He Built a $44M Green Empire on a Foundation of Lies.

The Green Dream Was a Lie

The people thought they were investing in a better world. Boy, were they wrong, wrong… wrong…… -.-

Their money was supposed to fund a revolution in sustainability, a California-based company called Aspiration Partners that promised to blend profit with principle. They wanted to plant trees, offsetting carbon, while banking with a conscience. One investor poured in over $50 million. Another, a cool quarter-billion dollars. They looked at the numbers and saw what the company’s co-founder, Joseph Sanberg, wanted them to see: “explosive growth.”

But the explosion was a illusionary mirage. The growth was a fiction. And the dream they invested in was an elaborate lie, constructed with sham contracts, secret payments, and a whole lotta nerve.

A House of Cards Built on Phantom Customers

So, how do you fake a booming business? For Joseph Sanberg, the scheme was as audacious as Bo in its simplicity. Between 2021 and 2022, Aspiration needed to look like a world-beater to attract the big money needed to go public via a SPAC merger.

The company had a new line of business selling reforestation services—basically, corporations could pay Aspiration to have trees planted and offset their carbon footprint. It was the perfect story for an eco-conscious era.

Sanberg’s job was to sell that story. And sell it he did.

He went out and recruited around 27 “customers.” They were a motley crew of friends, small businesses, and even religious organizations. He presented them to Aspiration as the real deal, complete with official-looking “letters of intent” (LOIs) promising to pay recurring fees from $25,000 up to a staggering $750,000 for the company’s green services.

There was just one tiny problem. These customers had no intention of ever paying a dime. In fact, Sanberg had personally assured them they wouldn’t have to. He just needed their signatures on the dotted line. The paperwork was a prop. The LOIs were a sham.

But a business needs cash flow, right? An invoice goes out, a payment comes in. To make the illusion look real, Sanberg secretly paid the customers’ first bills himself.

He’d wire money from his own accounts to the “customer,” who would then dutifully send it on to Aspiration. Sometimes, he’d just pay Aspiration directly through another one of his entities. It was a masterclass in circular logic: he was the salesman, the customer, and the benefactor, all at once.

He controlled everything, insulating his phantom customers from the rest of the company. When Aspiration’s CEO needed an address to send an invoice, Sanberg’s instructions were blunt: “You should send it to me. And for all my relationships… please email me the invoices to pass on.” He was the gatekeeper, the puppet master ensuring no one looked too closely at the puppets.

How the Deception Unfolded:

The Ripple Effect of a Lie

The fallout was immense. That “explosive growth” from Aspiration’s new environmental business? It accounted for about $44 million in revenue for 2021. It was the engine of the company’s story. And it was fake.

The investors who bought the story lost over $300 million. Their belief in a sustainable future was weaponized against them. But the damage went deeper. This wasn’t just about money; it was about trust. The very idea of “ESG” investing—putting capital toward companies that do good—took a massive hit. Sanberg’s alleged scheme treated sustainability not as a mission, but as a marketing gimmick to be exploited.

And what about Sanberg himself? While investors were being fed a fantasy, he was getting paid. Handsomely. In 2021 alone, Aspiration paid him and his entities over $3.6 million in cash. In January 2022, as the scheme was in full swing, the board granted him a one-time cash bonus of $8 million and 9 million shares of stock.

The irony is sickening: he was rewarded with millions for manufacturing the fake business, and then, according to the SEC, used nearly $2.3 million of that bonus money to continue making secret payments on behalf of his phantom customers. He was allegedly using the company’s own money to keep the con going.

The scheme finally unraveled from the inside.

An accountant blew the whistle on “related party transactions” and ballooning uncollected balances. The auditors, KPMG, took one look and resigned, citing transactions that had “characteristics of fraud.” The SPAC deal evaporated. And Aspiration’s parent company eventually filed for bankruptcy. The lie had consumed its host.

A System Primed for the Story

It’s easy to point the finger at one man, but Sanberg’s alleged fraud didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened during the great SPAC boom, a frantic period where Wall Street was obsessed with finding the next big thing. Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs, offered a faster, less scrutinized path to the stock market. All you needed was a good story.

And boy, did Aspiration have a good story.

A fintech company saving the planet? It was perfect for the moment. The system wasn’t just vulnerable to a story like this; it was hungry for it. The emphasis was on dizzying projections and rapid growth, not on boring things like, well, actual paying customers.

This “growth at all costs” mindset created the perfect environment for a scheme predicated on appearances over reality. It’s a tale as old as time: when the pressure to show hyper-growth meets a trendy sector with weak oversight, bad things happen.

Justice on Paper

Now, the regulators have stepped in. The SEC’s complaint is a methodical takedown of the whole affair. They want to permanently bar Sanberg from serving as an officer or director of a public company. They want him to pay back all his “ill-gotten gains” and face civil penalties.

But what does justice really look like here?

Is a fine just the cost of doing business? The investors who lost hundreds of millions are unlikely to be made whole. The employees who lost their jobs when the company crumbled won’t get them back. And the public’s trust in the promise of green capitalism is a little more broken than it was before.

The SEC’s action is a crucial step in accountability. But it’s also unfortunately, a post-mortem. It’s a detailed account of a disaster after it has already happened.

Beyond the Wreckage

The story of Aspiration must be seen as a learning lesson. It teaches us that a good mission statement is not a substitute for a good business model. It reminds us that in the gold rush for the “green economy,” there will always be those selling fool’s gold.

Real change requires more than just punishing the bad actors after the fact. It requires building a system where this kind of deception is harder to pull off in the first place. It means demanding stronger due diligence from investors, especially when a company’s story seems too good to be true. It means creating a culture of corporate governance where an accountant’s concerns are heard long before the auditors have to flee the building.

Investing in a better world is a noble goal. But it requires seeing the world as it is, not just as we wish it to be. It requires looking past the flashy presentations and asking the simple, brutal question that could have saved Aspiration’s investors a fortune: “Are the customers actually paying their bills?”

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the Securities and Exchange Commission Complaint, Case 8:25-cv-01848, filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California on August 21, 2025.

I found the above complaint from the SEC’s website by visiting this following link: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2025/comp26382.pdf