A New Jersey man who was once convicted of bank robbery will spend the next 18 years in prison for his role in a $3 million conspiracy that scammed customers by offering phony consulting services to owners of timeshares.
Ian Resnick was convicted, along with several co-conspirators, in 2013 on one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, three counts of mail fraud and three counts of wire fraud, and received his sentence this week.
According to evidence presented during Resnick’s trial, Resnick began working as a salesman at Vacation Ownership Group (now VO Financial), pushing the company’s fraudulent consulting services to timeshare owners.
Resnick worked for Adam Lacerda, the company founder, president and chief executive officer, who devised the company’s fraudulent sales pitches.
Lacerda directed his sales team to tell various lies to VO customers, including that VO worked with the banks holding the customers’ loans, would use money sent by customers to pay off the customers’ loans on their timeshares, and could cancel customers’ timeshares with money back.
Resnick worked his way up from salesman to director of compliance, where he served as Lacerda’s “enforcer,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey.
Resnick was convicted in 2013 along with Lacerda, his wife, Ashley Lacerda, who served as the company vice president and chief operating officer and sent fraudulent contracts to customers while managing the office, and Genevieve Manzoni, who was a top VO sales representative.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Manzoni falsely told one victim she worked with a bank and another victim that she worked with a timeshare developer.
The 14 victims who testified – including business executives, veterans, senior citizens, a lawyer and a professor – were defrauded out of tens of thousands of dollars by the defendants’ sophisticated scheme, the U.S. Attorney’s Office stated.
Adam Lacerda was sentenced to 27 years in prison on June 25, 2015. Ashley Lacerda is due to receiver her sentence on June 3, 2016, and Manzoni was sentenced in December 2015 to 42 months in prison.
