A scamster who likes to bilk investors with phony tech invention schemes may be out there conning someone new, after he was a no-show at a sentencing hearing last month in Santa Clara County.
67-year-old Dennis Fountaine is now considered a fugitive, and the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office is seeking the public's help in locating him. Fountaine failed to show up for an August 5 hearing at which he was set to be sentenced for a conviction for grand theft by fraud, relating to a fraudulent investment scheme in which there were four victims.
Prosecutors in the case said Fountaine had succeeded in getting $350,000 in investments from four individuals for a fake invention, a medical robot named Homer. The device, Fountaine said, could dispense medications for elderly and disabled patients.
And it supposedly looked like this:
"The man pretended he was an inventor, but he won’t be able to pretend for long that he’s not a wanted fugitive," says Santa Clara County DA Jeff Rosen in a statement. "Let us know where he is so we can make sure he doesn’t scam anyone else."
Fountaine's m.o., prosecutors say, is to create fake companies and fake websites, and then to seek loans from investors to launch fake products. He has a history of civil judgments against him in California and Florida, for fraud and breach of contract, and some of the products sound pretty goofy.
For instance, in Florida, he created a company named Screen Test, and per the DA's office, claimed that "the company had technology to insert individuals into any type of visual medium, allowing those individuals to 'act' or 'sing' in a visual clip as the original actor or singer." This faux AI that Fountaine claimed to have invented was called "Face Replacement Technology," and apparently he bilked millions out of investors who didn't know this basically already exists as a TikTok or Instagram filter.
And, even though Fountaine was convicted in California earlier this year, he's still apparently been at his old shenanigans. Prosecutors say that he was last caught trying to "dupe" unwitting investors earlier this summer, one month after the conviction.
Anyone with information about Fountaine's whereabouts is asked to contact Investigator Justin DeOliveira at 408-792-2420.