‘The Apprentice’ Producer Indicted in $12M Fraud Scheme

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 flimflams.

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.