Technically speaking, Jay Jones is more than $1 billion in the red. Five years ago, when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, federal district court judge Sven Erik Holmes ordered him to pay $1,089,636,980 to victims of the fraud that he committed at Tulsa’s Commercial Financial Services, Inc. CFS bought bad credit card debt and collected on accounts that other companies had written off?but when CFS’s collections dipped, Jones funneled bad debt into a separate company, fraudulently propping up the value of CFS bonds.
Today, though, it’s as though Jones’s debts have been written off. The government seized more than $4.4 million worth of his assets before he went to prison. Now, with monthly income of about $1,500 in Social Security and $1,000 for odd jobs he takes for the law firm that once defended him, the ridiculously unattainable $1.1 billion might as well be a trillion.
