🍿 Hollywood grifter
  Tonight: We're talking Hollywood Ponzi schemes, record gas prices and that murky "office culture" your boss keeps reminiscing about. Let's get into it. 🍿 SCHEMING  The tale of Zachary Horwitz made headlines this week after he was sentenced to 20 years for bilking investors out of $650 million by peddling bogus licensing deals with HBO and Netflix.
Ironically, it is just the kind of juicy swindler story you might binge watch on those platforms: Horwitz, a 35-year-old actor who had bit roles in a handful of low-budget films over the past decade, pleaded guilty to federal securities fraud and running an illegal operation known as a Ponzi scheme. For years, prosecutors say, Horwitz used his investors' money to fund a lavish Hollywood lifestyle — until his scam unraveled.
Somebody get me Shonda Rhimes on the phone!
Anyway, let's talk Ponzi schemes, and why investors are still falling for them.
Put simply: a Ponzi scheme is a type of financial fraud that uses money from new investors to pay off earlier ones. The term comes from the 1920 swindler Charles Ponzi, but it has become synonymous with the crimes of Bernie Madoff, the mastermind behind the largest financial fraud in history, who died in prison last year.
Early investors in a Ponzi scheme get rewarded with mindbogglingly large dividends — Horwitz allegedly promised returns between 25% and 45% — that propel them to tell others about the golden opportunity, which keeps new money flowing into the scam. Once the pool of new investment dries up, of course, the fraud falls apart.
A FRAUD IS BORN
Prosecutors say Horwitz, who goes by the stage name Zach Avery, promised his investors — many of whom were friends — that their money would be used to buy film distribution rights that he would then license to streaming platforms for a profit.
"But, as his victims came to learn, [Horwitz] was not a successful businessman or Hollywood insider," prosecutors said. "He just played one in real life."
(Ouch, savage burn, prosecutors.)
Horwitz's company "neither acquired film rights nor entered into any distribution agreements with HBO or Netflix" and he provided fake documents to his investors. (HBO, like CNN, is part of WarnerMedia.)
WHY IT MATTERS In this era of soaring stock markets and newfangled assets like NFTs and cryptocurrencies, it's basically a grifter paradise.
"Fraudsters really feed on times of uncertainty, financial distress, upheaval, times of change, and those are really the times that we've been living in the past few years," says Kathy Bazoian Phelps, a lawyer who runs a blog about Ponzi schemes. "And of course there's a lot of money out there people are looking to invest."
It's not hard to imagine how an investor might be sucked into such a scam in the era of meme stock rallies and overnight crypto millionaires. FOMO is a powerful force.
The best way to avoid getting taken for a ride is to always be mindful of potential fraud, Phelps says. Investors need to ask due diligence questions, beware of promises of guaranteed return with no risk, and watch out for returns that are higher than what you're likely to find in the marketplace.
Words to live by: "If you can't really understand what the investment is after a five-minute explanation," Phelps says, "you probably shouldn't be investing in it." #️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY $4.72 Gas in California hit a record high of $4.72 a gallon on average, and experts say residents should brace for $5 gas in the next few months. The new record is not only the highest price ever for California — it's the highest for any state, surpassing the previous record of $4.70 set by Alaska in 2008.
🏡 WFH  All right, bosses, listen up. We're coming up on the second anniversary of the day you emailed everyone to tell them to take their laptops home and prepare to work remotely for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, till this mysterious flu thing goes away.
Welp, it's nearly March 2022 and neither Covid and nor our remote office setups have gone away. Don't be shocked when your staff doesn't rush back into the office.
The news: Among Americans with jobs that can be done remotely, a solid majority, 59%, say they still are working from home much or all of the time, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. And among those, 60% say they'd like to work from home all or most of the time when the pandemic is over.
It's not hard to see why:
But the No. 1 reason? They just like it. A staggering 76% said that working from home is their preference. Their work-life balance is better, they're more productive and better at meeting deadlines, according to Pew.
MY TWO CENTS
Managers, you've got to step up your game if you're serious about getting people back into the office with any regularity. You can't just keep offering platitudes like "we miss office culture" and "we work better together." Those things may be true, but that's not your staff's problem.
Most of Corporate America is offering merely a chance to spend five days a week staring at a screen under neon lighting in an open-concept office that assures no one has any privacy, all for the privilege of being able to huddle IRL for a brainstorm sesh and go out for overpriced salads with your co-workers at lunch. Gee, who wouldn't want to commute an hour each way in traffic or on crowded public transit for that?
Executives have had two years to figure out back-to-office plan, and so far we're not seeing much innovation. Your employees are screaming out for what they want – just ask them. Maybe it's more schedule flexibility, a four-day week, better health care, subsidized child care, or, I dunno, a freakin' bike rack big enough for all your cycling commuters who want to lock up safely without having to walk an extra three blocks just to get into the building (I'm just spitballing).
In any case, if you truly believe in the value of having people together and aren't just falling back on tradition, then, by all means, get your staff in the building. But find a way to make it worth their while and articulate a clear vision of why it's important. The pandemic turned the tables on this dynamic, and workers need more than water-cooler talk to go back to the way things were.
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON? 🛢️ Oil prices briefly touched $95 a barrel in turbulent trading Wednesday as investors tried to make sense of the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
💸 US retail sales last month rose 3.8% — far more than economists had predicted — as shoppers largely shrugged at inflation.
📱 Two US senators introduced a bill aimed at curbing the harmful impacts of social media on young people, the latest example of how Congress is flexing its regulatory power to try to rein in Big Tech.
🎲 America's gambling industry just had its highest-grossing year ever. Again. TWEET OF THE DAY 
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