A White Bear Lake serial scam artist whose swindling ways have twice cost him his license as a chiropractor has been sentenced to 7½ years in prison for his latest misdeeds.
Randy Miland, 63, was sentenced last week in federal court in St. Paul for running a Ponzi scheme designed to pilfer hundreds of thousands of dollars from his victims. This term includes an order to pay about $214,000 in restitution and be on supervised release for three years after prison.
Miland's "trail of swindles has now led him straight to a lengthy prison sentence," said Minnesota Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman, whose agency regulates investment securities at the state level. "Over and over again, he stole people's life savings with his fraudulent schemes."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson said that Miland, who pleaded guilty in September to mail fraud and money laundering, "lied to and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from his friends and chiropractic patients."
Miland has prior convictions in state and federal court for other fraud schemes dating back nearly 20 years.
In 1999, he was convicted in state court of theft by swindle, sentenced to a 55-month term and ordered to pay more than $1.5 million in restitution. As of May 2016, he still owed nearly the entire amount.
In 2006, he was convicted in federal court of fraud, sentenced to more than three years in prison and ordered to pay more than $250,000 in restitution. He still owes nearly half that amount.
In this most recent case, Miland solicited more than $500,000 from 10 investors, telling them he would invest the money. Instead, he used the money to pay personal expenses, including court-ordered restitution to victims of his prior scams, and to make Ponzi-type payments of purported investment returns to other investors.
