US federal authorities have arrested and indicted a filmmaker, accusing him of spending $11 million given by Netflix to gamble on stocks and crypto instead of using it to finance a science fiction TV show.
The Department of Justice said in an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan federal court on March 18 that it had charged Carl Erik Rinsch with fraud and money laundering, and he could face upward of 20 years in prison.
The DOJ alleged that Netflix, which wasn’t named in the complaint, gave Rinsch $11 million in March 2020 to finance the storyboarding, pay actors and edit footage for the sci-fi TV show “White Horse” — later renamed “Conquest.”
Instead, prosecutors allege that Rinsch moved about $10.5 million of the funds into a brokerage account where he “made a number of extremely risky” trades, including call options on a biopharmaceutical company, which lost him over