One of HomeVestors of America’s residential investment properties is on Marjorie Avenue in South Dallas.
HomeVestors
For years, Charles Carrier — operating as a franchisee of HomeVestors known for its ubiquitous “We Buy Ugly Houses” slogan — lured investors to his Dallas house flipping business by promising solid fixed returns and the safety of secured priority liens.
In reality, according to federal prosecutors, Carrier was operating a scheme that bilked dozens of people out of nearly $40 million.
On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced the 67-year-old North Texas resident to more than 15 years in prison and ordered him to pay more than $24 million in restitution.
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“Carrier didn’t just target investors; he preyed on Main Street families, retirees and small business owners through a sham ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ scam,” U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Ryan Raybould said in a statement. “Through his lies and deceit, Carrier earned every month of his 15-year sentence.”
In an interview with The Dallas Morning News on Thursday, Tom Pappas, Carrier’s lawyer, said his client is deeply remorseful and has been prepared to serve a prison sentence. Pappas also characterized Carrier’s criminal actions as a yearslong attempt to turn around his flagging home-flipping business once the economy went south.
“He regrets every single criminal act he did trying to recoup money for investors,” Pappas said. “What’s interesting is he didn’t seek riches for himself. He didn’t profit off this. He didn’t have a bank account in the Cayman Islands.”
Carrier pleaded guilty to wire fraud in late 2025. “When this thing finally stopped, it was completely driven by me saying ‘enough’ and going to the people and saying, ‘Here’s the mess I’ve created,'” the businessman previously told ProPublica, which published an investigation of the alleged scheme last year. “This is a mess created by me.”
Carrier, a Wharton School graduate who previously worked at Pepsi, began his home-flipping business as a franchise of HomeVestors of America — the Dallas-based “We Buy Ugly Houses” corporate powerhouse — around two decades ago.
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For years, while relying on loans from institutional investors, he was successful. He led training sessions for other franchisees and even claimed to be “the largest and most successful HomeVestors franchise in the United States,” ProPublica reported.
But Carrier eventually turned to individual lenders, and around 2018 began orchestrating what amounted to a major fraud scheme, according to investigators. To entice investors, he promised “first-position” liens against properties that were secured by deeds and provided what appeared to be valid lien documents.
He also promised returns of between 8% and 10%, and initially did make payments to his small lenders. But those payments eventually stopped and prosecutors later alleged that Carrier had frequently failed to record the deeds to the properties investors had purportedly bought into, which meant their investments were unsecured.
“Second, even where Carrier provided investors with what appeared to be valid lien documents, he had already encumbered the same property with other liens and additional deeds of trust — without disclosing this to investors,” prosecutors alleged.
Carrier also sold off properties without repaying investors, used forged documents and spent money investors thought was going into rehabbing houses on unrelated business expenses and personal credit cards as well as payments to earlier investors, according to prosecutors.
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The Ponzi scheme ultimately swindled more than 80 people, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Many of the investors were elderly, and some lost millions. The investors also filed various lawsuits, and federal prosecutors brought their case last spring after an FBI investigation.
Pappas said he was unsure if his client might appeal the sentence.
“He’s 68 years old — he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison,” he said. “But he regrets taking shortcuts to try to fix things.”