In 2024, the CEOs of the failed Fresno tech company Bitwise Industries admitted to stealing over $100 million from investors — and now, another associate who helped defraud them is coming forward and facing up to 20 years in prison, officials announced.
According to an April 20 news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, 61-year-old David Hardcastle pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, totaling around $45 million in losses in two separate schemes: one involving Bitwise, the Fresno tech company, and a separate alleged Ponzi scheme based in Florida.
Prosecutors said that from 2022 through 2023, Hardcastle and his business partner, 32-year-old Andrew Adler, loaned Bitwise $20 million in high-interest loans from their company, “Startop Investments LLC.” After forging the signature of Bitwise’s co-CEO, they sold the fraudulent loans to investors, who believed they would be receiving loans that were much less risky than they actually were.
The two businessmen, who were already receiving tens of thousands of dollars in origination fees for the loans, were poised to make millions more if the loans had been fully repaid, the news release said. One loan to Bitwise involved an undisclosed secure interest reserve — a collateral account used to cover financial shortfalls — of about $700,000. Instead, Hardcastle and Adler used this capital to fund a separate company that they operated, the news release said. When Bitwise collapsed in 2023, the money vanished. “As a result, the investors in the loans lost nearly all of their money,” the news release continued.
In July 2024, Jake Soberal and Irma Olguin Jr., the CEOs and co-founders of Bitwise, agreed to plead guilty to felony counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. According to their plea agreements, their web of financial lies “were especially complex in that the alterations and fabrications tricked sophisticated individuals and financial institutions with extensive experience in financial markets into believing the company was excelling when the company was instead failing.”
In December of that year, prosecutors sentenced Soberal and Olguin to 11 years and nine years in prison, respectively, for defrauding individuals of about $115 million. “Defendants likened themselves to gods and joked about deceiving their well-intentioned investors while committing a massive fraud,” U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert said in the 2024 news release. “They lied repeatedly to pull in over $100 million to a dying business venture that they knew never had any meaningful revenue.”
Adler pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced to three years and five months in prison, the April 20 news release said. Hardcastle is scheduled for sentencing on Sept. 14, 2026.