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FBI: Bolt Faked Documents to Claim $1.9M in Abandoned Stock

3 min read

Jim Bolt, the convicted felon whose “cancer research center” in Rogers was raided last week, used fake documents to claim and then sell almost $1.9 million worth of stock that the state of California had listed as unclaimed property, an FBI agent said in an affidavit filed Tuesday.

Bolt has not been charged with any crime.

The affidavit by Special Agent Robert F. Cessario was filed in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville in support of forefeiture claims on three pieces of real estate in Rogers that Bolt allegedly purchased early this year with the money he fraudulently received.

The properties, which U.S. Marshals have already taken control of, are:

  • 1222 W. Poplar St., the location of Situs Cancer Research Center, for which Bolt paid $660,626 on Jan. 28;
  • 1204 W. Poplar St., for which he paid $99,765 on Jan. 22; and
  • 303 S. Rife St., for which he paid $208,395 on Jan. 25.

Cessario’s affidavit describes a bold and complex scheme involving forged documents and faked notarization used as proof that a defunct California company, Pacific Financial Research Inc., had donated 162,745 shares of Interpublic Group of Companies (NYSE: IPG) to a predecessor of Situs before PFR ceased operations in 2006.

More: Read the FBI’s affidavit on Jim Bolt (PDF).

After submitting the documentation in December, according to the affidavit, Bolt gained control of the shares in January and promptly ordered them sold. A grand jury subpoena of Situs’ account at Liberty Bank — which Bolt had opened in 2010 — revealed that the proceeds of the stock sales had been received in three wire transfers:

  • $116,000 on Jan. 18;
  • $1,336,170 on Jan. 22; and
  • $440,000 on Jan. 24.

The bank account had contained only $10.50 as of Jan. 1, according to Cessario, and all but $14,310 of the $1.9 million that passed through the account that month came from the three wire transfers.

The FBI received a complaint about Bolt’s scheme in April from a company that managed retirement and investment portfolios, including PFR’s. The company was trying to track down PFR assets when it discovered that they had been claimed by Bolt some months earlier.

The raid last week included the seizure of property in addition to the three pieces of real estate — specifically, three cars, three vehicles used by Situs and five aircrafts.

Bolt, who is in his early 60s, was convicted in 1975 for impersonating a police officer. In 1982, he was convicted in federal court in Oklahoma on two counts of mail fraud and two counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank. In rejecting his appeal of the 1982 conviction, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Bolt as a “skilled draftsman and printer” and detailed his use of “fictitious checks” drafted “on a nonexistent bank account at the National Bank of Liberia.”

He was also convicted of theft in Washington County in 1992.

But he was acquitted of the most recent charges filed against him, a 2006 indictment for mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy related to attempts to raise capital for a different Rogers company, Shimoda-Atlantic, that claimed to have a promising treatment for cancer.

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