SEC Charges San Francisco Bay Area Private Fund Executives with Multimillion Dollar Ponzi-Like Scheme

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Mark D. Hanf, the former CEO of Novato, California-based Pacific Private Money Group LLC (PPMG), and Hoai-Nam Chu Phan, the former COO of a PPMG subsidiary, with orchestrating an offering fraud that raised more than $80 million from approximately 190 mostly retail investors, many of whom were retired senior citizens.

According to the SEC’s complaint, from approximately December 2021 to November 2025, Hanf and Phan, also known as Nam Phan, misrepresented to investors in two of PPMG’s private funds that investor capital would be used to originate or purchase loans secured by real estate, and that investors could expect to receive preferred or fixed rates of return from the funds’ real estate lending activities. However, as alleged, Hanf and Phan regularly used new investor capital to make Ponzi-like payments to prior investors during this timeframe, and the returns that Hanf and Phan touted were sourced largely from new investor money rather than from any fund earnings connected with their real estate lending business. The SEC further alleges that Hanf misappropriated more than $7 million of investor funds for his own personal benefit.

“This alleged scheme began to unravel in the fall of 2025 as numerous investors demanded to withdraw their money and the defendants did not have sufficient funds to satisfy those requests,” said Jason Lee, Associate Director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office. “Despite total outstanding investments in the two private funds of almost $121 million, by February 2026 the total recoverable assets of those funds were estimated to be less than $17 million. That amounts to devastating losses for so many investors.”