NEW YORK - A former Stoney Creek man has pleaded guilty in a New York court to conspiring to commit wire fraud.

The FBI says Sandy Winick, 57, pleaded guilty on Friday at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn and faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

An FBI news release says Winick was the leader of a multimillion-dollar scheme that used call centres around the world to defraud victims.

The agency says the scheme involved collecting advance fees from investors for the purchase of penny stocks but no services were provided.

The FBI says victims were defrauded, collectively, of more than $5 million.

Winick had lived in both Stoney Creek and Toronto starting in 2004, but left Canada in 2009. He was arrested in Thailand in August 2013 and extradited from there to face the American charges.

He lived, at one point, in what was described as a heritage home in Stoney Creek with his girlfriend and her daughter. The home eventually became the headquarters for some of his companies.

His girlfriend, Andrea McCarthy, was found guilty of breaking securities law by the Ontario Securities Commission last year. She was named as a director or officer of two companies, BFM Industries Inc. and Liquid Gold International Corp. The commission found she distributed securities illegally and traded without registration.

The FBI says Winick is the seventh person to plead guilty in the case so far.

Nine were charged in two related schemes that Winick led from 2008 through 2013. The FBI said the first scheme involved an international "pump and dump" operation, in which the share price of worthless penny stocks were fraudulently inflated and then dumped on unsuspecting investors across the globe.

The agency said the second scheme saw operations called boiler rooms, where investors were induced to pay advance fees that the defendants promised would enable them to sell the stocks and recover any losses they incurred. In reality, the office said the conspirators "simply stole the fees without providing any services, fraudulently extracting more than $5 million from their victims."

The case involved investigators from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, RCMP and law enforcement agencies in England, Thailand and China.

Winick also had troubles with Canadian authorities. The Ontario Securities Commission ordered him and another man to pay more than $1 million in 2013 for the illegal distribution and unregistered trading of securities. The commission also banned him from securities trading, being an investment dealer, fund manager, director or corporate officer of any company.

The sanctions are related to three separate schemes involving securities of BFM Industries, Liquid Gold International and Nanotech Industries.

Securities commissioner James Carnwath ruled that Winick committed "a series of acts including the illegal distribution and unregistered trading of securities" and "engaged in an ongoing course of deceitful and fraudulent conduct designed to personally enrich himself at the expense of innocent investors."

In 2005, Winick was among six people who helped launch The Fight Network. He left the cable channel - which features boxing and mixed martial arts - in late 2007.

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