Miami-Dade woman who fleeced millions from Haitian-American investors sent to prison

A Miami-Dade woman has been sent to prison for four years after pleading guilty to swindling $2.4 million from more than 500 Haitian-American investors in South Florida.

Judith Dianne Paris-Pinder, 49, also must do 200 hours of community service after her release and pay back her investors as part of her punishment.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ordered Paris-Pinder, who had lived in Biscayne Park, to start her prison term after her sentencing hearing in Miami federal court on Monday.

In a plea deal, Paris-Pinder admitted that she pocketed her investors’ money for a wedding, vacations and other entertainment. She also admitted that she used an additional $2.2 million that she raised from investors to keep some at bay until her Ponzi scheme collapsed.

Paris-Pinder was able to lure investors by promising them up to 50 percent returns, federal prosecutors said. The scheme worked this way: Investors provided millions of dollars as advances to people who were purportedly represented by lawyers and were going to receive insurance company settlements and give them a portion of that money later, prosecutors said. But there were no claims, no lawyers and no settlements, they said.

“According to her plea, the entire investment was a scam,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a new release. “Paris-Pinder did not work for or with lawyers with litigation clients and there were no settlement agreements.”

Miami attorney Scott Bennett Saul, who represents Paris-Pinder, said that from the time of her arrest in September it was her intention “to amicably resolve her situation” by admitting responsibility and cooperating with federal authorities. She pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge in November.

Separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Paris-Pinder and obtained a civil judgment against her in September that tracks with her criminal case. In recent years, the SEC in Miami has cracked down on schemes like hers that target investors in immigrant communities.

Although much smaller in scale, Paris-Pinder’s scheme was similar to that of disbarred Fort Lauderdale attorney Scott Rothstein, who operated a massive $1.2 billion Ponzi scam more than a decade ago. He was convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison for 50 years.

Paris-Pinder was formerly the president of Pinder Associates Inc., a North Miami company. Prosecutors said that from November 2019 to August 2021, she told potential investors in the Haitian-American community that she was working with lawyers representing plaintiffs who had settled their claims but were still waiting for actual settlement payments from the insurance companies, according to an FBI probe.

Paris-Pinder told the investors that she would use their funds to loan the plaintiffs a portion of their purported settlements, according to a factual statement filed with her plea agreement. She also told investors that once the plaintiffs received the purported payments from the insurance companies, they would turn the entire amount over to Paris-Pinder.

In turn, she promised investors that she would pay back the investors’ initial loan contributions plus any returns, which could be as high as 50 percent, according to prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

But her investment scheme was a ruse, prosecutor Eric Morales said, noting that Paris-Pinder kept the Ponzi scheme going by using money from new investors to pay existing investors. She raised about $4.6 million from investors, leading to $2.4 million in losses that she kept for herself, Morales said.