A top Democrat donor and anti-poverty activist has agreed to plead guilty to a nearly $250 million fraud scheme. Joe Sanberg, who co-founded the online financial services company Aspiration Partners, will admit to defrauding investors. “For years, Joseph Sanberg used his position at Aspiration to deceive investors and lenders for his own benefit, causing his victims over $248 million in losses,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “The Criminal Division is committed to pursuing, charging, and convicting fraudsters like Sanberg, who cause significant harm to their victims and undermine our financial institutions,” he added. “A billionaire ‘anti-poverty activist’ fraudulently enriched himself with a ‘carbon credit’ scheme where companies would pay for ESG indulgences and he’d plant trees in Africa, the DOJ said,” The Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak said. “The company’s financials were fake, Joe Sanberg admitted,” he added. How it started / how it's going A billionaire "anti-poverty activist" fraudulently enriched himself with a "carbon credit" scheme where companies would pay for ESG indulgences and he'd plant trees in Africa, the DOJ said. The company's financials were fake, Joe Sanberg admitted pic.twitter.com/4TRS1LPltM — Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) August 22, 2025 More from The Daily Wire: Sanberg and other high-profile Democrats started the carbon-credit platform and online banking app Aspiration Partners Inc., promising to plant trees and not invest in polluting industries. Its motto was “clean rich is the new filthy rich.” It was once a star of the “environmental, social, and governance (ESG)” movement that blended corporate finance with leftist politics, and counted actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. as investors. But it was instead a scheme as corrupt as any on Wall Street, with Sanberg concocting fake customers for his tree-planting services to try to dupe investors into a $2 billion valuation, the Department of Justice said. Sanberg faces up to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud, according to the Department of Justice. Sanberg is a key player in California politics, a Gavin Newsom donor who personally spent $11 million backing a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour. Voters blocked the initiative by one percentage point in 2024. A 2019 Atlantic story headlined, “Joe Sanberg Dares Trump to Call Him a Socialist,” said “the multimillionaire investor says the Democrats’ progressive agenda is best for jobs and economic growth.” But “this so-called ‘anti-poverty’ activist has admitted to being nothing more than a self-serving fraudster, by seeking to enrich himself by defrauding lenders and investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Bill Essayli, the Acting U.S. Attorney of the Central District of California. “Joe Sanberg, the California Dem behind the state’s expansion of welfare to illegal immigrants & ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $18, was arrested today on suspicion of fraud related to his ‘green’ finance company, marketed as a more moral alternative to Wall Street,” Rosiak said earlier this year. Joe Sanberg, the California Dem behind the state's expansion of welfare to illegal immigrants & ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $18, was arrested today on suspicion of fraud related to his "green" finance company, marketed as a more moral alternative to Wall Street pic.twitter.com/ddiGRtyU5V — Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) March 4, 2025 The Los Angeles Times provided further info: Joe Sanberg, 46, of Orange will enter his plea in the coming weeks in L.A. federal court to two counts of wire fraud, felonies that each carry a sentence of up to 20 years behind bars, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Ibrahim AlHusseini, 51, of Venice, a former Aspiration board member and investor, pleaded guilty in March to wire fraud for falsifying documents that aided in the scheme, federal prosecutors said. Prosecutors said Sanberg and AlHusseini fraudulently obtained $145 million in loans several years ago from two lenders by pledging shares of Sanberg’s Aspiration stock. Sanberg and AlHusseini also falsified AlHusseini’s bank and brokerage statements to inflate AlHusseini’s assets by tens of millions of dollars to secure the loans, court papers show. Beginning in 2021, Sanberg also defrauded Aspiration’s investors by concealing that he was the source of certain revenue recognized by the company, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Court documents also state that Sanberg personally recruited companies and individuals to sign letters of intent with Aspiration in which they committed to pay tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg used legal entities under his control to conceal that these payments came from himself rather than from customers. He also instructed Aspiration employees not to contact the customers that he had recruited to conceal his scheme, prosecutors stated.