Lillian Arielle Markowitz, former owner of three San Diego-based surrogacy consulting businesses, has been sentenced to 24 months in prison for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from her clients.
At the court hearing, U.S. District Judge Todd W. Robinson also ordered Markowitz to pay $389,142.00 in restitution to her former clients.
According to court documents, Markowitz owned three businesses — My Donor Cycle, Surrogacy Beyond Borders, and Expecting Surrogacy — through which she marketed herself as a surrogacy consultant to those seeking to realise their dreams of becoming parents.
Beginning around 2018, when Markowitz and her businesses began to experience financial distress, she devised a scheme to steal money from her surrogacy clients by, among other things, submitting fraudulent requests to withdraw client funds from the escrow company where the funds were maintained.
Markowitz submitted four fraudulent escrow disbursement requests, including one in which she forged a client’s signature in order to steal his escrow funds.
In her plea agreement, Markowitz admitted that from 2019 through 2021, she defrauded nine additional clients by falsely promising that their funds would be deposited into an escrow account and that their funds would be accessed only to pay for expenses related to their respective surrogacy journey.
Instead, Markowitz deposited these clients’ funds into her business checking account, then immediately used them to cover general business expenses, expenses related to other clients’ surrogacy journeys, expenses related to her unrelated yoga and float business, and to pay for her personal expenses.
