A disbarred real estate attorney who was previously licensed to practice law in Georgia was sentenced to prison for embezzling more than $3 million from clients. He used those funds for personal purposes and created phony accounting records to cover up the theft.
According to U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan, the charges and other information presented in court, Matthew Allen Dickason owned a law firm in Atlanta specializing in real estate law and was responsible for overseeing hundreds of real estate sales transactions totaling tens of millions of dollars.
While employed as an attorney, Dickason knowingly devised and conducted a scheme to defraud and obtain money from clients under false pretenses. Specifically, Dickason misappropriated millions of dollars belonging to clients who trusted him to handle their real estate transactions. To conceal his scheme, Dickason took one client’s money and used it to pay his own or another client’s expenses. He used this deceptive practice again and again. This allowed the scheme to go undetected for years.
Dickason also hid his fraud by causing false and misleading information to be entered into his law firm’s accounting system to make it appear that the firm had paid a client’s mortgage when, in fact, Dickason had used the money for fraudulent purposes.
Dickason, who now lives in Wellington, Ohio, was sentenced to 27 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay restitution of more than $3 million.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development-Office of Inspector General, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency-Office of Inspector General.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Russell Phillips prosecuted the case.