Brian Anthony Bjork, Ponzi Scheme, Texas 2023

Defendant Name, Crime, State Year

Brian Anthony Bjork, Ponzi Scheme, Texas 2023

HOUSTON – In a shocking turn of events, 43-year-old Brian Anthony Bjork, a former employee of deceased Friendswood financial advisor David Salinas, has pleaded guilty to running his own Ponzi scheme, defrauding nearly a dozen investors out of over $1 million.

Bjork, who was a registered investment advisor formerly employed at J. David Financial Group and later Select Asset Management (SAM), used his position of trust to perpetrate the scheme. He admitted to creating fictitious ‘Consolidated Statements’ to trick investors into believing he had made certain investments when in fact he had not.

The investigation revealed that Bjork selected his victims from current and former family members, as well as individuals he knew personally and who were not likely to speak to Salinas about their investments. He would also use his position as treasurer of the Houston Athletics Foundation (HAF) to write checks disguised as bond investments with J. David Financial.

Bjork’s scheme came to light after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began investigating SAM for certain disclosure irregularities in connection with its lending funds. As the investigation progressed, the SEC learned that Salinas, through J. David Financial, had been offering corporate bonds that Salinas was purportedly able to purchase in bulk at a discount.

However, the SEC became troubled that there was little to no evidence of the actual purchase of the bonds and that Bjork was unable to provide information concerning the entity purportedly serving as the custodian for the bonds. Salinas ultimately took his own life by shooting himself at his home in Friendswood on July 17, 2011.

The investigation of this unusual ‘scam within a scam’ revealed that Bjork opened a Bank of America account under the name ‘Brian A Bjork dba: J David Financial Group’ for the purpose of defrauding a subset of the J. David Financial investors. He was the sole signatory on this account and used it to convert the funds to his own use.

With respect to the funds Bjork fraudulently obtained from HAF, the investigation revealed that he used his position as treasurer and signatory on HAF’s bank account to simply write checks disguised as bond investments with J. David Financial. Bjork would sign the checks as HAF’s Treasurer, forge the signature of any other individuals required to sign checks on the HAF account and then use the funds for his own personal gain.

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