First SEC internet fraud case
The SEC's pursuit of Larson's shell company Pleasure Time Incorporated was the agency's first serious internet fraud case.
Where this was said
The Final Years: From TV Moment to Pioneer of Internet Fraud
At 40:08 · chapter starts 39:50
The years after Press Your Luck were not kind to Michael Larson — or to the people he encountered. Rather than serving as a foundation, his win seemed to accelerate his worst instincts [1] — Host "Larson's post-win life was a spiral of increasingly bold fraud. He ran a multi-level marketing shell company called Pleasure Time Incorpora…" 39:48 . By the mid-1990s, he had relocated to Florida, ostensibly fleeing the cold Ohio winters but in fact running from the law. Through a shell company called Pleasure Time Incorporated, he helped orchestrate a multi-level marketing scheme involving fraudulent investments in fake Native American lotteries. The scheme allegedly defrauded approximately 20,000 people of a combined $3 million. When the SEC filed charges against the sham company in 1995, investigators noted something remarkable: it was the agency's first serious internet fraud case ever pursued. Larson's crimes had made him a pioneer of a whole new category of crime. But the law never caught up with him personally. In 1999, he died of throat cancer in Apopka, Florida, at age 49. His brother James believed the Press Your Luck win was the start of his downfall; his former wife Teresa offered the most concise verdict of all: 'The game show is one thing he did do that was honest.' In 2024, four decades after his famous day, actor Paul Walter Hauser brought Larson back to life in The Luckiest Man in America. It's a title Larson himself would have rejected — he insisted, to the end, that luck had nothing to do with it.
Larson bilked 20,000 people out of $3M
Larson's post-show fraud scheme through a shell company called Pleasure Time Incorporated allegedly defrauded approximately 20,000 people of a combined $3 million.
Larson died at age 49 in 1999
Michael Larson died of throat cancer in Apopka, Florida in 1999 at the age of 49, never having been caught for his fraud scheme.
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