6 Arrested in Alleged Web Investment Scam

Federal prosecutors said Tuesday they have arrested six Southland telemarketers, charging them with helping to operate an Orange County Internet gaming scam that took in almost $5 million from more than 500 investors.

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted the group last week on 26 counts apiece of mail and wire fraud. They were taken into custody Monday and Tuesday, prosecutors said.

The telemarketers worked for Gecko Holdings, which had boiler rooms in Irvine and Costa Mesa before being shut down this spring by the Orange County Boiler Room Task Force, the indictment alleges.

They offered investors stock in Gecko, telling them it was an online gambling business about to go public. Investors were promised that their shares, priced at $2, would be worth double or triple that much in a few months, prosecutors say.

“But Gecko never went public,” Assistant U.S. Atty Ellyn Lindsay said. “Instead, the owner took off with all the money. [The investors] were just devastated.”

At least two investors lost more than $200,000 each in the scheme, prosecutors say.

The Aliso Viejo man that ran Gecko, Robert Louis Syrax, 57, pleaded guilty to fraud charges in July.

But first, he and his wife, Sandra Diane Coronado, 46, led police on a three-week chase from Southern California to Las Vegas to Florida.

The couple fled with $2.5 million emptied from bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes, living extravagantly until police tracked them down in a Palm Coast, Fla., hotel. Authorities also seized Syrax’s 1999 Silver Spur Rolls Royce, for which he paid $175,000 in cash.

Syrax remains in jail. He is expected to be sentenced Nov. 3. The company’s office manager, Gretchen Wilson, 52, of Huntington Beach, also pleaded guilty to fraud charges and is scheduled for sentencing later this year.

Coronado, who was charged with fraud in April and now faces an additional count of transporting ill-gotten gains across state lines, is in jail awaiting trial.

Those arrested this week are: Stephen James Stapleton, 43, of Dana Point; Benjamin Peter Antonello, 39, of Yorba Linda; Robert Edwin Perkins Jr., 67, of Newport Beach; Tony Alexander Saccareccia, 35, of Huntington Beach; Jon William Long, 47, of Long Beach and San Diego; and Nancy Ann Klatter, 41, of Costa Mesa.

A seventh man, David Van Dyke, was also named in the indictment but is already in jail on unrelated charges, prosectors said.

Consumers should be wary when approached about Internet gambling investments, law enforcement agencies warn. In most cases, Internet gambling is illegal in the United States. However, jurisdictional questions regarding offshore gaming operations have made enforcement difficult.