Crypto ‘Godfather’ Gets Six Years for Hiring Sheriff’s Deputies, $37M Meta Fraud

Adam Iza, the 26-year-old who styled himself “The Godfather” and is already serving 15 years over an attempted Bitcoin robbery, has been sentenced to a further 78 months for hiring off-duty Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies to harass people he was in dispute with, stealing more than $37 million from Meta, and hiding the proceeds with cryptocurrency custodians to evade tax.

U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson also ordered him to pay $23,402,766 in restitution, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said. Iza pleaded guilty in January 2025 to conspiracy against rights, wire fraud and tax evasion, and has been in custody since September 2024.

The new term runs concurrent to that Connecticut sentence, imposed last month over a robbery attempt in the month before his arrest, so it adds nothing to the time he will actually serve.

Between August 2021 and April 2022 Iza hired off-duty deputies as personal security. He admitted in his plea agreement to conspiring with them to pull confidential law enforcement records and personal data on people he had financial and other disputes with, and to obtain court-authorized search warrants to track those people down. He also had the deputies intimidate and threaten them.

Per the DoJ, five former deputies have now been convicted over work they did for him. They include Eric Chase Saavedra, 42, a former federal task force officer who set up the security company that supplied them, who got 21 months on September 28. Michael David Coberg, 45, is serving 63 months for helping extort a rival and arranging a sham drug arrest. Scott Allen Simpkins, 34, got 18 months for obstructing an investigation into a $25,000 extortion at Iza’s Bel Air mansion, and David Anthony Rodriguez, 45, a year for filing a false search warrant application.

People with money cannot buy “warrants, arrests, badges, or firearms for use in private disputes,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

The $37 million Meta fraud

The fraud was separate. From December 2020, Iza gained access to Meta business manager accounts and the lines of credit attached to them, then sold that access on to advertising companies. Meta clients were billed for advertising they never bought; when the billing was discovered, Meta refunded them and absorbed the loss itself.

About $37 million flowed into his companies’ accounts between 2020 and 2022. He admitted receiving at least $36,360,844 in gross income through 2023 and causing the IRS a loss of $13,286,152, filing no corporate returns at all. To hide it he concealed his ownership of Zort, his crypto trading platform, had a co-schemer buy personal items with the money, and moved corporate income to cryptocurrency custodians.

Iris Rabaya Au, 37, Iza’s former girlfriend, was sentenced to 18 months on September 21 for failing to report more than $2.6 million she received through his activities. She was ordered to pay $1,484,343 in restitution and to forfeit a fleet of luxury and high-performance cars, designer handbags and three “Godfather” sculptures, among other assets.