February 21, 2025
Some lost their savings. Some, their homes. Some lost everything.
At least 116 investors lost money to Douglas Grozelle, the man at the top of a $24.6-million alleged Ponzi scheme.
The former magician and punk rock singer from Burlington is under investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police in connection with an international fraud allegedly carried out over two years. Bankruptcy records show it operated as a classic Ponzi scheme, using money from new investors to pay illegally high returns to a select group of clients — many of them Halton Regional Police officers.
As bankruptcy receiver Grant Thornton Ltd. fights in court to claw back money from the “net winners” to pay the “net losers,” it is becoming clear just how much is at stake for those who trusted Grozelle and lost.
The Spectator reached out to Grozelle and his lawyer, Shana Nodel, for comment. They did not respond.
The fraud detective
He was a career cop who investigated frauds and thought he had an excellent B.S. detector.
Yet he was no match for the charm of Doug Grozelle.
“He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Sgt. Jon Williams told The Spectator. “I feel like the world’s biggest fool.”
The Halton Regional Police officer is the biggest “net loser” in Grozelle’s investment plan. He personally lost more than $327,000, according to Grant Thornton. Add in investments he brokered for friends and family and the amount jumps to a staggering $6.1 million.
“He’s probably the most charismatic man I’ve ever met, by a long shot,” said Williams. “I don’t trust easily. I’ve been a cop all my life. I’ve dealt with a lot of bad people. But he just pulled me right in.”
Williams, 41, has been a cop for 22 years, first with Metro Police in London, U.K., then with Halton. He was working in the fraud unit in early 2021 — investigating Ponzi schemes — when he met Grozelle.
The two men had friends in common, many of them Halton officers.
“They were doing private lending through Doug Grozelle,” he said. “They were all singing his praises.”
Williams was invited to join the investments, but he declined.
“It was too high risk for me.”
A year went by.
Williams’ friends were making serious money with Grozelle and were enamoured with him.
“They portrayed him to be a big businessman, highly intellectual,” said Williams. “He was a very well put-together fellow.”
In the spring of 2022, another Halton cop set up a meeting between Williams and Grozelle at a Hamilton coffee shop.
Grozelle talked about his millionaire father, Ross Grozelle, whom he called “Daddy Warbucks.” They owned a travel company together.
When COVID hit, the tourism industry was decimated and Grozelle was “trying to diversify” by offering short-term loans or bridge financing to clients, said Williams.
After watching from the sidelines, Williams was ready to give it a try.
“I’ll dip my toe in,” he decided.
He took “a couple of hundred thousand” from his line of credit and gave it to Grozelle, who set the interest rate at 15 per cent. No negotiation.
The loan was for four to six weeks and it came back with the interest.
“Holy hell,” Williams thought. “He’s the real deal. I did another (investment) and again, no problems.”
Grozelle and Williams had a good vibe going.
Grozelle needed an administrator and Williams wanted out of policing.
“My family knew that I was quite miserable in policing,” he said. “I was starting to struggle with mental health issues to do with the job.”
In May 2022, Williams took a leave of absence to work in a salaried position for Grozelle.
“His paperwork was terrible,” said Williams.
He also created his own business called Venture Capital to funnel funds, largely from his friends and family — “including my own mother” — to Grozelle. He thought they would all do well and he would earn enough to retire early from policing.
He liked Grozelle and trusted him.
“He was living a modest life,” Williams said. He lived in a townhouse, didn’t take vacations and drove a “beaten down old Mercedes.”
“This man was in my house, regularly. It’s like he became my brother.”
The summer of 2022 was great.
“Everyone was thrilled. We hit the lottery basically,” said Williams.
Once a month, Grozelle held Dragon’s Den style meetings where entrepreneurs pitched ideas to him and he’d dole out money.
“He loved it,” said Williams. “But I told him none of these are good.”
The businesses tended to be high-risk startups doomed for failure. But Grozelle loved flexing his power and influence, says Williams.
“I think he liked being the big man. He really relished the attention …. He was almost drunk on the power it gave him.”
Meanwhile, other small concerns were cropping up for Williams. For instance, he heard Grozelle recycle the same pitch to different clients — that a borrower needed $75,000 for a BMW.
It wasn’t until November 2022, when some payments were a few days late, that Williams started to worry. Grozelle cited problems with banks.
Still, Williams didn’t panic.
The fact so many Halton cops — more than a dozen — invested with Grozelle boosted Williams’ confidence that everything was legit.
“It seemed like I was living the dream. Who would be stupid enough to defraud half the department?”
By the end of November, Grozelle was in the hospital. Williams said he and another Halton officer — also an investor — spoke with him after he was discharged. The colleagues told him he needed to “pay everyone back,” according to Williams.
“He’s the only one who had knowledge where the money was.”
They planned to meet with him at Williams’ home Dec. 4, 2022 to begin “winding everything down.”
The colleagues waited for Grozelle to arrive. He called to say he was on his way. They waited some more.
They waited five hours.
Eventually, Grozelle admitted he wasn’t coming. He was overcome with anxiety, so he turned around.
That’s when Williams knew.
“This is a fraud,” he realized. “That same day I called the police.”
“I walked the people I care about in my life down Doug’s trap.”
In January 2023, Williams returned to work at Halton Regional Police. But his job is in jeopardy.
He is suspended with pay and under investigation in connection with an incident involving another Grozelle investor. The exact allegations are unclear and he has declined to speak about it on the advice of his union.
Williams has also been interviewed by the OPP as part of its fraud investigation involving Grozelle.
Not only has Williams lost his own money, his family and friends’ money, “but by the looks of it my career as well.”
“This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” he said. “I trusted the wrong person.”
The widow
In February 2023, Betty-Lou Moffatt responded to a Facebook post she hoped would turn her life around.
It was an ad for an administrative assistant job and Moffatt desperately needed work.
She was 45, had just graduated from a legal assistant program and was studying for her paralegal exams.
She went back to school after her husband died three years earlier, leaving her to raise their 10-year-old daughter alone.
The bills were stacking up. Life was hard.
She answered the posting and was told a businessman named Doug Grozelle was looking for help.
She googled him and found the stuff about his early career as a punk rock singer and magician, which she thought was odd. But she also saw links to a travel company he owned.
“He seemed legitimate,” she told The Spectator.
Her job interview with Grozelle was over the phone. To this day, she has never met him in person.
“He seemed nice. Funny. Smart. He was a great salesman. He could sell you a hunk of dirt.”
He told her the pandemic forced his travel company into receivership and he needed someone to manage his insolvency proceedings as he repaid his creditors.
He was “sympathetic” when he heard Moffatt was widowed.
“We went into negotiations about pay,” she said. “He threw a number out and I was flabbergasted.”
He offered her a $5,000 signing bonus and $2,500 a week.
She would work from home. He bought her a cellphone and suggested she not tell anyone her full name.
She was simply Betty M.
Moffatt didn’t realize she was about to become the gatekeeper between Grozelle and dozens of angry investors duped by his alleged Ponzi scheme.
For at least six hours a day, Moffatt dealt with Grozelle’s mess.
Her primary responsibility was to “keep guys at bay,” take complaints about missing payments and tell people Grozelle was “working on it.”
“I did a lot of avoiding answering the phone,” she said. Partly because those were Grozelle’s instructions, but also because callers were hostile.
“I totally get it,” Moffatt said of the investors’ ire. “They’re not getting the answers that they needed. (Grozelle) would just have me tell them ‘We’ll set up a phone call this week. Let them know they’ll be the first to be paid out.’”
She says her job was to shield Grozelle, make promises that would never be kept, and that all the emails she sent were dictated by Grozelle.
Not only was Grozelle missing in action, Moffatt was so elusive that investors questioned whether “Betty M” was even real. Some suspected her email account was really just run by Grozelle using an alias.
Moffatt began to know the stories of some of the most persistent investors. One had medical bills piling up. Another was being evicted. A few were on the brink of losing their homes.
She hated that her job was to lie. Yet, she needed the job.
Her first paycheque was for $1,500. But it didn’t come from Grozelle. She says it came from one of his investors.
It would be her only paycheque.
“I still had some OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Program) money left over,” she said. “Because had I not, I would have been totally screwed.”
She had trouble making rent. She was behind in her car payments.
“I had worked since I was 14,” she said. She left high school to work in the fast food industry and always made ends meet. Until Grozelle stopped paying her.
“He said he had funds coming in. He told me his bank accounts were frozen.”
While Moffatt waited for her money, Grozelle asked for a favour.
“‘Hey, I know I owe you money,’” Moffatt recalled him saying. “But can you float me a loan?’”
If she loaned him $1,500, he’d give her $5,000 the following day.
Moffatt said no. She didn’t have any money to lend him even if she wanted to.
Yet she continued to work for him. When the cellphone went dead because Grozelle hadn’t paid the bill, she kept working.
“I was giving him the benefit of the doubt,” she said.
Eventually, she emailed the investors to say she was off work due to family issues.
“That was a bulls—t lie,” she said. “That’s what we came up with.”
As the weeks rolled on without a paycheque, Moffatt reached the end of her patience.
“I’m not falling for this,” she thought. “By then, I was kind of catching on. I was getting very worried. I made sure I had enough food in the house but we were on a pretty damn tight budget. I was fed up.”
“I wasn’t 100 per cent sure there was a scam going on,” she said. “Until the lawsuits started and Grant Thornton stepped in” as the court-appointed receiver.
“I’d like to say I was shocked, but I wasn’t. I got screwed.”
When Moffatt stopped invoicing Grozelle, he owed her $50,000.
Moffatt has found full-time work as a paralegal. Just recently, she caught up on her car payments.
“It’s literally been hell for the last couple of years,” she said.
Moffatt asked to add one important note.
“I’m adding a sorry to everybody I had to deal with. I feel guilty. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I really thought he was legitimate. He’s a great salesman.”
‘Losing face’ in Thailand
After 30 years of working, Justin Kavanagh must now rely on the generosity of relatives and friends to support him, his wife and their two teenaged daughters.
He lost everything to Grozelle.
From 1987 to 2022, Kavanagh worked in construction and had other business dealings on the side.
“I have worked tirelessly throughout my life investing in rental properties, operating bars and restaurants and running wellness stores,” he said in a sworn affidavit supporting Grant Thornton’s clawback motion. “I have dedicated countless hours to securing a stable future for my family, only to see everything I built taken from me.”
He bought a home in Burlington for his family but their dream was to eventually sell it and relocate to Thailand.
Kavanagh was introduced to Grozelle in October 2021 by a neighbour. He learned several Halton police officers “had been investing with Grozelle for some time and Grozelle consistently provided high, above-market returns on investments.”
“At first, I had serious reservations about the investment. The terms seemed too good to be true,” Kavanagh said. Grozelle offered a 15 per cent return on a 30-day loan.
Kavanagh thought the deal was “too risky” and promissory notes issued by Grozelle “did not appear to have been professionally drafted.”
Later, a Halton police officer “reassured me that there were numerous police officers involved in these investment deals and that Grozelle had a solid track record … Grozelle and I met for lunch on a handful of occasions.” They discussed prospective investments and “the meetings served as an opportunity for me to do my due diligence on Grozelle’s business.”
When Kavanagh asked for details about the investments, he was told they included Hollywood films, startup ventures, real estate and short-term bridging loans for restaurants.
hat diversification “gave me a sense of security,” he said.
Apart from those meetings, all his communication with Grozelle was through text, WhatsApp and emails.
Over the following months, Kavanagh watched his neighbour, who invested with Grozelle, consistently receive payments.
“I came to believe the investment was not as risky as I had initially believed and it was likely lucrative instead.”
In May 2022, Kavanagh invested with Grozelle.
The initial investment was $15,000. The interest was paid, although sometimes it came late. Grozelle chalked that up to “unforeseen circumstances, such as health issues,” according to Kavanagh’s affidavit.
Kavanagh gained confidence in the arrangement as he made more money. He rolled over the funds he invested and added to that.
In October 2022, he sold his home and invested the proceeds — $735,000 — with Grozelle. He moved his family to Thailand.
“Upon our relocation to Thailand, the payments from Grozelle became increasingly infrequent,” Kavanagh said. “After several months of repeated lies and broken promises, it became apparent that something was seriously amiss.”
Kavanagh contacted Grozelle and was assured he would get his money.
He didn’t.
Grozelle stopped taking his calls.
Kavanagh is out $630,000 in principal alone.
“The emotional, financial and psychological toll cannot be overstated,” Kavanagh said in his affidavit. “We envisioned a future where we could integrate into the local culture, establish ourselves in a new community and possibly start a business. Instead, we have been left in a state of financial ruin, unable to fulfil even basic needs and our dreams have been shattered.”
Since February 2023, the family has depended on others financially.
“My credit in Canada has been irreparably damaged and I have lost everything I worked for,” said Kavanagh. “Moreover, my reputation in Thailand has been severely damaged as a result of Grozelle’s relentless pattern of broken promises and missed deadlines.”
He is unemployed because he doesn’t have a work visa. He has forfeited deposits on vehicles and land in Thailand.
“In Thai culture, the concept of ‘losing face’ is of paramount importance, and Grozelle’s continued failure to honour his commitments has led to repeated public humiliations.”
Kavanagh cannot afford to return to Canada. His 20-year marriage is under stress and his daughters are unable to have the life they hoped for in Thailand.
As well, Kavanagh is unable to visit his ailing mother in Ireland because he cannot afford to make the trip.
“I am now left with nothing.”
Courtesy of Opinion Article at Hamilton Spectator – February 20, 2025
