Rand Report Reveals 57-month Sentence

As ArkansasBusiness.com reported late last month, oil-and-gas scammer Jeff Rand, formerly of North Little Rock and Hot Springs, went to prison proclaiming himself “an honest guy.”

In the usual manner of federal judges, U.S. District Judge Robert Dawson was poker-faced as Rand explained that he “pled to the problem” last summer only “to stop the train” after more than a decade of investigation.

“I’d had enough,” Rand said.

The “problem” was a fraud that cost at least 138 victims almost $8 million. And we’ve learned that more of those victims were Arkansans than we realized.

The final report by the trustee in Rand’s bankruptcy case in Texas listed 107 creditor claims, including eight with Arkansas addresses.

Those victims are less likely to be made whole since Judge Dawson was just too mean to let Rand go back to his new home near Seattle with a sentence of probation rather than prison.

If he’d been allowed to continue working as a “consultant” in the oil and gas industry, Rand could probably earn enough to pay back $7.92 million in restitution “in the next year or two,” defense attorney Morse U. Gist Jr. of Hot Springs told the judge.

Dawson sentenced Rand to 57 months in prison and three more years of supervised release. And the judge ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to take Rand into custody immediately.

He’ll eventually be transferred to a federal prison, location as yet undetermined. But his first stop was the Saline County jail.