TikTok Stalker Used Millions From His Ponzi Scheme to Live Large, Feds Say

A South Carolina man is facing civil charges after allegedly running a $20 million Ponzi scheme to fund his lavish lifestyle—and scoop up a million dollars worth of TikTok coin.

Michael French, 40, and two of his companies were charged on Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused him of defrauding over 400 investors to whom he’d sold millions of high-yield promissory notes. The complaint states that during the two-year scam, which ended around September 2022, French “misappropriated at least $13.2 million of investor proceeds to make Ponzi payments to earlier investors and to pay for his personal expenses.”

Among those personal expenses were luxury cars, homes for both him and his parents, a personal performance coach, a trainer, a chef, and over $1 million in payments to TikTok for “coins” to give to social media creators.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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