A 58-year-old California man who starred in a renovation competition series for HGTV was sentenced to serve four years behind bars after being convicted of real estate fraud, prosecutors announced Tuesday.
Charles “Todd” Hill was also ordered to pay back restitution to the tune of $9.4 million, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office said in a news release.
After being indicted in 2019, Hill was convicted of committing “multiple fraud schemes” last September after he admitted to “grand theft against all victims and admitted the aggravated white-collar enhancements,” prosecutors said.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Some see the huge amount of money in Silicon Valley real estate as a business opportunity,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said. “Others, unfortunately, see it as a criminal opportunity – and we will hold those people strictly accountable.”
More than a decade ago, Hill starred on the sole season of Flip It to Win It, described on HGTV’s website as “a high-stakes hour” in which “expert flippers bid against each other for abandoned houses sight unseen” and work to bring them to market. Hill was “Mr. Flip It” on the show, according to The Mercury News, which described him in a 2014 article as “a hard-charging and charismatic developer.”
That year, just months after Flip It to Win It aired, Hill was sued by his former top investor, who alleged that the Los Gatos native had stiffed him out of money meant for renovations. Max Keech said in his civil suit that he’d once funded more than 90 percent of Hill’s flipping endeavors, but that Hill had taken “money for work that was never performed,” cooked the books, and pocketed the profits, according to the News.
“I made a critical mistake not looking over his shoulder,” Keech told the News at the time. “My money made him a celebrity. We started this before there was a TV show.”
Hill denied the allegations, but they caused his former partner on Flip It to Win It to denounce him and break off their relationship. It was not immediately clear on Tuesday whether Keech’s lawsuit was ongoing. An attorney for Hill said in 2014 that he expected the matter to be resolved in private arbitration.
The reality star was arrested in early 2018 after a criminal fraud investigation by the district attorney’s office, according to news reports at the time.
“There are allegations that he took more than $200,000 from each of four victims,” Christine Garcia-Sen, then the Santa Clara district attorney, said after his arrest. “So, there is an aggravated white collar crime enhancement that basically means there is a pattern of crime involving the taking of more than $500,000.”
Garcia-Sen explained that, between March 2013 and July 2014, Hill had “a business where he was buying homes and hiring contractors to fix them up for profit.
“He started losing money and began manipulating the books to make it appear profitable. Then, he created a new company and transferred assets from the other company to attract new investors,” she said, according to The Mercury News.
As the case against Hill progressed, prosecutors found a total of 11 victims who had fallen prey to Hill’s machinations, they said on Tuesday. That included at least one Ponzi scheme, in which Hill took “an investor’s money budgeted to buy homes and, instead, used it to live lavishly.” To hide the theft, they said, he created false balance sheets and got loans using fraudulent information.
Hill also laundered his ill-gotten gains and splurged on “a rented apartment in San Francisco, as well as hotels, vacations, and luxury cars,” prosecutors said.
After Tuesday’s sentencing hearing, during which a number of victims testified they were still “suffering financial and professional damages,” according to prosecutors, Hill was immediately remanded into custody.
