Todd Burkhalter, the founder and chief executive of the Georgia advisory firm Drive Planning, was sentenced on August 14 to 20 years in federal prison, the maximum the law allows, for running what prosecutors called likely the largest Ponzi scheme in the state’s history. Over roughly four years he collected about $380 million from more than 2,000 investors, many of whom he pushed to drain retirement accounts and college funds to chase a guaranteed return that never existed. A federal judge also ordered him to repay more than $233 million, and a court-appointed receiver is working to recover the yacht, condo, and luxury vehicles he bought with client money. For the retirees among his victims, the sentence settles who is to blame without settling how much they will ever get back.
A 10% guarantee that never existed
The engine of the fraud was a product Drive Planning called the Real Estate Acceleration Loan, or REAL, which Burkhalter marketed as a short-term bridge loan to developers that would pay investors a guaranteed 10% every three months. To make the pitch look safe, the firm told clients the money was fully collateralized by real property and prepared what prosecutors described as fraudulent “collateral sheets” listing valuations for properties that in some cases did not exist. None of the money financed the bridge loans it was supposed to fund.
Instead, the operation ran as a classic Ponzi from the start. Within weeks of taking its first $50,000 into REAL in September 2020, the firm used part of it to repay an earlier investor, the telltale pattern of paying old clients with new money. A second product, the CORE Fund, promised “100% passive income from tax liens” and a 22% annual return, yet the firm stopped investing any of that money in late 2022 while continuing to raise it. The Justice Department laid out the mechanics in announcing the sentence.
What makes the case unusually stark is that the scheme kept running after regulators arrived. The Securities and Exchange Commission opened its investigation around March 2024, and even then Burkhalter and others solicited tens of millions of dollars more before the agency obtained an emergency asset freeze that August and a receiver was installed over the company. Guaranteed double-digit returns paid on a fixed schedule are the oldest warning sign in investment fraud, and Drive Planning wrapped that promise in the language of real estate to make it feel concrete.
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The retirement money Burkhalter told investors to tap
The detail that lands hardest for older savers is where the money came from. Prosecutors said Burkhalter did not simply accept whatever cash investors had spare; he encouraged them to deplete their children’s college funds, take early distributions from retirement accounts, and borrow significant sums at high interest to put more into REAL. The SEC’s complaint made the same allegation, describing a sales approach that urged clients to tap savings, retirement accounts, and lines of credit.
That instruction turned an investment loss into a compounding one. An early retirement withdrawal can trigger taxes and penalties on top of the money handed over, and a line of credit opened to invest keeps charging interest long after the underlying “investment” has vanished. A retiree who moved a chunk of an IRA into a guaranteed 10% product was not risking spare income; they were risking the balance meant to carry them through a decade or more of expenses, often with no paycheck left to rebuild it.
The money did not go into real estate. According to the government, Burkhalter spent roughly $2 million on a yacht, about $2.1 million on a luxury condo in Cabo San Lucas, and around $800,000 on vehicles that included a Prevost motorcoach and two 2024 Land Rovers, along with millions more on private jet charters and hundreds of thousands on clothing and jewelry. Those are the assets a court-appointed receiver is now trying to sell so that some portion of the loss can be returned to the people who funded the lifestyle.
What victims can expect to recover
The restitution figure and the loss figure do not match, and the gap is the real story for victims. Judge Tiffany R. Johnson ordered Burkhalter to pay $233,777,763.82 in restitution against a scheme that took in about $380 million, and even that court-ordered number is a claim on paper rather than cash in hand. Recovery now depends on what receiver Kenneth Murena can seize and liquidate, and seized assets in these cases rarely cover the full amount because so much is already spent.
Burkhalter was not the only one sentenced. Earlier the same week, the firm’s chief operating officer, David Bradford, received four years and three months after pleading guilty to conspiracy, and chief administrative officer Julie Edwards received two years for laundering scheme proceeds, with their own smaller restitution orders. The sentences closed the criminal case against the company’s leadership, though the civil receivership that controls the money runs on its own separate track.
For anyone weighing a similar pitch, the case is a checklist of what to avoid: a guaranteed return paid like clockwork, pressure to move retirement money or borrow to invest, and collateral that cannot be independently verified. Legitimate investments do not promise 10% every quarter, and no honest adviser tells a retiree to raid an IRA to buy in.
The harder lesson is about timing. The fraud ran for nearly four years, kept taking money after regulators were already circling, and only stopped when a court froze the accounts. By then the yacht was bought and much of the cash was gone. A 20-year sentence answers the demand for accountability, but it does not refill the retirement accounts that were emptied on the promise of a number that was never real.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed against primary sources by The Money Overview editorial team.
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