Fresno man pleads guilty to wire fraud schemes totaling $45 million in investor losses

A Fresno man pleaded guilty to a pair of wire fraud conspiracies that together cost investors roughly $45 million, U.S. Attorney Eric Grant announced.

David Hardcastle, 61, admitted his role in two separate fraud schemes — one involving manipulated loan documents tied to a collapsed technology startup, and another a years-long Ponzi-style scheme run through a Florida real estate investment firm.

In the first case, prosecutors said Hardcastle and business partner Andrew Adler, 32, of Greenwich, Connecticut, extended approximately $20 million in high-interest hard money loans to Fresno-based startup Bitwise Industries through their entity Startop Investments LLC between December 2022 and May 2023. The pair then sold portions of those loans to outside investors — but not before altering the original loan documents to conceal the true interest rates, making the loans appear less risky than they were. They also forged the signature of Bitwise Co-CEO Jake Soberal on the altered paperwork, prosecutors said.

Hardcastle and Adler collected tens of thousands of dollars in origination fees and stood to reap millions more in undisclosed profits from the hidden interest rates. The scheme also involved a roughly $700,000 interest reserve that was not disclosed to investors. Instead of protecting those investors, Hardcastle and Adler used the reserve funds, without authorization, for an unrelated investment in another company they operated. When Bitwise collapsed in May 2023 without repaying the loans, investors lost nearly all of their money.

Adler previously pleaded guilty to the same conspiracy charge and was sentenced on June 2, 2025, to three years and five months in prison. Bitwise’s co-founders, Jake Soberal and Irma Olguin Jr., were sentenced in December 2024 to 11 years and nine years in prison, respectively, for defrauding the company’s investors and lenders out of approximately $115 million.

In the second case, Hardcastle served as a general partner and chief executive of Voyager Pacific Capital Management, a Florida-based real estate investment firm. Between June 2020 and January 2025, prosecutors said Hardcastle and others falsely told investors in the firm’s Opportunity Fund II that their money would be used to acquire residential properties, land, and tax liens. Instead, the funds were used to pay returns to earlier participants, as well as for personal investments and other improper purchases. The firm also provided investors with fabricated financial statements showing the fund was performing well when it was not.

Prosecutors also said Hardcastle and others carried out undisclosed, on-paper sales of certain underperforming or distressed properties in the fund to themselves, with no money changing hands, in order to inflate the fund’s value and continue collecting management fees. The fund was ultimately acquired by a third party at a discount, diminishing the value of investors’ shares.