Philly’s Jeremy Hare charged by feds for alleged $400K scam

By the time regulators banned him as a stockbroker in 2013, the telegenic Jeremy Hare had left behind a trail of upset investors who said Hare had churned their accounts to gain the trading fees.

The largest investor dispute was settled for $1.1 million.

A Florida attorney who specializes in investment-adviser disputes nationwide looked at Hare's record at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — 19 complaints over about a decade — and called him a "rogue broker." The attorney, Jeff Erez, added that Hare "was off the rails."

Blocked from a stock-trading career, Hare — who had appeared as an expert on the stock market on the Fox Business cable channel — reinvented himself as a high-end recruiter of financial executives and accountants through his new company, Apollo Search Partners LLC, with locations in Cherry Hill and One Liberty Place in September 2015.

Last month, the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey charged Hare for allegedly defrauding a California commercial financing firm of more than $400,000 between last June and August.

Hare, 47, appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Leda Dunn Wettre in Newark on June 21 and was released on bail. He faces a possible 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The federal criminal suit did not name the victimized company, but a civil suit filed the next day in federal court in San Francisco did. Flexible Funding Ltd., which funds payrolls for the temporary staffing industry, claimed breach of contract and fraud against Apollo and Hare.

Ronald L. Greenblatt, Hare's attorney in the criminal case, said that the case was a misunderstanding, a "civil dispute gone criminal, and we look forward to resolving it."

Greenblatt would not comment on Hare's problems with Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

According to the California federal suit, Flexible Funding CEO Steve Capper first met with Hare in Philadelphia on Nov. 26, 2016. Flexible Funding offers funds to term staffing companies such as Apollo until their client companies — or those that need the temp staffers — pay their invoices. Companies can borrow up to 90 percent of their invoices for 30 to 60 days, the suit says.

Hare convinced Flexible Funding that it could place high-level accounting and financing executives in jobs. Hare said he already had a database of candidates for those positions.

After "due diligence," the suit says, Flexible Funding approved Apollo on June 6, 2017, for funding, according to records. Flexible began wiring money to Hare and Apollo on June 20. There was constant communication between the commercial lender and Hare.

Polite but insistent, Hare emailed Flexible Funding on Aug. 8. "I look forward to the deposit later today. Thanks again in advance! You are a pleasure to work with!!"

Between June 20 and Aug. 15 of last year, Flexible Funding wired $411,838 to Apollo for staffing employees at the Results Cos., Harbor Linens, and Boyds LP, according to the suit. The money was not paid back.

On Aug. 24, John Villanueva, Flexible Funding's director of account services, told his colleagues by email that "it appears that Jeremy Hare is … providing us with bogus invoices."

According to the suit, a manager with Results Cos., which has a call center in Blue Bell, said the invoices through Apollo Search Partners were not valid. Officials from Harbor Linens and Boyds did not return calls from Flexible Funding, the suit says.

Catherine Schlomann Robertson, an attorney with the Pahl McCay firm in San Jose, which represents Flexible Funding, declined comment on the suit.

The website for Apollo Search Partners listed the company's new base as Marlton. No one answered the phone there on Wednesday.

In an interview with equities.com available online after he launched the company, Hare said that with Apollo Search Partners,  he "wanted to have something that was different, outside the box, a fun place to go to work, not filled with the drama that you have with some of the companies."

On Wall Street and in some recruiting companies, "it's like a shark tank," he said on the video, "and I am trying to build a wolf pack where we're together in a team harmony kind of place, rather than in a place that we want to eat each other."