Date: June 17, 2025
Contact: [email protected]
Madison, WI — Timothy M. O’Shea, United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, announced the unsealing of a criminal complaint charging Stanley Pophal, of Wausau, Wisconsin, with wire fraud and money laundering. Pophal was arrested Saturday and made his initial appearance in federal court yesterday. He was detained pending further proceedings.
According to the criminal complaint, beginning in 2019, Pophal solicited investors to purchase promissory notes from him with supposedly guaranteed rates of return. In order to lure investors into the scheme, Pophal falsely represented that he was a wealthy businessman. Between May of 2019 and March of 2025, Pophal received more than $15,000,000 from at least 120 investors.
The criminal complaint also alleges that Pophal did not actually invest the majority of the money he obtained from his investors. Instead, Pophal used the money to live an extravagant lifestyle, including the purchase of over 300 snowmobiles. To keep the fraud scheme going, Pophal also used new investor money to make “lulling payments” to previous investors to make it appear as though those investors were earning investment returns.
The charges against Pophal are a result of an investigation conducted by IRS Criminal Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The prosecution of the case is being handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Wegner.
You are advised that a charge is merely an accusation, and a person named as defendant in a criminal complaint or indictment is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) is the law enforcement arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 19 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.