In the Courts

According to Merrill's plea agreement, the scheme, which operated from 2013 through September 2018, involved the use of fictitious sales agreements and other falsified documents, including quarterly reports and tax returns, provided by a co-conspirator Jay Ledford, 55, to induce investors to invest in consumer debt portfolios with Merrill's companies: Delmarva Capital and Global Credit Recovery. Merrill and Ledford, a certified accountant with offices in Texas, had been long term friends since meeting in 1999 before commencing the scheme in 2013. In the first year of the scheme, Merrill raised over $4 million from investors, far exceeding the $186,000 brought in by Ledford, at which point they agreed that Merrill would assume the "front man" sales role given his superior sales ability. Ledford continued to supply Merrill with the fictitious documents needed to lend credibility to the transactions, eventually bringing in a third co-conspirator in 2017, Cameron Jezierski, 28, to assist.

Merrill, assisted by Ledford and Jezierski, falsely represented to investors that he would use their money to purchase debt portfolios of commensurate value to the investment made before collecting on the debts or "flipping" the portfolios for profit to other third-party debt buyers. In fact, in most cases Merrill did not use the investments to buy any portfolios, did not manage, sell or collect on portfolios, and did not pay net profits back to investors as claimed. The vast majority of the purported "profits" returned to investors were paid from funds provided by other investors. Investors who requested additional due diligence were provided with false collection reports, false bank statements and false merchant account statements.