GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – Trent Witteveen, of Montague, Mich., who operated Titan Timber, has been sentenced to 41 months in federal prison in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids after pleading guilty to wire fraud.

He was also ordered to pay more than $840,000 to victims expecting returns from what was portrayed as a legitimate timber harvesting investment opportunity.

“Witteveen stole from innocent investors by operating his sham timber business as a Ponzi scheme solely to line his own pockets,” U.S. Attorney Mark Totten said following the Nov. 18 sentencing.

According to the federal indictment, Witteveen got his start in the business as a supplier of trees working as a subcontractor or independent contractor for sawmills.

In June 2018, though, it’s alleged Witteveen for more than two years began luring investors into crooked business dealings with promises of significant returns on their money.

He supposedly needed their money to secure timber harvesting rights from landowners with hardwood and softwood trees on their properties in the northwest Lower Peninsula of the state.

According to the indictment, there were almost never any such deals in the making, though, because Witteveen had already harvested timber from the property of those landowners at an earlier time.

It was also alleged he led his victims to believe the timber on a landowner’s property had a higher value than what he knew a sawmill would pay for it to obtain more cash from his investors.

In addition, Witteveen showed his victims cashier’s checks and money orders payable to landowners to make his supposed harvesting rights contracts seem legitimate to gain the trust of investors when no such arrangements existed.

He simply put the money from his investors into his own account, authorities said.

According to authorities, he also used money from his most recent investors to repay all or some of the amount he owed to prior investors to give the appearance he was actually living up to his promised returns.

In some cases, victims feeling confident about the money they had just received gave him more of their capital in hopes of seemingly realizing further profits.

Toward the end, authorities said he collected more than $20 million from investors and used most of that money to pay his personal expenses and fund his lifestyle.

Eventually, investors demanding their money back or expecting dividends called the Federal Bureau of Investigations, which began to investigate their suspicions.

However, in his written sentencing arguments submitted to the court, defense attorney Ryan Maesen described his client’s intentions as good, initially. Maesen said the business was doing well enough for others hearing about it to want to invest.

At some point, though, he said the company began experiencing financial troubles and Witteveen started using false and altered contracts as a last resort to try to keep the business afloat.

He said his client didn’t take the money “to support a lavish lifestyle. There is no addiction to feed or creditors to pay.”

Regardless, Totten said major crimes were committed and hopes the outcome of the case deters other would-be fraudsters from causing “devastating financial harm to honest and hard-working individuals.”

According to the most recent figures from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR), the timber industry had a $26.5 billion economic impact on the state in 2022.

Michigan has 20.2 million acres of forest covering nearly one-half of the state primarily in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula, making it fifth in the continental United States for the percentage of forested land, MDNR said.

Trees from Michigan are used to make anything from building materials and furniture to paper and cardboard products.

According to MDNR, more than 88,000 jobs in the state are directly created or supported by the forest products industry.