A former investment advisor has pleaded guilty to involvement in a decade-long $72 million fraud scheme, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced last week.
Doug Miller, of Bowling Green, Ohio, is among multiple defendants associated with Northwest Capital who were reindicted in July 2024 in the complex case and is the second to plead guilty, according to Yost. Northwest Capital was a Toledo investment firm that sold accounts receivable as it acted as an intermediary between investors and businesses, he said.
Prosecutors allege over 700 investments totaling about $72 million from at least 200 people were mismanaged as part of the scheme, which lasted from 2011 through 2021. Investors were persuaded to put money into underperforming companies without receiving disclosure of the companies' significantly impaired status, Yost's office said in a statement that referred to the activity as a Ponzi scheme.
Miller was one of eight investment firm managers originally indicted in 2023. Last week in Lucas County Common Pleas Court, he pleaded guilty to one count each of theft, securities fraud, attempting to engage in a pattern of corrupt activity, and grand theft, and two counts of attempted money laundering — all felonies — Yost announced. He had been charged with 26 felonies in the 2024 reindictment.
The plea agreement calls for Miller to cooperate with the ongoing investigation and testify in six co-defendants' prosecutions. He will be sentenced after those cases end, Yost said. In May, Richard Scheich, an executive with multiple entities involved in the Northwest Capital scheme, pleaded guilty to five felonies, according to the attorney general.
Miller and another defendant in the Ohio cases accepted a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority decision in 2016 to bar them for breaking rules related to the sale of investments in six LLCs to clients of the RIA firm they owned, a development noted in the initial indictment.
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