Ex-chair of FCC broadband committee gets five years in prison for fraud

Between May 2015 and July 2017, Pierce engaged in a scheme to induce two New York-based investment companies to provide more than $270 million to construct the Quintillion System by providing them with eight forged broadband capacity sales contracts and related order forms under which Quintillion would obtain guaranteed revenue once the Quintillion System was built (the “Fake Revenue Agreements”). Pierce altered the contracts “to make them more favorable to Quintillion and, therefore, more appealing to investors than the genuine agreements,” the US Attorney’s office said. “When Quintillion and the investment companies ultimately discovered the fraud in mid-2017, they learned that the real contracts Pierce actually negotiated would generate only a fraction of the anticipated guaranteed revenue of the Fake Revenue Agreements she forged.”

Source: arstechnica.com