Real estate investment funds are supposed to acquire properties, generate rental income, and distribute the proceeds to investors. What Roger David Hardcastle, 61, of Fresno, California, John Giarmarco, 70, and Vanessa Lung-Medlock, 46, of Clovis, California, built at Voyager Pacific Capital Management, LLC between July 2020 and early 2025 was the opposite: a fund that paid investors with other investors’ money, booked fictitious property sales to create phantom revenue, and funneled millions to entities the executives personally owned.
According to the SEC’s civil complaint filed April 20, 2026, the trio caused Voyager to use more than $15 million in fresh investor capital to cover monthly preferred-return payments — money the fund had not actually earned. Hardcastle, it now emerges, was simultaneously running a second fraud through a separate hard-money lending operation, bringing his total admitted losses across both schemes to approximately $45 million. He pleaded guilty on April 21, 2026 and faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
The Takeover That Put Two Con Men in Control of a 1,200-Property Fund
Voyager Pacific Capital Management did not begin as a fraud. The company and its Opportunity Fund II had already accumulated a portfolio of approximately 1,200 residential properties before Hardcastle and Giarmarco acquired control of the firm in July 2020. Of those 1,200 properties, only about 200 were acquired after the pair took over. What they inherited was a functioning real estate operation. What they created in its place was a fraud that took years to unravel.
From the moment they assumed control, the presentation to investors diverged sharply from reality. Private placement memoranda, quarterly newsletters, YouTube pitch videos, and annual meetings all depicted a fund generating steady, sustainable returns under experienced management. Hardcastle was marketed to investors as a seasoned fund operator despite having owned Voyager for only weeks. Giarmarco’s credentials were worse than exaggerated — the SEC alleges his official biography, which claimed a finance degree from Fresno State and oversight of a $750 million portfolio, was simply fabricated. The fund, regulators say, was actually generating sufficient cash to support roughly a 1 percent return. The executives were paying investors considerably more.
How $15 Million in New Investor Money Plugged a Gap the Fund Could Never Fill
The math of the scheme was straightforward. The fund owed investors a preferred monthly return it could not generate through legitimate operations. To keep those payments flowing, Hardcastle, Giarmarco, and Medlock used approximately $15.5 million in new equity investor capital — roughly 89 percent of the $17.5 million distributed during the relevant period — to cover distributions to existing investors. That is the mechanical definition of a Ponzi arrangement.
The shortfall existed partly because the executives had been helping themselves to the fund’s capital from the outset. The SEC alleges that Hardcastle and Giarmarco caused Voyager to transfer approximately $5.98 million from the fund to affiliated entities they personally owned or controlled. Roughly $2.9 million of that moved with no supporting documentation at all. The remaining $3 million flowed through 13 promissory notes — each of which contained an “Automatic Continuance” clause that allowed the affiliated borrowers to defer repayment indefinitely. Outside borrowers did not receive those terms. In September 2020, just after taking control, Hardcastle and Giarmarco changed the fund’s accounting policy to capitalize 85 percent of all rental home-related costs, up from approximately 76 percent — a shift that inflated the fund’s reported net income and sustained the illusion of a performing operation.
The $8.2 Million in Phantom Property Sales That Existed Only on Paper
Beginning in 2022, as the fund’s actual condition deteriorated further, Hardcastle and Medlock moved to a bolder layer of deception. They booked approximately $8.2 million in fictitious “cash sales” of fund properties to two affiliated entities — The Golden H, LLC and WHPH Investments, LLC — recording the transactions in the general ledger as completed revenue. No money changed hands. The fund retained control of the properties throughout. Purchase agreements, the SEC alleges, were signed after the fact to make the transactions appear legitimate.
The purpose of the fake sales was mechanical: they generated paper revenue that Hardcastle and Medlock then used to justify continued preferred-return distributions to investors. Because the fund was contractually prohibited from incurring debt on the properties, and lacked the capital to maintain or improve underperforming assets, the sham sales also allowed the executives to move troubled properties off the fund’s books without disclosing the transfers to investors. The fund had nine entities named as relief defendants in the SEC’s complaint, each having received proceeds the regulators are now seeking to recover, including Adagio SPE LLC, Andante SPE LLC, Brighton Cove LLC, HGM Holdings LLC, and Kastlemark LLC, among others.
The Bitwise Industries Scheme Running Simultaneously Out of the Same Fresno Office
The Voyager fraud was not Hardcastle’s only operation during this period. Simultaneously, he was running a separate scheme through Startop Investments LLC, a hard-money lending vehicle he operated alongside Andrew Adler, 32, of Greenwich, Connecticut. From December 2022 through May 2023, Hardcastle and Adler loaned approximately $20 million to Bitwise Industries, a Fresno-based startup, through Startop, then altered the loan documents to conceal the true interest rates from the outside investors they sold the loans to. They also forged the signature of Bitwise’s co-CEO Jake Soberal on the altered paperwork and concealed a $700,000 interest reserve, which they diverted into an unrelated investment without authorization. When Bitwise collapsed in May 2023, investors lost nearly everything. Adler pleaded guilty and was sentenced in June 2025 to three years and five months in federal prison. Soberal and Bitwise co-CEO Irma Olguin, Jr. were sentenced in December 2024 to 11 years and nine years in prison respectively for defrauding Bitwise’s investors and lenders out of approximately $115 million.
Despite that surrounding destruction, Voyager Pacific earned a spot on Inc. magazine’s 2023 5000 list of fastest-growing companies, receiving the recognition even as the fund hemorrhaged investor capital. The fund continued operating under Voyager’s management until mid-2025, when it was acquired by a third party at a discount, diminishing the value of every investor’s share.
Conclusion
Hardcastle pleaded guilty on April 21, 2026 to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in Case No. 1:25-cr-00016-JLT-SKO and faces sentencing before U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston on September 14, 2026, with a statutory maximum of 20 years per count. Giarmarco consented to a bifurcated civil judgment without admitting the allegations. Medlock has not settled, and the nine relief defendants remain subject to the SEC’s disgorgement claims. Investors in Opportunity Fund II who trusted a YouTube pitch and a fabricated CFO biography received a fund acquired at discount and monthly payments built entirely from their own money.
