar Works had been presenting itself to be highly profitable with each new site even
though locations had started closing rapidly.
On top of that, one of Haddow’s cofounders, Sam Aura, made sure to reach investors who
couldn’t verify the location’s existence.
Savraj Gata-Aura Sam Aura, or Savraj Gata-Aura, was another
man with an extensive background in scamming.
Sam Aura was the alias that Savraj used.
Before Bar Works, he had worked for a UK company called “Park First,” an investment company
having to do with airport car parking spaces.
In 2017, the Financial Conduct Authority shut down Park First because it was an unauthorized
collective investment scheme.
When he moved to the U.S, he purchased a parking lot in North Carolina, convincing the owners
to give him a $1.3 million loan for the property.
He advertised the lot as part of his Parking Investment Business, promising a 12% yearly
return.
He has since shut down the parking lot due to the COVID epidemic, blaming the decrease
in flyers for the decline in the need for parking.
He now owes the original owners $1 million for the loan they gave him.
In Bar Works, his primary role was to attract investors from countries outside of the U.S
because they wouldn’t be able to see the workspace locations.
He also contributed to creating and sending out documents stating the false financial
situation of the company as well as helping “Jonathan Black” conceal his true identity.
Gata-Aura and Haddow were aware of the aliases they used while working together.
James Moore Now let’s talk about the third cofounder,
Mister James Moore.
Although he was the only one who didn’t use an alias, he was arguably the biggest
liar out of the three.
Before Bar Works, Moore had worked with Haddow previously on a hotel investment scheme in
2009.
This scheme involved hotels in Prague and Morocco where investors could buy shares and
stay in a free room at the hotel throughout the year.
The company later went into liquidation, losing all the money investors had spent, and the
Financial Conduct Authority caught them, and Haddow was eventually sued.
In 2015, Moore had approached Haddow again, looking to partner for the Bar Works scam.
Here, Moore did the same things that Gata-Aura did, and he helped find investors from other
countries, created fake financial documents, and helped Haddow hide the fact that he was
Jonathan Black.
In 2016, Moore went on a recorded phone interview with the SEC, claiming that Jonathan Black
was a real person despite knowing that Black was just an alias for Haddow.
Moore said he had never asked to speak with Black even though he represented to multiple
agents that he was working closely with him.
In 2017, in a videotaped interview with the IRS, Moore claimed that he hadn’t done anything
for money since 2010, even though he had received $1.3 million from Bar Works alone.
Some people have considered Moore to be the mastermind behind the entire Bar Works Ponzi
scheme since he was the one who contacted Haddow.
It wasn’t like Moore had no idea who he was working with; he had previously worked
with Haddow and made the conscious decision to do it again.
Zoia Kyselova In 2016, at the height of the US investigation,
Haddow and his wife, Zoia Kyselova, went on their honeymoon.
She was also suspected of being a part of the scam by Chinese Investors.
According to the evidence, she only had one statement on her Facebook that involved the
Bar Works company.
However, she did have a post including a picture of Jordan Belfort, the self-proclaimed Wolf
of Wall Street.
Her post was about an event he was speaking at in 2014.
She wrote that their team did a good job inviting him to London.
The post also stated that the night's theme was about the truth behind success.
Losses Together, these three men, and potentially
woman, scammed over 800 investors and received over $57 million.
One victim, a 32-year-old named Jocelynne Houghton, invested $50,000 after her financial
advisor recommended the company.
He claimed that Bar Works seemed functional and trustworthy after hearing from multiple
sources, including his business partner, that the company was thriving.
Jocelynne said she had received a few months' worth of payments before they stopped coming
in.
When she asked where the payments were, she would hear many excuses.
Eventually, she looked up Bar Works, and to her horror, she saw that it was a scam.
Jocelynne would’ve used her earnings to finally buy a house, but now she has nothing.
Many victims lost their retirement money or money they saved for their children’s tuition.
All of them were put into a financial situation that would take many years to fix.
Another victim had lost $500,000 due to the Bar Works scam.
Due to stress, his wife even gave birth to their daughter five weeks early.
They were also hoping to buy a house with their earnings, only to be left with nothing.
Investigation Once investors started getting suspicious
of Bar Works, they started filing many lawsuits.
As we saw with the interviews that Moore participated in, the government sought evidence to prove
that Bar Works was illegitimate.
It wasn’t until Moore was convicted for a separate property investment crime in Florida
that they were able to arrest Gata-Aura and Haddow for this crime.
Once they tried to arrest Haddow, they realized he was being kept prisoner in Morocco.
Haddow had been arrested for, you guessed it, another fraud case.
He had started a new “Bitcoin Store” company, an online platform where people could buy,
store, and sell their digital currency.
Here he had planned to use investor money to pay his cold callers; this wasn’t revealed
to the investors.
While cold callers claimed that Bitcoin Store had a turnover of over $5.5 million, in reality,
the bank account only had a little over $400.
Gata-Aura had already been arrested.
Haddow was extradited from Morocco to the United States in 2018 for his court hearing.
Aftermath The years of karma had been building for these
men, who were about to receive punishment.
In June of 2019, James Moore pled guilty to the Bar Works crime and was sentenced to 11
and a half years in prison.
In addition, he would have three years of supervised release and have to pay over $57
million in restitution, forfeit $1.5 million, and pay a fine of $50,000.
Savraj Gata-Aura also pled guilty to the Ponzi scheme.
In July of 2020, he was sentenced to four years in prison.
Upon release, he’ll have three years of supervised release.
Aura was ordered to pay almost $40 million in restitution and forfeit nearly $3 million.
As for Renwick Robert Haddow, the face of the Bar Works scheme pled guilty in March
of 2019.
His sentence date was set for October that year and has been rescheduled several times.
In April 2022, it was rescheduled again for October.
While it’s nice to see two of the culprits already put behind bars, we can only hope
that come October, we see Haddow receiving a sentence along with restitution requirements
for all the people he’s taken advantage of these years.
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