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

He Sold the Dream of a Green Future. The Product Was a Lie.

Aspiration Partners launched in 2013 with a pitch that was catnip for anyone who had ever felt guilty about where their bank account was sleeping at night. It was a financial services company built around environmental sustainability: plant trees, offset your carbon footprint, do capitalism but make it feel good. Joseph Neal Sanberg was one of its co-founders, a board member, and by September 2021, he and his entities controlled 29.82% of Aspiration’s shares.

Sanberg was also personally desperate for the company’s stock to go up. Between March 2020 and at least November 2021, he had taken out more than $100 million (enough to buy roughly 400 median-priced American homes) in loans using over ten million Aspiration shares as collateral. If the stock fell, his lenders could foreclose. He had every reason to do whatever it took to make the company look like a rocket ship.

In late 2020, Aspiration rolled out a new business line under a subsidiary called Aspiration Sustainable Impact Services (ASIS): selling carbon offsets and reforestation services, meaning companies and individuals would pay Aspiration, which would then pay a third party to plant trees. This new line of business became the vehicle for one of the most brazen revenue fabrication schemes the SEC has documented in the green finance sector.

The Blueprint: Recruit, Sign, Wire, Repeat

Starting in December 2020, Sanberg began recruiting people he knew personally: friends, associates, small businesses, and religious organizations. He told them directly that they could receive reforestation and carbon offset services from Aspiration at absolutely no cost to them. He or his entities would cover the payments. All they had to do was sign a document.

That document was a “Letter of Intent” (LOI): a one-to-two-page agreement that appeared, on its face, to obligate the signer to pay Aspiration between $25,000 and $750,000 on a recurring monthly or quarterly basis for tree-planting services. The LOIs did not disclose that the signers were not actually expected to pay. The SEC complaint is explicit: these LOIs were “illusory” and “a sham.”

Sanberg Locked Down Every Piece of the Machine

Sanberg used his position as a co-founder and large shareholder to block Aspiration’s own staff from communicating with the fake customers. He prevented the company’s standard onboarding process, which would have checked whether customers could actually afford their commitments. He personally controlled which invoices could be sent, and when.

When Aspiration’s CEO asked for a customer’s mailing address to send an invoice, Sanberg replied: “You should send it to me. And for all my relationships with [the LOI Customers] please email me the invoices to pass on.” On another occasion, when the CEO asked permission to send two months of unpaid invoices to a customer, Sanberg permitted only one to go out. Every financial touchpoint with these fake customers ran through Sanberg.

The Money Loop That Made Fake Revenue Look Real

When invoices came due, Sanberg wired money from accounts he controlled either directly to the fake customer, or through a separate affiliated entity, and the fake customer would then forward it to Aspiration. On June 14 and 15, 2021, Sanberg wired $450,000 (the cost of building a community health clinic) to one customer, who then wired $425,000 back to Aspiration. Sanberg did this twice in two days. Aspiration recorded it as $850,000 in earned revenue. It was Sanberg’s own money, laundered through a middleman to look like a paying customer.

In another documented instance, Sanberg wired $350,000 (enough to cover college tuition for 12 students at a state university) to a Sanberg-affiliated entity on March 22, 2022. That same day, the entity transferred the $350,000 to Aspiration with a note indicating it was for a specific customer’s invoice. Aspiration booked it as revenue. These payments, which the SEC confirmed totaled approximately $33,575,000 (more than the annual budget of many rural county governments), covered every single payment made by LOI customers to Aspiration from 2021 to 2022.

He Got Paid to Run the Scam He Invented

Here is where the scheme becomes a closed loop. While Sanberg was secretly wiring money to fake customers so they could pay Aspiration, Aspiration was paying Sanberg millions of dollars for “advisory services” related to recruiting those same fake customers. In 2021, Aspiration paid Sanberg and his entities over $3.6 million (enough to fully fund 72 teachers’ salaries for a year) in cash through a series of service contracts signed by the company’s CEO. In January 2022, the board handed him an additional $8 million cash bonus (enough to buy a small apartment building in most American cities) and 9 million shares of restricted stock.

Sanberg then used nearly $2.3 million of that $8 million bonus to pay invoices for approximately five LOI customers in early February 2022, the month after receiving it. The company paid him to recruit fake customers, and he used that payment to keep the fake customers’ invoices current, which kept Aspiration recognizing more fake revenue, which justified more payouts to Sanberg. This was a self-financing fraud machine.

The Numbers That Never Added Up

By the end of fiscal year 2021, the LOI scheme had artificially inflated Aspiration’s revenue by approximately $44 million (enough to provide a year of clean drinking water infrastructure to a small city). Of that $44 million, approximately $33,875,000 remained completely uncollected as of December 31, 2021, meaning it had never actually arrived at Aspiration from any genuine customer. The company’s accounts receivable balance had ballooned to approximately $104 million by June 2022, which was higher than the company’s entire reported revenue for 2021. By that point, the fiction had grown larger than the business it was supposed to represent.

27 People Who Didn’t Know They Were Props

The SEC complaint includes a full chart of all 27 LOI customers, identified only by initials to protect their identities. These are the people Sanberg recruited, ranging from individuals to small businesses to religious organizations. Each one signed a contract promising to pay Aspiration between $25,000 and $750,000 per month or quarter, believing Sanberg would cover the bill.

Source: SEC Complaint, Exhibit within complaint document. Initials as provided by the SEC. Amounts represent purported monthly or quarterly payment obligations.

He Looked Investors in the Eye and Lied

With fake revenue on the books, Aspiration began pursuing a SPAC merger to go public, partnering with a company called InterPrivate Financial Partners III. In August 2021, Aspiration and InterPrivate published a joint press release and investor presentation. One slide was titled “Explosive growth from a standing start.” The corporate ESG business had, according to the presentation, “Scaled Rapidly.” The revenue behind those claims was almost entirely manufactured.

Sanberg pitched investors directly and personally. Investor 1 purchased over $50 million (enough to fund 1,250 full four-year college scholarships) in Aspiration stock between September and December 2021, after Sanberg told their Chief Investment Officer, in person and over the phone, that Aspiration’s ESG business “represented a large area of profitability.” After the purchase, Sanberg emailed the investor’s CIO calling Aspiration “a lot more efficiently and profitably than projected.” The investor’s CIO later described Sanberg’s representations as “extremely important” and making the company look “incredibly well” financially.

Investor 2 put in $250 million (more than the annual budget of many mid-sized American cities) on December 15, 2021. Before signing, their managing director asked directly whether the LOI agreements were “one-off consulting agreements.” Sanberg replied in writing that they were “definitely not one-off consulting agreements” and claimed Aspiration was building “long term relationship[s]” with customers who were “recurring, sticky and value-add.” Every word of that was false. The customers had been told in advance they would never pay.

He Pushed Fake Numbers Even After His Own CFO Said Stop

By early 2022, Aspiration’s Chief Financial Officer was sending Sanberg explicit written warnings. The CFO told him the company had “some revenue recognition risk,” that “collection has been poor,” and that KPMG might force Aspiration to “reverse or write off some revenue.” The CFO’s formal recommendation was to present investors with a conservative projection of $255 million in revenue for fiscal year 2022. The full Aspiration board, including Sanberg, received those lower projections on March 31, 2022.

Sanberg ignored all of it. On April 6, 2022, he emailed a prospective investor a confidential “Investor Addendum” projecting that Aspiration would achieve “$386 million in total revenues in 2022” and told the investor these were “internal projections” that were “substantially ahead of the public projections that Aspiration disclosed to the marketplace.” That gap between the public number ($254 million) and the private pitch ($386 million) was $131 million (more than the annual operating budget of a mid-sized American city). Sanberg was running two sets of books: one for the public and one for the people he was trying to close.

On April 25, 2022, a Sanberg-copied email to another prospective investor projected over $385 million in revenue for fiscal year 2022, with over $280 million expected from “Enterprise Sustainability Services.” The prospective investors who received these inflated projections said they considered them important in deciding whether to invest.

What Money Cannot Measure: The Human Wreckage

The easiest way to discuss this fraud is through its dollar figures, because the numbers are staggering. But focusing only on the capital at stake erases the people who actually got hurt. Aspiration’s pitch was specific: it told consumers, investors, and the broader public that putting money into this company was a moral act. It tied financial participation to environmental redemption. People who cared about the planet, who were trying to do something right with their savings or their businesses, made decisions based on a story Sanberg knew was false while he was telling it.

Consider the character of the fake customers themselves. The SEC complaint notes that Sanberg’s network included “friends, associates, small businesses, and religious organizations.” These were people who trusted him. He approached them not as a broker pitching a product, but as a friend offering a favor: sign this document, get free tree-planting services, help me out. The LOI customers did not know they were being used as props in a securities fraud. They signed because someone they trusted asked them to, and they believed the assurances they were given. Their identities, their relationships, and their goodwill were instrumentalized without their full knowledge.

Aspiration’s own employees saw what was happening and tried to raise the alarm. An Aspiration accountant filed a formal internal complaint on March 18, 2022, citing concerns about “related party transactions,” missing documentation, uncollected balances, and invoicing irregularities. This person was doing their job, following their professional and ethical obligations, and was operating inside a company whose co-founder had structured the entire deception to prevent exactly this kind of scrutiny. That accountant filed the complaint anyway. The Special Committee was formed. And shortly after, KPMG walked out the door.

When KPMG resigned as Aspiration’s auditor in July 2022, citing “revenue transactions that had characteristics of fraud,” every employee at Aspiration felt the consequence. A company that cannot keep its auditor cannot go public, cannot raise capital, and cannot sustain operations. The SPAC merger with InterPrivate was ultimately abandoned in August 2023. In early 2025, the company’s parent entity filed for bankruptcy. Every person who worked at Aspiration, who believed in its mission or needed their paycheck, paid for Sanberg’s fraud with their job security and their professional future. The company that was supposed to be saving trees was burning down everything it touched.

There is a specific kind of betrayal embedded in green fraud that regular financial fraud does not carry. When someone lies to you about a drug’s safety or a bank’s solvency, they are exploiting your need or your greed. When someone lies to you about saving the planet, they are exploiting your conscience. The investors who put $300 million (more than the GDP of a small island nation) into Aspiration were not purely chasing returns. They were, at least in part, trying to align their capital with their values. Sanberg weaponized that impulse. He took the thing that made people want to be better and used it to take their money.

The reforestation services at the center of this scheme were real in one narrow sense: Aspiration would pay a third party to plant trees on behalf of its customers. But those trees were being planted in a context that was entirely fabricated. The “customers” funding the planting were not actually funding anything. The growth narrative that justified investor confidence was a construction. Whatever genuine environmental benefit those trees might have provided existed in the shadow of a fraud that destroyed a company, wiped out hundreds of millions in investor capital, and ensured that Aspiration, which could have become a genuine force for sustainable finance, instead became a cautionary tale used to discredit the entire sector.

Their Own Words, on the Record

These are direct quotations and factual statements from the SEC complaint filed on August 21, 2025. Nothing here is paraphrased. These are the words that will be read aloud in a federal courtroom.

“Figure out how to get me the money tomorrow or I’ll be in default. It’s your turn to do what needs to be done. . . . But if you don’t get me the money tomorrow we are all f…ed. Get me the money. Your turn to figure it out like I have for so long. Wire it to the [Sanberg-entity] account. If you don’t then [the lender] will foreclose. This will give you a good taste of what I have to experience every day. I hate you and I hate this company and I don’t want to work anymore with you [ ]. You are so oblivious to what you’ve forced me to have to do.”

Joseph Sanberg, in a text message to Aspiration’s CEO, November 29, 2020. This message was sent one month before he began recruiting fake customers. — SEC Complaint, paragraph 24.

“You should send it to me. And for all my relationships with [the LOI Customers] please email me the invoices to pass on.”

SEC Aspiration Partners inflating company stock priceDownload

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

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