Fugitive Santa Monica CEO Bernhard Fritsch Added to FBI's Most Wanted Fraudsters List, $150,000 Reward Offered

Bernhard Eugen Fritsch spent years telling investors his celebrity-endorsement app was about to land a Disney deal. A federal jury didn't buy it, and neither should anyone still looking for him.

On September 3, 2026, the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office announced it was adding Fritsch, 65, to its newly created Most Wanted Fraudsters list. Assistant Director in Charge Patrick Grandy made the call. "Southern California is a target-rich environment for fraudsters, among them Bernhard Fritsch, who was convicted of ripping off investors of millions and fleeing the United States prior to his sentencing," Grandy said, according to the Daily Breeze. The FBI is offering up to $150,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

The Scheme

Fritsch founded and ran StarClub Inc., a Santa Monica startup that pitched an app called StarSite. The pitch: help celebrities and social media influencers monetize brand endorsements and split ad revenue with them. Federal prosecutors charged him in August 2017, alleging he raised roughly $35 million from investors between January 2014 and August 2017, according to Patch.

To get that money, prosecutors said Fritsch lied. He told investors StarClub was on the verge of striking deals with or landing investment from major media companies including Disney. He claimed the company pulled in $15 million in revenue in 2015. He said a global investment bank and other major media firms were already on his cap table. None of it held up, according to the FBI.

Instead of building the technology, Fritsch used investor cash on himself. The FBI says at least $7.3 million went toward personal expenses: a McLaren, a Rolls-Royce, upgrades to his yacht, and renovations to his Malibu mansion near Carbon Beach. The FBI seized the yacht and both cars. One victim alone put in more than $20 million over two years and introduced Fritsch to other investors who lost millions more.

A Los Angeles federal jury convicted Fritsch of one count of wire fraud in April 2025 after a nine-day trial. The jury acquitted him on a second wire fraud count, meaning prosecutors did not prove every allegation they brought. Fritsch has not spoken publicly through his attorneys in the reporting available, and no defense has been presented in these sources beyond the trial's mixed verdict.

The Run

Convicted, Fritsch stayed out on bond. Then, ahead of a bond revocation hearing in June 2025, he vanished. The FBI says he fled to Los Mochis in Sinaloa, Mexico. A federal warrant went out June 3, 2025, after he failed to show up.

Mexican immigration authorities picked him up in September 2025 carrying false identification, a violation of Mexican immigration law, according to the FBI. They released him with orders to check in with a Mexican court every two weeks. Instead, he ran again, this time to Munich, Germany, on October 6, 2025.

Two weeks later, on October 20, 2025, a federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced Fritsch in absentia. He got 15 years in prison, a $35,000 fine, and was ordered to pay $26,806,901 in restitution.

He didn't run alone. In June 2026, his girlfriend, 63-year-old Lucinda Jane Weist Manera of Malibu, also known as Lucy Weist, pleaded guilty to acting as an accessory after the fact for helping him get from Mexico to Germany, according to the Santa Monica Mirror and Westside Today.

A New Kind of Wanted List

Fritsch is one of three fugitives named to the FBI's Most Wanted Fraudsters list, alongside cases out of the Seattle and Tampa field offices. The Daily Breeze reports the list is separate from the traditional Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and was launched in June 2026 specifically to generate public tips on financial fraud cases. It's a new tool, and Fritsch is one of its first test cases.

The coverage across the Times of India, Santa Monica Mirror, Westside Today, Santa Monica Daily Press, Patch, and Daily Breeze is largely consistent on the core facts, all working from the same FBI press release. None of them, including the FBI's own announcement, address why a convicted fraudster with a German passport and a documented flight risk was allowed to remain free on bond after his conviction in the first place, or whether that decision is being reviewed. That question has no answer in the record so far.

Fritsch is believed to be living in or near Munich, according to the FBI. Germany's extradition posture toward its own nationals convicted of financial crimes in the U.S. will determine whether the $150,000 reward and the 15-year sentence ever mean anything beyond paper.