Minooka Businessman Bilked Investors Out Of $130M: Feds

MINOOKA, IL — A Minooka businessman has been found guilty of wire fraud charges after federal prosecutors said he came up with a scheme to take more than $130 million from more than 500 investors.

Kenneth D. Courtright, 53, was convicted on Friday of all seven counts of wire fraud and now faces up to 140 years in prison, the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois announced on Monday. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 4.

Evidence that was presented in a two-week trial showed that Courtright owned and operated Today’s Growth Consultant, a Minooka-based business that operated under the name of The Income Store, federal prosecutors said.

According to federal prosecutors, the company purported to build or acquire websites for investors. From 2015 to 2019, Courtright schemed to defraud investors by falsely promising to provide them with a guaranteed income stream of either 50 percent of the advertising revenue generated by the websites or the monthly equivalent of at least 15 percent of the investor’s upfront fee, federal officials said.

Prosecutors proved that Courtright backed these guarantees through fraudulent claims that his company was financially healthy. But, in reality, the payment of returns to investors was primarily funded through money raised from new investors, officials said.

Patch previously was given access to a five-minute video Courtright produced shortly before Christmas for his investors. In the video, Courtright recalls the history of The Income Store and how he battled Google algorithms from 2012 through 2016 "in a constant dance of two steps forward, one step back."

To generate more money, he went after Facebook-driven assets "as they were providing us traffic and revenue, the likes we had never been seen before ... some of these assets were earning us hundreds of thousands per month," Courtright says in his December 2019 video.

Then, Courtright said in his video, The Income Store sustained an immediate monthly seven-figure financial loss. He blamed the federal government's decision to "mandate Facebook turn off their paywalls due to selling everyone's data through paywalls.

"This kick in the teeth by Facebook drove us to seek a platform that had no algorithms, no paywall and no revenue system,” he said in the video.