Solar company's outside counsel sentenced to over 11 years in prison for role in $1B Ponzi scheme
A lawyer for a California solar power company has been sentenced to 11 years and five months in prison after pleading guilty to fraud in connection to a $1 billion Ponzi scheme. (Image from Shutterstock)
A lawyer for a California solar power company has been sentenced to 11 years and five months in prison after pleading guilty to fraud in connection to a $1 billion Ponzi scheme.
The Associated Press reports that Ari Lauer, 61, outside counsel for Benicia, California-based DC Solar, was sentenced Monday.
According to a March 9 press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, Lauer had previously pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Dale A. Drozd of the Eastern District of California in October 2025 to all counts, which included conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud and multiple counts of bank fraud and wire fraud affecting a financial institution.
From 2011 to 2018, DC Solar sold solar generator units that were mounted on trailers and claimed that they could be an emergency power source for cellphone carriers, as well as provide lighting at outdoor venues. According to the AP, DC Solar executives started telling customers that they could buy the generators, lease them back to the company, and take advantage of federal tax credits. DC Solar would then turn around and resell them to other customers.
Prosecutors, however, claim that DC Solar sold more units than they actually produced and used fraudulent records to convince investors that their market was robust. According to prosecutors, DC Solar claimed to have 17,000 generators, but about 9,000 of those did not actually exist.
“Without the participation of Lauer, the DC Solar fraud scheme would never have been operational,” U.S. Attorney Eric Grant of the Eastern District of California said in a statement Monday, referring to the case as the “biggest criminal fraud scheme in the history of the Eastern District of California.”
“As the only attorney involved, he should have been the first person to recognize the fraud and stop it. Instead, he was the last person to accept responsibility, only doing so on the eve of trial,” Grant said.
“Ari Lauer intentionally used his position as an attorney to provide the illusion of legitimacy to DC Solar’s fraudulent scheme. He hid uncomfortable truths behind claims of confidentiality while profiting from the arrangement and mistakenly assumed that law enforcement would not catch on,” FBI Sacramento Special Agent in Charge Sid Patel said in a statement.
In November 2021, DC Solar founder Jeff Carpoff was sentenced to 30 years in prison and ordered to pay $790.6 million in restitution. Since then, several other executives and people connected to Carpoff have been sent to prison, as well, including Carpoff’s wife and his former chief financial officer.
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