Two Convicted in Connection with Series of Investment Fraud Schemes

WOBURN – Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan has announced that Robert Ross Reinhart and Clarissa Rodriguez have been found guilty of defrauding multiple victims of approximately $169,000 and other property over the course of six years.

From 2007 through 2013, Reinhart and Rodriguez presented themselves as financially savvy, sophisticated, experienced and very successful people who could provide investment advice and assistance with various projects to others. These projects included plans to redevelop property and promote and market inventions. Ultimately they did not deliver and instead left the victims bereft of their assets.

“Robert Ross Reinhart and Clarissa Rodriguez engaged in a pattern of deceit and dishonesty over the course of their criminal scheme. For years, they preyed on victims who trusted them and believed their businesses to be legitimate.  Tragically, as we see in many scam cases like this one, the victims were left having suffered highly personal losses including inheritance, an engagement ring and even theft of money from a bank account belonging to a 13-year-old girl,” said District Attorney Ryan. “This case serves as a reminder of the sophisticated lengths to which scammers will go to in order to earn victims’ trust. I applaud the work of the investigators who worked diligently to unravel the defendants’ crimes despite their use of multiple aliases and wide spread reach across multiple states, to get to today’s conclusion.”

On February 22, 2024 Robert Ross Reinhart was convicted by a Middlesex Superior Court jury of 11 counts of larceny over $250, two counts of attempted larceny over $250, and one count of larceny under $250. He was also deemed a common and notorious thief and sentenced to eight to ten years in State prison, followed by three years of probation. He was ordered to repay his victims $169,000 in restitution. The Court ordered his sentences to run consecutive with a one to two year state prison sentence that he was already serving for attempting to pay a witness $500 to influence his testimony. A Superior Court jury found him guilty of that offense in December of 2023.

Clarissa Rodriguez was convicted by a Middlesex Superior Court jury of five counts of larceny over $250. She was also deemed a common and notorious thief and was sentenced to four to five years in state prison.

Some of the scams conducted by the defendants include:

• Charging two inventors a total of $55,000 for marketing advice and product research for two separate products that was never delivered.
• Convincing another victim to drain the bank accounts she shared with her husband and held for her 13-year old daughter so that Reinhart could “invest” the cash. Reinhart also convinced this victim to obtain more cash for him to “invest” by refinancing her paid-off automobile. The defendants also stole her wedding jewelry under the guise of having it appraised and safeguarded, after which Reinhart pawned it for $125.
• Reinhart solicited donations to support a bogus organization called “Missing Persons Bureau, Special Investigations Unit,” purportedly doing business in Washington, D.C., The Unit supposedly would attempt to solve the 1977 disappearance of a 14-year-old girl from Townsend.  During this scheme Reinhart personally solicited a contribution from the mother of the missing girl and attempted to convince the town to pay over $11,000 in phony “expenses” for his “investigation.” 

In October, 2013 the branch manager of the Wilmington Citizens Bank called police to report that he believed one of his customers was being victimized in a scam and that Reinhart had been in the bank seeking to ensure that a deposit to be made by one of his “investor” victims into the account of a sham corporation he had formed could be immediately wired out of the account to another account he controlled. Wilmington Police determined that the transaction was suspicious, arrested an individual that Reinhart sent to the bank to withdraw the money, after which Reinhart went into hiding under various aliases in New Hampshire.

Following the 2013 incident, a comprehensive investigation led by the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office with assistance from the Wilmington Police, the Chelmsford Police, and the FBI’s New England Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory resulted in Robert Ross Reinhart and Clarissa Rodriguez being charged with multiple counts of larceny in Woburn District Court in early 2013. The investigation continued and in late 2014, a Middlesex County grand jury indicted the defendants for those charges and related financial crimes.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant District Attorneys Graham Van Epps, Michael Klunder, and former A.D.A. Doug Cannon.  The victim witness advocate was Lori Riccio.