Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Billion Dollar Solar Panel Scam - The Jeff Carpoff story

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

Jeff Carpoff, a former auto mechanic from California, founded DC Solar in 2008, promoting it as a manufacturer of mobile solar generators (MSGs) designed to provide emergency power for applications like cellphone towers and sporting events. Between 2011 and 2018, Carpoff and his associates solicited approximately millions from investors, enticing them with promises of federal solar tax credits and lease revenues from the MSGs. However, the company produced fewer than half of the 17,000 units it claimed, and the purported lease revenues were largely fabricated. Instead, DC Solar operated as a Ponzi scheme, using funds from new investors to pay returns to earlier ones.

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He's behind on his mortgage. Creditors are suing. He's even tried being a drug dealer, but that fails too. But then, one day in 2008, he's talking to his name. about solar panels. And through that conversation, he gets a legitimately good idea. What if he could bolt the solar panels to a trailer so you'd have like a mobile power source? It would look like this, just a trailer with solar panels on it. And so he builds it using information he found on Google.

And he creates a generator that's just a trailer with solar panels attached, and he applies for a patent. Like this could be a billion dollar idea! Here's the problem with this billion dollars. billion dollar idea though. Jeff, the ex-meth addict, doesn't really know what he's doing. He builds this mobile generator thing and, you know, it looks good, but it only kind of works sometimes. Like they break down all the time if you can even get them working at all. But whatever, that isn't going to stop him. He starts a company called DC Solar. He is going to sell these things.

And so he gets a business loan and he hires a company to market his invention. And all this works and he starts to get a bit of traction. A couple of years later in 2010, Jeff finally hits the jackpot. He discovers something that's going to change his entire business. A few years before this, the Bush administration had enacted a program that gives big tax credits to big corporations who invest in green energy, aka solar power and stuff. So Jeff creates a business model that allows these companies to invest in the generators he built so that they can get a tax break. And big corporations, they're greedy as hell. Like, they don't care that his janky-ass generators barely function.

They just want to purchase or lease them so that the government will give them a tax credit. What that means is Jeff can continue to make a subpar product that barely works and make a ton of money off of it. And that's exactly what he does. and he gets a bunch of contracts going, and by 2011, he gets a life-changing deal. Sherman Williams, the huge paint company, leases $29 million worth of generators from him.

And again, they don't even want the generators. They just want the tax credit. So Jeff, he doesn't have to do shit, and he just made $29 million. Now, at this point, he could use some of this new money to go out and hire, like, a bunch of engineers, to make his generators actually function. But, of course, he's not going to do that.

Instead, he goes and spends the money on some dumb shit. But we'll get to that. Now, as part of his deal with Sherman Williams, they get to inspect the generators for quality, which Jeff's generators, they're not going to pass inspection. Come on, they suck. So he pulls this whole scheme where he tells his team to put the working generators at the front of the line

and they put the busted-ass ones that don't work at the back of the line. so that when Sherman Williams inspects them, it looks like they all work great. But whatever, all these companies want is the tax credit anyway, so no one suspects Jeff is doing anything shady, and he's going to coast on this success for a while. But here's the thing, though, all this money he's making, it ends up not being enough. His shady-ass business is going to crash unless he gets more.

So he turns his solar panel trailer business model into a big, scheme where he uses the new investors money to pay off the old investors leases. And this works for him too. In fact, it works really well. And over the next three years, he sells 1,200 of his shi generators for $150,000 a piece, making him $174 million, a lot of which feeds back into his Ponzi scheme. And by 2014, a regional bank wants to buy millions of dollars worth of generators from him. But in order to do that, he needs to fake a contract with T-Mobile. So he ends up faking a contract with T-Mobile. It's all fraud.

But again, this works. And he keeps getting more and more contracts. He gets a contract with International Speedway Corporation for $150 million. He gets a contract with GEICO for $1.2 billion. dollars. One point two billion dollars. So now Jeff's company, DC Solar, is a billion dollar company, propped up by a Ponzi scheme based on a product that doesn't even really work. And it's all because these fucking corporations aren't looking into his product because they just want those sweet, sweet tax credits. So what does Jeff do now that he has a billion dollar company? Well, of course, he

buys himself a bunch of shit. Of course. Like he buys a bunch of houses like this house for $1.4 million. This house for $2.5 million. These two condos for almost $4 million. This whole ass apartment building for $3.5 million. Dude buys 32 properties. And not only that, he buys 150 classic and luxury cars. 150. What do you even do with that many cars? He also buys a whole Semi-Pro baseball team. He also sponsors a car in NASCAR. Like, that's his company right there, D.C. Solar. He also throws these crazy expensive company Christmas parties for his employees,

paying top dollar for live performances. He even gets rapper singer Pitbull to headline one of these parties. Like, here's a picture of Mr. Worldwide himself performing at one of these parties. But here's the craziest part of Jeff's scams. Even the U.S. government falls for it. In 2016, the Transportation Secretary chooses Jeff's company for some government contract that they're working on. And I don't know how Jeff plans on pulling this scheme off, considering his generators don't really work, but I don't know, I guess he's going to try. Regardless, bro has everyone fooled.

And if that isn't bad enough, Jeff makes it even worse. He decides to start lying and faking the amount of generators he has. Because remember, when these companies buy them, they aren't checking to see if the generators work or if they even. exist. They just want the tax credits. So these busted-ass generators are just sitting in Jeff's warehouse, I guess. And in 2017, he only has 6,000 generators available, but he sells 17,000. So now he's selling inventory that, like, doesn't even exist. But I guess it doesn't really matter because dude has a billion dollar company and more cars than he could ever drive, and he even has the government fooled.

Until. Okay, here's the thing about Jeff and his company. Jeff obviously doesn't work alone. His company's fully staffed. Like, he has employees. And his employees can see that the company is selling generators. Yet it has stopped building generators. So how are they selling something that doesn't exist?

And at some point, one of their employees quits. And they go straight to the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, and they report Jeff and the company. So of course, the SEC starts investigating and eventually the FBI gets involved. And in 2018, boom, a ton of federal agents swarm his company headquarters while a SWAT team busts into his home and bam, they arrest him. Here's a picture of him in real life. A Northern California couple pleading guilty to a massive Ponzi scheme.

So over eight years and 34 deals, he scammed customers out of almost a billion dollars. And for that, he takes a plea deal and he's sentenced to 30 years in prison. And his wife is actually involved too, and she gets sentenced to 11 years in prison. And what's crazy is one of Jeff's very last tweets is him celebrating Pitbull, of all people, playing at one of his parties.