A California man who was a co-founder and former board member of Aspiration Partners, Inc., a financial technology and sustainability services company, has been sentenced. He was sentenced on Monday to 14 years in prison for a five-year scheme to defraud multiple lenders and investors of at least $248 million.

According to court documents, Joseph Neal Sanberg, 46, of Orange, California, devised a scheme that began in 2020 and continued into 2025 to use his significant share of Aspiration stock to defraud various lenders and investors.

Between 2020 and 2021, Mr Sanberg and Ibrahim AlHusseini, who were both members of Aspiration’s board of directors, fraudulently obtained $145 million in loans from two lenders by pledging shares of Sanberg’s Aspiration stock.

In order to secure the loans, Messrs Sanberg and AlHusseini falsified AlHusseini’s bank and brokerage statements to fraudulently inflate AlHusseini’s assets by tens of millions of dollars.

Beginning in 2021, Mr Sanberg concealed from investors that he was the source of millions of dollars of purported revenue paid to Aspiration through, or purportedly on behalf of, sham customers.  

Court documents indicate that Mr Sanberg personally recruited companies and individuals to enter into agreements with Aspiration, in which they committed to pay tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree-planting services.

The money for these customers’ payments was supplied by Mr Sanberg himself. Mr Sanberg concealed that these payments came from him rather than from the customers.

Aspiration booked revenue from these sham customers between March 2021 and November 2022. At the same time, Mr Sanberg concealed that he was the source of the payments. As a result, Aspiration’s financial statements falsely and fraudulently reflected much higher revenue than the company in fact received.

Nonetheless, Mr Sanberg continued to solicit investors to invest in Aspiration securities into 2025.

According to the documents, Mr Sanberg also defrauded other lenders and investors by using fraudulent materials describing Aspiration’s financial condition, including a fabricated letter from Aspiration’s audit committee that falsely stated Aspiration had $250 million in available cash and equivalents, even though Aspiration had less than $1 million in available cash.

Mr Sanberg used these fraudulent financial materials to obtain millions of dollars in additional loans and investments in Aspiration securities. Mr Sanberg’s victims sustained at least $248 million in losses.

Mr Sanberg pleaded guilty in October 2025 to two counts of wire fraud.

“Joseph Sanberg preyed on investors and lenders who believed in his vision of environmentally conscious fintech,” said assistant attorney general A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Instead of delivering on Aspiration’s promises, he orchestrated a multi-year scheme involving fake clients, sham payments, and deceptive loan collateral that caused at least $248 million in losses to numerous victims. This sentence holds him accountable and serves as a clear warning to others who abuse trust for personal gain and obtain loans from the financial industry based on lies and misrepresentations.”