Spartanburg Man Sentenced in Three Million Dollar Wire Fraud

Contact Person: David Stephens (864) 282-2100

Greenville, South Carolina ---- Acting United States Attorney Beth Drake announced today that Claus C. Foerster, age 56, formerly of Spartanburg, South Carolina, was sentenced today for multiple counts of Wire Fraud in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1343.  United States District Judge Bruce H. Hendricks, sitting in Greenville, sentenced Mr. Foerster to serve twenty-four months in prison to be followed by supervised release for three years.  Additionally, Mr. Foerster was ordered to pay $3,543,829.48 in restitution to the victims.

At the guilty plea hearing on May 10, 2016, Assistant United States Attorney David C. Stephens advised the court of the following.  From 1997 through 2014 Mr. Foerster was a financial advisor employed by national investment counseling firms.  In approximately 2000 Mr. Foerster began stealing from his clients.  He advised the clients that he had located better investments than their current portfolio.  He would then tell them that to get into these investments they had to withdraw their funds from Foerster’s employers’ accounts and transfer them to Foerster’s account for further investment.  Once the funds were in Mr. Foerster’s account he diverted them to his own use.  By creating bogus account statements and on occasion returning some funds to the clients as “profits” he was able to keep the scheme going for over a decade.  By his use of this scam Foerster cheated his clients out of more than three million dollars ($3,000,000.00).

The case was investigated by the United States Secret Service and prosecuted by AUSA David Stephens of the Greenville Office. 

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