A federal judge in Dallas sentenced Charles Carrier, 67, to 188 months in prison — more than 15 years — for running a real estate investment fraud that prosecutors say carried $39,514,300 in intended losses. The court also ordered Carrier to pay $24,416,911.16 in restitution to more than 80 investors, many of them retirees and small business owners who trusted him to secure their money with real property. The sentence, announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, closes a case built on a scheme prosecutors say ran from 2018 through 2024.
Carrier’s pitch to investors centered on a specific legal protection: a first-position lien, the senior claim on a property that would put an investor at the front of the line for repayment if a deal went bad. Prosecutors say he rarely delivered on that promise, and the gap between what he sold and what he actually recorded is what turned an investment fund into a federal fraud case.
The First-Position Lien Promise Carrier Broke
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, Carrier told investors their money would go toward acquiring and renovating residential properties, secured by deeds of trust recorded in their favor. Prosecutors say he routinely failed to record those promised deeds, then issued multiple, competing liens against the same properties without telling the investors already holding a stake in them. In some cases, Carrier sold properties outright without notifying the investors whose money was supposedly tied to them, and used forged or unauthorized lien releases to clear the way for those sales. The overlapping, undisclosed claims meant that when the properties changed hands or lost value, more than one investor could be left with a worthless piece of paper.
A properly recorded first-position deed of trust is normally what makes private real estate lending attractive to investors who want yield above what a bank savings account or a certificate of deposit pays without taking on stock-market volatility: if a borrower defaults, the lienholder in first position is repaid from the sale of the property before anyone else has a claim on the proceeds. That structure only works if the lien is actually recorded and no competing claim is layered on top of it later. Prosecutors say Carrier’s use of forged and unauthorized lien releases defeated the entire premise, because a title search that should have caught a second, undisclosed lien would instead show the property as clear…