‘Canada’s version of Bernie Madoff’:
The rise and fall of Greg Martel

The private investigator said he'd found Greg Martel, the B.C. mortgage broker accused of defrauding investors.

“He was hiding very well.” 

It was September 2023. Five months earlier, Martel, 47, had denied running a Ponzi scheme — one that was eventually called the biggest in B.C. history — and then fled.

Since then, financial investigators had been building a case that the former competitive hockey player turned entrepreneur had defrauded 930 investors of $317 million. 

Now, Martel’s assets had been frozen, and he’d been ordered into receivership and bankruptcy. A civil warrant for his arrest had already been issued in Canada, and would soon be issued in the U.S. 

There were rumours Martel was in Thailand, but Mike Green, the private investigator who’d tracked him down at the behest of former investors, said that wasn't true.

“You might think you know where he is, but you don’t.”

Green’s account is one of dozens of interviews with former employees, business partners and investors conducted by CBC News as part of a year-long investigation and co-production with the Tiny Foundation. 

It sheds new light on a story mostly told, until now, through official documents as Martel’s financial affairs wound their way through receivership. 

But who is Martel, the man with the apparently Midas touch?

And where has all this left all those who sank savings — small and large — into his promises of returns from a financial web that has since officially been deemed a “massive” Ponzi scheme?

Tammy Morse, of Mount Uniacke, N.S., lost around $40,000, and blames herself for encouraging her two children to invest with Martel. 

“There’s a lot of guilt.”

Out of the scores of documents and accounts by some of those closest to Martel as the money flowed to him — and then disappeared — a tangled tale of great ambition and tremendous loss emerges, along with questions of how justice may ultimately be meted out.  

“The story with Martel is way more complex than you think,” Green said.

From what is known about Greg Martel, his life seems to have begun unremarkably enough. He was born in 1976, grew up in Toronto and had that most Canadian of interests, playing hockey as a teen.  

By the early 2000s, he had pivoted into finance and got a job at Scotiabank.

Not long afterward, Martel relocated to B.C., where he met and married the daughter of a businessman and eventually settled in Victoria.

In 2006, Martel registered as a submortgage broker and by January of the following year, at age 30, he had joined The Mortgage Centre, a national mortgage broker organization.

By 2009, Martel had started his own Dominion Lending franchise called Harbour View Mortgages, a company known for its “great mortgage giveaway,” a lottery that paid one client’s mortgage for a year.

As those business endeavours grew, so did Martel’s reputation. In 2010, he was named one of the top 50 mortgage brokers in Canada, according to Canadian Mortgage Professional.

Even with the growing reputation, Martel was still finding his way, particularly as he was starting to be asked to give presentations.

“I was, at the time, scared of public speaking,” Martel told the podcast Hustle Inspires Hustle in 2021. 

In the same interview, Martel said he searched for world-class speakers, and found Tony Robbins, later attending a four-day training program with him in San Diego, Calif. 

Martel subsequently enrolled in Robbins’s “platinum partnership” course — an $85,000-a-year networking program. 

“Before I met him, I was kind of like that big fish in the pond,” Martel told another podcast, COSIGN Conversations, in 2021. “And after … I was like a minnow in the ocean.”

In Martel’s business world, change became something of a constant. In 2013, he renamed Harbour View Mortgages, with the company becoming Zilla Mortgage Corp. 

The newly named company compiled lending rates of financial institutions in one place, making it convenient for consumers to find the cheapest available mortgage. 

On the side, under the name Zilla Capital, Martel borrowed money from investors, loaned it to developers and returned the money with interest weeks or months later. Investors believed they were funding projects such as condominiums and multi-family homes across Canada. 

Yet as far back as 2016, Dawn Zapp, an investor in B.C., had concerns about Zilla Capital.

Zapp read an article about Ontario investors who were suing owners of a development company accused of operating a syndicated mortgage scam. Zapp emailed Martel asking if he was involved in something similar. 

“God no,” Martel responded. 

Despite the denial, Zapp said, in hindsight, she believed her money was being used to fund Martel’s other businesses. 

The owners of the syndicated mortgage company in Ontario were eventually charged with fraud. (Their case remains before the courts.)
 

Questions from outside Martel’s mortgage world also began to emerge. 

In 2017, two provincial regulators, the B.C. Financial Services Authority and B.C. Securities Commission, received inquiries from someone wanting to know if Zilla Capital was a scam, according to the Vancouver Province.

They investigated but found “no breach of requirements under the Mortgage Brokers Act,” the Province reported.

A business partner of Martel, Garrick Delafuente, said he believed Martel told people he would secure their loan by putting a lien on the borrower’s property if the borrower defaulted on payment. 

“I’m sure some people asked to be on title, and so he had to have some sort of rebuttal for that,” said Delafuente. 

Martel had his own phrase for it, according to investors: All deals were backed by his “personal guarantee.”

Around the same time, Martel rebranded Zilla Mortgage as My Mortgage Auction Corp. (MMAC), which did business as Shop Your Own Mortgage (SYOM). 

MMAC used investor money to fund bridge loans for real estate developers, or so Martel claimed.

Investors logged onto a personalized “portal,” and saw what they believed were investments that appeared to be maturing. They also saw whatever new “opportunities” Martel was offering.

Many of the more than a dozen Martel investors interviewed by the CBC described hearing about MMAC through someone else, and doing some degree of due diligence.

“I looked on his website. There was nothing shady,” said Tammy Morse.

“He coached his kid’s hockey team, he did different kinds of things in his community,” said another investor, Linda Brooks, of Penticton, B.C.

“It seemed legit,” U.S. investor Kathy Julien said, noting she could view the properties Martel claimed her money was funding on the investor portal.

In hindsight, Julien identified one possible red flag. She was told investors were supposed to have a net worth of at least $1 million.

“They never did ask to see any proof of that, ever.”

WATCH | Panic sets in for investors in 2023:

Around mid-2017, Martel moved to Nevada, where SYOM was licensed to broker with banks. 

He lived in Henderson, a city about 30 kilometres from the Las Vegas Strip, according to Delafuente.  

A recent graduate of the University of Las Vegas, Delefuente was 22 when he was hired by Martel that spring as a loan officer. Despite the 20-year age gap, Martel struck him as “cool, nice,” and a “funny guy.”

Delafuente, who’d worked at a Ford dealership and racetrack, was intrigued by Martel’s special edition Mercedes, which wasn’t available in the U.S., and was soon teaching his boss about cars. 

“We had a lot of common interests.” 

Believing they would be more successful brokering loans rather than compiling various lenders’ rates in one place, Delafuente said they moved in January 2019 to Irvine, Calif., where some of their non-bank lenders were based. 

Martel started Delafuente on a $60,000-a-year salary, was financially generous and promised a piece of whatever they built. He also got to know Delafuente’s family.

In January 2020, Martel and Delafuente resettled in Newport Beach. 

While Martel was away from the house, someone stole his brand-new Maserati, Martel told a YouTuber in 2021.

Police recovered the vehicle, which was damaged but not enough to be written off. According to podcast interviews, Martel decided to take the loss, trade it in and lease an even more expensive 458 Ferrari, which retails for around $250,000 US.

Delafuente said Martel rented the vehicle out on Turo, a peer-to-peer marketplace for vehicle owners and renters, and made back the money he lost on the Maserati. 

With Delafuente’s help, he leased another half-dozen vehicles, including a Porsche 911 and two Mercedes G-Wagons, and was soon profiting $20,000 to $30,000 US a month, according to Delafuente. 

“It was growing so fast,” Delafuente said. “We were like: ‘We should just do it ourselves.’”

In order to create a viable business, Delafuente said they knew they needed to offer insurance, so Delafuente began calling providers. “I got told no by every insurance company in the book.”

Finally, a Fairfax Financial subsidiary called Crum & Forster agreed to work with them. 

Some of the same engineers who worked on Martel’s mortgage software were tasked with making an app. SHAiR Your Car, also known as carSHAiR , launched in February 2020.

Martel described SHAiR as a “financial literacy” company that taught people how to turn liabilities into assets. He claimed to donate a percentage of SHAiR’s profit to OUR Rescue, a U.S. non-profit dedicated to fighting child sex trafficking. 

Users created an account, awaited verification and then chose to rent or host a vehicle. SHAiR took a commission of whatever insurance policy the person purchased and had plans to add advertising revenue.

Martel owned around 70 per cent of the company, and Delafuente owned between 10 and 20 per cent (Delafuente described Martel as a “carrot dangler,” and said his ownership stake fluctuated with Martel’s mood.) The rest was owned by other executives and engineers. 

Martel’s fleet of 32 vehicles was stored and rented from three locations, including company headquarters, a former car dealership in West Costa Mesa. Among his personal favourites was a 2021 Rolls Royce Cullinan, worth around $400,000 Cdn, which Martel saved for himself, according to a former employee.

Most days, Martel and Delafuente would get up early and work out at the office gym with other executives, according to former employees. The rest of the day was spent doing work and making trades on the stock market. 

In a pandemic-era YouTube video called “How to Lose Money in the Stock Market,” Martel and Delafuente discuss investment strategies on a whiteboard, joking they were off to a “great start” by losing $50,000 in 10 days. 

Some employees said they believed Delafuente was also involved in Martel’s alleged Ponzi, on the basis of his close relationship with Martel. 

WATCH | Martel and Delafuente on the golf course in a video from SHAiR's YouTube site:

In May 2023, Martel told his court-appointed receiver and trustee, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), he was “solely responsible” for all MMAC bridge loans. 

Delafuente said he’d fully co-operated with investigators in the U.S. and Canada. “I’ve got nothing to hide … I didn’t have any part of it,” he said.

According to PwC, Martel dispersed tens of millions of dollars in investor funds among his businesses, including SHAiR, between 2021 and 2022. 

SHAiR employed around 50 people from various remote locations, as well as offices in California, Nevada, Texas and B.C. In audio obtained from secretly recorded Google Meets calls with employees, Martel said he was spending around $1 million on operating costs every other month. 

In 2022, Martel began renting private planes to fly between the U.S. and Canada to see his kids and continue coaching hockey. That November, when SHAiR was invited to the Web Summit, an annual technology conference in Lisbon, he and Delafuente flew private. 

“We got a crazy deal on the plane,” Delafuente said.

In addition to market trades, Martel routinely bet on sports games, according to employees and business partners. Two senior employees said they quit because Martel’s mood and judgment seemed affected by his use of prescription medication. 

Martel also seemed to gamble on his abilities as an entrepreneur, launching new ideas before old ones had taken off.

SHAiR added electric bikes in 2022, and the West Costa Mesa office was plastered with a “coming soon” advertisement for Martel’s next big vehicle-sharing idea: planes.

Even as the company strayed from its initial purpose, Martel continued to lease more cars, paying dealer prices and renting them for just enough to make his monthly payments. 

“He was just, like, spending money on this business that he had no idea about,” a prospective business partner, Houston Crosta, said.

But all was not well at SHAiR. By the end of 2022, several employees had quit or been laid off. 

Some contemplated taking legal action against their former employer, according to employees and court documents. Two employees said they were fired for speaking out against a toxic workplace that included micromanaging by Martel’s chief operating officer. 

A call centre employee filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the U.S., alleging racial discrimination, but the case was closed without investigation. 

Sales manager Corey Firth was fired for “failure to adhere to the company’s time clocking policies,” according to his termination letter, after he said he showed up to work a few minutes late the Monday after a family member had died. 

Firth said he was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and ended up publishing a book that offers advice to others dealing with stress. 

“Now I can look back at it and laugh at it … but at the time it was rough,” he said. 

Other employees told the CBC there were widespread payroll shortages within the company, which PwC cited as one of the reasons SHAiR ultimately ceased to operate. 

In early 2023, Delafuente, Martel and another partner agreed to buy 50 per cent of Royalty Exotic Cars, a Las Vegas car rental company owned by Houston Crosta, according to Crosta. 

SHAiR would get access to Crosta’s client base of 100,000 renters, and Crosta would get access to Martel’s technology. 

Delafuente said he spent months working out the deal, which Martel seemed to want to prolong. 

According to Crosta, on the day all three executives were supposed to wire their portion of the down payment, which totalled $500,000, only Delafuente sent his, which Delafuente said came from real estate and other ventures.

According to Crosta, the other executive’s third was supposed to come from money Martel owed them, which is why it was never sent. Crosta said he and Martel continued to text into the spring. 

“He started to try to put the blame on Garrick,” Crosta said, rereading his text messages with Martel. “Just bullshit from there.”

Late on Feb. 17, 2023, while Delafuente was in Las Vegas having dinner with his cousins, he alleges, Martel phoned him with an unthinkable request: Make it look like he had $64 million in a Scotiabank account, when he had $946.86. 

According to PwC documents, Martel owed a significant amount to an MMAC investor in Alberta named Robert Bertram. 

Delafuente said Martel sent him a photograph of his online banking — not a screenshot, but an actual photo — and asked him to Photoshop it. 

When Delafuente said no, Martel replied it wasn’t a big deal, he would get the $64 million from their lawyer on Monday, according to Delafuente. 

Delafuente declined to provide the photograph to the CBC.

After hanging up, Delafuente said he talked to their lawyer, but the lawyer said he wasn’t involved in company finances. 

Delafuente said he also talked to an MMAC investor in B.C. who was suing Martel for allegedly not being able to get their money out. 

A few days later, he quit.

In March, Delafuente and Martel met one last time for lunch in Newport Beach. At that point, Delafuente said, he suspected Martel was up to something but was still concerned about his friend’s well-being. When he broached the subject, he said, Martel quickly shot him down. 

“He was just like, ‘What? What are you talking about?... Everything’s going great,’” Delafuente said. 

Martel said it was his staff’s fault that the B.C. investor hadn’t been paid and he had fixed the issue. 

After lunch, Martel dropped Delafuente off at a friend’s house where he was staying. 

“That was the last time I ever saw him.”

By April 2023, Martel’s fleet of vehicles was being repossessed over lack of payments. Martel himself was facing a barrage of lawsuits from people claiming he owed them millions, according to court documents. 

Bertram, the Alberta investor, was in the process of filing an application that would force MMAC into receivership, a process to help creditors recover assets, according to documents. 

From his home and office in Orange County, Calif., Martel appeared in livestreams with his investors, many of whom were trying to get their money out. 

Even as he tried to explain the delays — blaming staff shortages, system errors and statutory holidays — he continued to solicit new investors. 

“Many people want to say [bad] things about our company.… It’s not true at all,” he said. “And a good proof of that is that we have a massive waitlist.” 

At other times, Martel got defensive. He repeatedly denied doing anything fraudulent, admonished investors for risking too much of their net worths and appeared to adapt an old quote about not fixating on the loss of a few seconds when you have thousands of minutes remaining — although he rephrased it in terms of dollars missing from a metaphorical wallet. 

“I’m not saying I’m stealing your money,” he added. 

Martel left his Newport Beach house for the last time on April 23, according to Delafuente, who said he reviewed home security footage. A week later — just after 6 a.m. on April 30 — Martel arrived in Thailand, according to Delafuente and information obtained by the CBC. 

In early May, a post written by someone who said they were Martel’s executive assistant, Kelsee, appeared on Reddit. 

The post said that Martel had gone to Thailand for OUR Rescue and described the timing of the trip — amid the turmoil back home — as “unfortunate.” 

 After attempting to reassure investors, the author of the post accused Delafuente of “stealing from Greg and his companies.” 

Delafuente said he had been in the process of warning investors that Martel was fleeing and denied all the allegations made against him. 

In a written response, a spokesperson for OUR Rescue said only that “unauthorized public statements” about Martel’s involvement with the organization had been made and “subsequently deleted” at their request, and that they didn’t know where Martel was.
 

On May 4, MMAC was ordered into receivership by a B.C. Supreme Court judge in Vancouver. 

Martel’s bank accounts and assets were frozen, and he was ordered to comply with PwC, which the judge appointed as receiver and trustee for MMAC. 

Over the following weeks, Martel failed to meet deadlines, provide access to some of his online accounts and answer investigators’ questions. 

In one email, he blamed his lack of co-operation on PwC, saying his company was “under a massive breach of company data,” which he claimed to have reported to the police, “who have escalated it to the FBI.” 

Around May 12, Martel told the CBC that the receivership was “regrettable” and denied that MMAC was a Ponzi scheme. He hasn’t spoken to the media since. 

He has opened emails from this reporter, sometimes several times, but never responded. Attempts to reach him at phone numbers previously associated with him were not successful.

In June, Martel’s lawyers resigned from his case, citing “ethical reasons.” 

Around the same time, the private investigator tracked down by the CBC, Mike Green, said he was hired by two of Martel’s former investors. 

According to PwC documents, one of Martel’s investors, a California resident named Daniel Castellini, hired an unnamed private investigator. In his interview with CBC, Green said he located Martel in Thailand after about two months and eventually found him using a different passport. 

As proof, Green sent a screenshot of what appeared to be a form relating to Martel’s entry into Thailand — which showed Martel staying at a $500-a-night luxury resort. He also sent a video of someone roughly resembling Martel getting out of a Tesla and walking into a gym in Phuket. 

A couple of weeks later, Martel transferred two Teslas, a $5.6-million Las Vegas property and $300,000 to Castellini, in what PwC’s Canadian counsel called a “fraudulent conveyance.” 

After posting a $50,000 bail, according to PwC, Martel was reportedly released from jail, and left Thailand on Aug. 31. Martel then went to Dubai, according to B.C. court documents. 

Dubai has no extradition treaty with Canada or the U.S. From an undisclosed location, Green told CBC he would get Martel on another phone and allow this reporter to listen. 

A few minutes later, a gravelly baritone said hello. 

The speaker sounded tired and began talking about a plan they and Green had the following day at 7 p.m. “Let me call you about this in an hour,” Green said. 

After the voice was gone, Green said he could arrange a paid interview with Martel — a nonstarter to any credentialed reporter — and implied that Martel was no longer using his legal name. “If they try to find him using ‘Greg,’ they will never find him.”

Last September, just after the CBC’s conversation with Green, Martel’s second set of lawyers withdrew from his case.

Martel was ordered into bankruptcy and found in contempt of court over noncompliance with court orders. Civil warrants for his arrest were issued in Canada and the U.S. 

So far, Martel has not been criminally charged.

In an early email to PwC, Martel’s initial lawyers claimed Martel had received death threats. 

A year after Martel’s disappearance, financial investigators for PwC concluded that Martel’s lending business was a Ponzi. No bridge loans existed. 

“As the controlling mind of MMAC, Martel orchestrated a massive Ponzi scheme through MMAC, and raised over $270 million from investors on false pretenses, which has resulted in claims from at least 930 investors totalling more than $317 million,” PwC said.

Through MMAC, Martel had used money from one investor to pay another and poured money into his companies. His own bankruptcy was brought on a lifestyle of “unjustifiable extravagance,” PwC said.

Between 2018 and 2023, Martel had spent at least $3 million in private plane rides and $3 million in cars.

Martel had nine bank accounts, according to PwC, including a Coinbase account, that had a combined balance of $2,661.35. 

PwC eventually recovered about $300,000 from various MMAC accounts and an unrelated legal proceeding. Martel owned two houses, one in B.C. and one in Nevada, each of which had significant mortgages and little equity. He also jointly owned a third house in Ontario with his ex-wife. 

All told, Martel’s combined assets were less than the PwC spent in the recovery effort.
 

So where did the money go?

Some investors believed it was gone. Spent. 

Others wondered if Martel himself may have hidden some money — perhaps in cryptocurrencies. 

One investor referred to the missing funds as “phantom money,” believing interest, not capital, accounted for much of the $300-plus million in claims. 

As well, PwC has been trying to recover several million dollars worth of “preference payments” from a handful of creditors who received payments when other creditors remained unpaid.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for PwC described the receivership proceedings as “ongoing,” and said it does not comment on issues relating to “active receivership proceedings.” 

While some things remain unknown, what is painfully clear is the impact on the people who lost money they will probably never see again.

WATCH | Why the victims may never get their money back:
 

People like Cheyenne Chamberlain, 23, who is out $6,000 worth of carefully saved birthday and Christmas money she had “invested” with the hope of eventually making a down payment on a home on Vancouver Island, where she’s a student. 

“[I wanted] to do my own things in my house, paint my walls, you know? Sounds a little ridiculous, but it’s the little things that I really wanted.” 

And people like Kathy Julien, 67, a commercial pilot in Santa Cruz, Calif., who invested her son’s $20,000 life insurance payout, wanting to fulfil his dream of starting a business that helped others struggling with homelessness and addiction.

“Shame on me for being so gullible.”

Now that financial investigators have declared MMAC a Ponzi scheme, Martel may be one step closer to justice.

Robert Currie, a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax who specializes in international criminal law, said Canadian police may now be able to get Crown approval to charge Martel. 

If Martel is in the UAE or another non-extradition country, he could still be brought back to Canada, Currie said. 

“They would have to enter into … basically a one-time extradition agreement where UAE agreed to surrender him to Canada.” 

Currie said that white collar crime is treated more seriously than it has been in the past, and that the scale of Martel’s alleged fraud was significant. “An alleged $300 million fraud is a serious offence.” 

Cheyenne Chamberlain said she would be “very happy” if Martel were charged. 

A U.S. investor, Rob Barlow, described Martel as “Canada’s version of Bernie Madoff,” the U.S. ex-financier who was convicted for running the largest known Ponzi scheme in history.

“How can you be so greedy and despicable and dishonest?” Barlow said.

Garrick Delafuente, Martel’s former business partner, said he’s moved back to Las Vegas and is slowly rebuilding his life. He also wants his one-time friend and mentor held accountable. 

“I think he’s taking the easy way out, wherever he’s at, and it’s pathetic and cowardly.” 

After Martel travelled to Thailand, he purportedly texted Delafuente’s friends and family to say Delafuente was going “down” with him.

Delafuente tried calling Martel, but he didn’t respond, so Delafuente texted. 

“Honestly,’ I said, ‘You’ve ruined my entire life. If I don’t get to see you and tell it to your face in court,’ I basically said ‘F-you’ and ‘I can’t believe what you’ve done to me.’ And I blocked his number.”

The reporting and travel for this story has been funded by the Tiny Foundation, which had no role in the editorial process.

Top illustration: Shop Your Own Mortgage/Facebook/Zillow.com/Wendy Martinez/CBC |  Graphics: Wendy Martinez | Editing: Janet Davison.