A former Los Angeles film producer who held key roles in several independent projects, including the Oscar-nominated young Donald Trump movie The Apprentice, has been arrested in South Carolina after a grand jury indicted him on charges of defrauding victims out of more than $12 million in schemes that included a Ponzi scheme, phony COVID-19 testing and misappropriating production funds.
David Raymond Brown, 39, has been charged with nine counts of wire fraud, 10 counts of transactional money laundering and two counts of aggravated identity theft in an indictment filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. Brown had an initial court appearance in South Carolina on Wednesday following his arrest and is expected to be arraigned when he is returned in the coming weeks to California, where he lived in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles while allegedly defrauding two individual victims and bilking several film productions with a grab bag of flim-flams.
From December 2021 through this year, Brown allegedly defrauded film production companies and the two victims mentioned but kept anonymous in the federal indictment by using an inflated status in the film industry to dupe them and transfer funds meant for production costs to his personal bank account, all to maintain his swish lifestyle. In addition to using the guise of filmmaking to dupe one victim, another individual was told funds handed to Brown were for real estate investments.
“Without the knowledge or authorization of the Film Production Companies…Brown misappropriated funds belonging to the film production companies by causing funds to be transferred from the film production companies’ bank and prepaid debit CASHét card accounts to bank and CASHét Card accounts he controlled,” the indictment read.
The funds allegedly embezzled by Brown were then used to keep up his upper-crust L.A. lifestyle. Purchases, according to the federal indictment, included a 2025 Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon and multiple Tesla vehicles, a house for his mother, as well as to pay his mortgage, install a pool and a Subzero freezer, pay for private school tuition and to put $70,000 into surrogacy services.
To embezzle some of the funds, Brown is accused in the indictment of setting up a Studio City-based company he called Hollywood Covid Testing LLC, which he would use to bill productions for COVID-19 tests “never rendered or already paid for, including by using false or duplicative invoices,” according to a press release from the DOJ on Wednesday. The alleged fraud scheme also involved an elaborate lie that saw $970,263 in investor cash be sent to an entity set up to make a never-produced film about the Symbionese Liberation Army and its members’ infamous kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
Brown is accused of running what was essentially a Ponzi scheme, on which the parties’ feds say he victimized, using funds he obtained from new victims, including Victim 2, to compensate one victimized Film Production Company. The indictment also accused him of intentionally submitting checks drawn on insufficient funds and allegedly passing off another person’s Internet Movie Database Page as his own to convince one victim of his industry bona fides.
Federal prosecutors also claim that Brown tricked a third party into signing backdated loan documents while withholding purported health insurance payments from employees’ payroll, while failing to maintain their health insurance coverage.
Brown is being detained at a jailhouse in Columbia, South Carolina. He will remain in custody until his next hearing, which is scheduled for Sept. 4. An email The Hollywood Reporter sent to his attorney on Thursday afternoon was not immediately returned.
The Department of Justice notes that if convicted, Brown faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each of the nine wire fraud counts, up to 10 years in federal prison for each money laundering count, and a mandatory two-year consecutive prison sentence for each aggravated identity theft count.
