Federal prosecutors charge Tiburon man in $103M Pacific Private collapse

Mark Hanf of Tiburon, founder and former CEO of Novato-based Pacific Private Money — seen here shuttered in March — has been charged with charged in federal court with money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (Francisco Martinez archive / The Ark 2026)

A Tiburon man whose Novato lending firm took in about $103 million from investors before collapsing now faces federal fraud charges and has settled a case brought by securities regulators.

The charges against Mark Hanf come six months after The Ark reported that the Marin County District Attorney’s Office was fielding complaints from investors who could not get their money out.

Hanf, 66, the founder and former chief executive of Pacific Private Money, appeared in federal court in San Francisco on Sept. 1 and pleaded not guilty. So did Hoai-Nam Chu Phan, 58, of Novato, the former chief operating officer of Pacific Private Money Inc., the group’s operating company. Both are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Hanf also faces a count of engaging in monetary transactions in criminally derived property, a money-laundering charge.

They settled the civil case the same day it was filed, each signing a consent to a judgment that would bar him permanently from the securities business. What they will owe has not been set.

A developer’s death

The criminal charging document traces the collapse to a single death. Pacific Private Money raised investor capital to make loans secured by real property, paying members fixed distributions of about 6% to 10% a year and telling them they could take their principal back within 30 days without penalty. In 2021, prosecutors say, the developer who owed the most on loans from the firm’s original fund died. The document identifies him only as Developer-1. His loans were not being repaid, and the projects securing them were distressed and unlikely to cover what was owed.

That gutted the fund’s finances, prosecutors say, and Hanf and Phan did not tell investors the extent of the losses. By December 2021 the fund could not cover its expenses, its distributions and its redemptions out of revenue. On Dec. 7, 2021, the two began moving money between the Pacific Private funds to close the gap, booking the transfers as loans that accrued interest while little or no interest was actually paid. Money raised for one fund went out as distributions and redemptions to investors in another. Prosecutors put the total raised at about $103 million from more than 175 investors between December 2021 and December 2025.

“As alleged, these defendants falsely assured investors that Pacific Private Money was successful and profitable, knowing that continued losses had turned it into a Ponzi scheme,” U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian said in a statement.

The two also showed at least one investor manipulated “loan tapes” — the schedules of loans a fund holds — to keep him from pulling his money out, prosecutors allege. They told a corporate investor the funds still owned loan assets that had already been sold.

Hanf, meanwhile, was moving investor money out to two companies he owned that were not part of Pacific Private, prosecutors allege: Hanf Capital LLC and Pacific Realty Development I LLC. He spent it on credit-card bills, home mortgage payments and speculative investments unrelated to real estate.

The money-laundering count rests on one such payment: $12,162.36 paid electronically from a Wells Fargo checking account on May 5, 2025, to cover a month’s mortgage. Prosecutors are also seeking forfeiture of any property traceable to the alleged fraud.

What investors were told

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s complaint, filed Sept. 1, covers a narrower slice of the same conduct and describes it in more detail. It concerns two funds: Pacific Private Money Fund I, whose biggest borrower died in 2021, and the Pacific Freedom Fund, which Hanf launched in 2020. Together they raised more than $80 million from about 190 investors between December 2021 and November 2025, most of them ordinary retail investors and many of them retired. The commission alleges Hanf misappropriated at least $7 million.

The totals across the cases are not in conflict. Each agency measures a different window and a different set of entities.

Investors were told their money would originate or buy loans secured by real estate and that they would earn a fixed or preferred rate of return. In a February 2023 email quoted in the complaint, Hanf wrote that the Freedom Fund “pays 9% on deposits over $1 million (slightly less on lower amounts), with 30-day liquidity and monthly distributions.” At an in-person meeting in December 2024 he told potential investors they would get 9% and that he would never go below 6%.

By August 2022, according to the complaint, the older fund had stopped originating new real-estate loans altogether.

It kept selling shares to new investors for three more years.

By then the Freedom Fund’s largest category of loans was unsecured lending to other Pacific Private entities, the SEC says — money moved among Hanf’s own companies and still largely unpaid. In a 2024 webinar titled “How Investors Earn Consistent Income from Short-Term Real Estate Bridge Loans,” Phan walked through three example loans, all secured by real estate and all to strong borrowers. In another that year Hanf said the funds had delivered “above-market returns, reliable above-market returns regardless of market cycle,” and showed a chart of returns rising every year from 2020 to 2023.

Hanf directed the creation of false account statements and false tax forms sent to investors, the SEC alleges, showing income the funds had not earned.

The $7 million went to buy and build real estate and to pay the taxes and debt on it, the commission says. It also went to increase his own stake in a new Pacific Private fund, to invest in a purported crypto venture and to fund the purse of a boxing match, along with his mortgage and credit cards.

The collapse

By fall 2025 the two funds were running out of money to pay investors even with new investor money coming in. Hanf and Phan kept a spreadsheet of unfilled redemption requests, according to the complaint, and when new capital arrived they discussed which investors to pay first, giving priority to the ones most likely to complain.

“This alleged scheme began to unravel in the fall of 2025 as numerous investors demanded to withdraw their money and the defendants did not have sufficient funds to satisfy those requests,” said Jason Lee, associate director of the SEC’s San Francisco office.

In October, both funds stopped paying distributions and redemptions entirely. In December the company hired a chief restructuring officer. Investors still had nearly $121 million outstanding in the two funds; by February, the SEC says, recoverable assets were estimated at less than $17 million.

That is less than 15 cents on the dollar.

The settlement

Hanf and Phan each signed a consent the day the SEC sued, and the commission asked the court to enter judgment against both. The judgments would permanently bar each man from violating the antifraud provisions of the securities laws. They would also bar him from taking part, directly or through any company he owns, in the issuance, purchase, offer or sale of any security, though he could still trade in his own personal accounts. A judge had not signed them as of The Ark’s press time.

The consents contain no admission of wrongdoing. But both men agreed that when the commission comes back to ask for money, they cannot argue they did not violate the securities laws and that the complaint’s allegations are to be treated as true. Hanf faces disgorgement of his gains, interest on them and a civil penalty; the interest runs from no earlier than Dec. 31, 2021. Phan faces a penalty alone. The court will set the amounts later, and any penalty may be routed back to investors.

Both also stipulated that the allegations are true for bankruptcy purposes — which means whatever they end up owing cannot be wiped out in a personal bankruptcy. Both gave up the right to appeal.

But none of it touches the criminal case. The consents resolve only the SEC’s claims, and neither man was promised anything about what the U.S. attorney does next.

In court

Both men waived indictment. They were charged instead by information — a charging document filed by prosecutors rather than voted out by a grand jury, which a defendant can accept only by giving up the right to be indicted. It was filed Aug. 31 as U.S. v. Hanf.

Both men had signed their waivers days before the charges were filed, Phan on Aug. 24 and Hanf on Aug. 26. Hanf is represented by Shaneeda Jaffer and Phan by Sharon Frase. The Ark sent written questions to both attorneys Sept. 2; neither had responded by press time.

Magistrate Judge Lisa J. Cisneros released each man on a $250,000 unsecured bond, meaning no money changes hands unless a condition of release is broken. Neither was taken into custody; both were ordered to report to pretrial services and the U.S. Marshals Service the same day for processing.

Both are due back before U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley for change-of-plea hearings, Phan at 10 a.m. Sept. 23 and Hanf at 10 a.m. Sept. 30. A change-of-plea hearing is where a defendant who has already been arraigned enters a new plea, typically guilty under an agreement with prosecutors. Both sides stipulated to excluding the time until those dates under the Speedy Trial Act.

If convicted, each faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on the conspiracy count, and Hanf 10 more on the money-laundering count. Maximum terms are rarely imposed; a sentence would be set by the judge after weighing the federal sentencing guidelines.

A year of warnings

The federal counts follow six months of state and civil action. The SEC had notified Pacific Private of a formal investigation in August 2025, court records show — months before the collapse became public.

California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation had suspended Pacific Private’s state lending license for 30 days on March 16, a week after company representatives told regulators the firm had hit a severe liquidity crunch in December. On April 6 the department revoked the license outright, superseding the suspension, after the company failed to file a required annual report. On May 4 it went further, ordering Hanf, Phan and six Pacific Private entities to stop selling securities in California through untrue or misleading statements. That order found they had raised at least $139 million from more than 400 investors across five funds beginning in 2013.

It also found the firm had withheld three pieces of material history from investors: Hanf’s 2007 Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharge; a 2014 state action that suspended both his broker license and the company’s corporate license, after a 2012 audit found he had commingled client money in non-trust accounts; and the 2022 revocation of a lending license held by Pacific Mortgage Capital LLC, an affiliate he co-owned and managed. The state order reached only sales made through false statements; the bar the SEC is asking for would keep both men out of the securities business altogether.

At least six civil suits have been filed since January, among them an April 8 federal racketeering complaint alleging $75.8 million in investor money was routed to Hanf-controlled entities. U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, wrote April 1 to the chairman of the SEC and the director of the FBI, urging them to investigate Hanf and to seek a court-supervised receiver to protect what was left. His constituents who had come forward, he wrote, were “not wealthy individuals” but people who had invested their life savings or retirement funds.

Thirteen Pacific Private Money entities filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection June 16 in the Northern District of California, according to a notice on the firm’s website. Bill Brinkman of Jigsaw Advisors LLC, the chief restructuring officer, has told account holders that net recoveries would be a fraction of investors’ total capital. Investors can reach the court-appointed claims agent at veritaglobal.net/ppm.

The FBI is taking information from investors at forms.fbi.gov, and investors have organized a coordination site at pacificprivatemoneyinvestors.com.

Reach Executive Editor Kevin Hessel at 415-435-2652.