Sylvein William Maximilian D’Habsburg XVII, 48, of West Hills has agreed to plead guilty to running a $5.9-million Ponzi scheme in which he convinced seniors to invest in his businesses and then spent their money on luxury cars and rare antiques, authorities said.
With such a grand name, it could be easy to assume that the man is a descendant of the Habsburg dynasty that ruled Austria from 1282 until 1918. That, however, is false.
D’Habsburg legally changed his name from Sylvein Scalleone and “is neither a relative by blood nor marriage to the Habsburg dynasty that ruled parts of Europe for centuries,” according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice.
The San Fernando Valley man filed his plea agreement Tuesday and was expected to formally enter a guilty plea for one felony count of wire fraud in the U.S. district court in downtown Los Angeles in the coming weeks, according to the Department of Justice. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, prosecutors said.
According to his plea agreement, D’Habsburg operated his Ponzi scheme from January 2018 to June 2023 and hired recruiters to identify potential investors for his two companies: Wild Rabbit Technologies LLC and BAI Intelligence LLC.
The scheme targeted the local Filipino community, including many elderly church parishioners, prosecutors said.
D’Habsburg told potential investors that he had created artificial intelligence software capable of accomplishing amazing feats such as predicting the future or detecting a COVID-19 infection based solely on a video recording, prosecutors said.
The Department of Justice said he also falsely claimed that multiple big-name celebrities — including Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and Steve Wozniak — had invested some $500 million in his companies.
He promised to use money from investors to hire staff for his company and patent his inventions.
But he actually used his victims’ money to splurge on luxurious cars and rare antiques, such as a pair of 1800s-era Italian throne chairs made of carved giltwood and a 1933 Rolls-Royce Phantom II Continental Sedanca de Ville by Barker, prosecutors said. That car model recently sold for more than $200,000, according to RM Sotheby’s.
D’Habsburg defrauded his victims out of $5.9 million, prosecutors said. The case is being investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice.