Former Gatlinburg Resident Dennis R. Bolze Sentenced to 327 Months in Prison for Wire Fraud and Money Laundering Offenses

KNOXVILLE, TN—Dennis R. Bolze, 61, formerly of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, was sentenced today in United States District Court in Knoxville, to serve 327 months (27 years and three months) in prison and three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay over $12 million in restitution to the victims. Bolze remains in custody.

Bolze pleaded guilty in November 2009, to a federal indictment charging him with three counts of wire fraud and three counts of money laundering offenses arising from a Ponzi scheme he admitted to operating between April 2002 and December 2008.

According to court documents, Bolze admitted that from April 2002 through December 2008, he perpetrated a scheme to defraud individuals who invested millions of dollars with him and his companies, Centurion Asset Management, Inc. ("CAM") and Advanced Trading Services, Inc. ("ATS"), by fraudulently representing that he would invest all of the funds entrusted to him in CAM’s and ATS’s day-trading of E-mini NASDAQ futures contracts and E-mini S&P 500 futures contracts (collectively referred to as “futures contracts”). Rather than investing all of his clients’ funds in futures contracts, he admitted to running a ponzi scheme by diverting new investor funds to existing investors, thereby lulling the existing investors into believing that they were, in fact, receiving a return on their investment through the day-trading of futures contracts through CAM and ATS. Bolze also admitted that to keep his scheme to defraud running, to encourage additional investments, and to discourage investor withdrawals, he provided fabricated documents to investors entitled “Trader’s Invoices” that fraudulently represented to investors that he, CAM, and ATS had generated profitable returns on their investments. For the same reasons, Bolze also caused fabricated day-trading results to be posted on the website www.accesscam.net for the purpose of fraudulently representing to investors that he had generated returns on their investments.

Bolze admitted that through his scheme to defraud he received $21,584,189.13 from investors, but actually invested only $1,601,188 on their behalf, and over the course of the scheme to defraud collectively experienced a substantial net loss. Of the $21,584,189.13 he received, $9,626,620.64 was returned to existing investors for the purpose of lulling them into believing that their investments with him were both safe and generating a profitable return.

This investigation was conducted by the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Division and the FBI. Assistant U.S. Attorney F. M "Trey" Hamilton represented the United States.