Rhino Onward International—or ROI—launched in 2022 claiming that its cutting-edge tech would make it a major player in Green Hydrogen. Instead, investors claim the founders used their funds to collect luxury cars, pay off bills, and otherwise fuel their extravagant lifestyles.
By John Hyatt, Forbes Staff
Rhino Onward International, or ROI as it called itself, launched in 2022 with some big promises. The renewables development firm claimed that its “proprietary process and technology” put it in position “to assume the leading role in Green Hydrogen production.” The company said it was building a green hydrogen plant in Arizona that would be worth about $530 million within 5 years, according to marketing materials it shared with investors.
ROI raised $31 million from over 200 investors but apparently only invested $200,000 in the business; the firm’s promoters Paul Croft and J.D. Frost diverted the rest of the investors’ money to themselves and entities they control, according to an investor lawsuit filed in Illinois last month, which cited bank records obtained through subpoenas. Beginning in 2021 until last year, Croft, a 42-year-old entrepreneur living in Chicago, and Frost, a 40-year-old accountant based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised approximately $46 million from a series of phony renewables investment schemes, which the pair used to live extravagantly, pay employees at their tax advisory business, pay down short-term loans and even lend money to embattled professional hockey player Robin Lehner, according to allegations in lawsuits, bankruptcy filings, former investors and ex-employees of Croft’s and Frost’s businesses who spoke with Forbes on the record, and others with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak about sensitive information.
About 230 people invested in ROI and related ventures, and many of them were clients of Croft & Frost, the pair’s eponymous accounting and tax advisory business, according to the class action complaint and those familiar with the case. Some investors were employees of Croft & Frost and of ROI who had believed ROI was a legitimate venture. Croft & Frost abruptly shut down and laid off all of its employees in September 2023. ROI’s website is still up, but the company has functionally ceased to exist.
“It became clear they were just using the money to pay for their extravagant lifestyle and pay off debts,” says Sarah Bivans, former director of client services at Crost & Frost, who personally invested about $50,000 in ROI. “I don’t know if there was ever a true business plan.”
“No investor was told their money would go to pay off hard money loans, pay for Croft’s incredible car collection, or cover Frost’s $27,000 per month American Express bill,” the Illinois complaint states. Croft appears to have collected three Ferraris, one Maserati, one Bentley, and one Range Rover, according to his various Instagram posts in 2022 and 2023 of himself with the cars. “My goal is to have 29 vehicles, working on #6 right now,” he captioned one photo of himself with a Bentley in November 2022. “The fraud on investors is obvious and clearly shown in the financial records for the entities involved in this case,” says Ross Good, an attorney for Loftus & Eisenberg, the law firm representing the investor plaintiffs in the Illinois case.
Croft and Frost face a barrage of lawsuits. In addition to the Illinois lawsuit, investors brought a class action complaint earlier this month in federal court, which contained many of the same fraud allegations. In Arizona, a man sued Croft and Frost, alleging he had been “swindled, due to misleading and false representations.” In New York, hard-money lenders filed lawsuits to get back millions of dollars that Croft and Frost allegedly borrowed in the form of short-term, high interest loans. Federal prosecutors have been investigating the businessmen and their dealings, according to three sources familiar with the matter who spoke with Forbes. Frost’s attorney Sam D. Elliott declined to comment. Melinda Power, Croft’s attorney, also declined to comment.
The two men have promoted themselves as financial gurus with the midas touch. “One hundred percent I’m a billionaire,” Croft, wearing a gold cross around his neck, boasted on the Unconventional Money Moves podcast in June 2022, during which he claimed to have a net worth somewhere between $1.8 billion and $3.8 billion. But Croft appears to be far less wealthy than he claims—he took out a $600,000 mortgage for an $800,000 home purchase in 2021, property records show. His online audience is seemingly manufactured: Croft’s Instagram boasts an incredible two million followers, but his recent posts have received fewer than 50 likes each. He was arrested on domestic battery charges in September 2022 (charges were never brought). Ten days later, his then-wife Chersti Croft filed for divorce, which was completed this February, according to public records.
Frost meanwhile styled himself as a faith-driven financial advisor guided by Christian ethics. On YouTube, he made videos of himself offering advice to entrepreneurs and small business owners. In a weekly email to subscribers, he talked about the importance of prayer and building trust in relationships. He talked with clients about the lessons he learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. His Daily Ledger podcast, launched in 2021, published dozens of episodes and hosted guests like the popular investor influencer Grant Cardone, whom Frost called his mentor. (Cardone says he has “no intimate details or understanding of his business” and that he has been a mentor to “tens of millions” of people).
Posted on July 13, 2023 by Paul Croft. Caption: “Never forget that 5 years ago you wished for this & all the sacrifices you made along the way. 🦏” Instagram @therealpaulyc819
Frost could be persuasive. Darian Woolbright, a single mom and real estate broker in Oklahoma, met him through a financial coach in 2021, and he convinced her to invest over $330,000, all her savings, into ROI. In one instance, when Woolbright was thinking about borrowing against a rental property she owned to finance another investment, Frost assured Woolbright she should take out that loan—only she should invest the borrowed sums into ROI. “Now I have a $120,000 equity line that I’m paying $980 a month to for nothing,” says Woolbright.“He was just taking all the money he could from everybody he could.”
Frost and Croft became partners in December 2019 when they formed Croft & Frost LLC, a tax and accounting firm headquartered in Illinois that claimed to “transcend traditional accounting and wealth creation.” It’s not clear how they first met.
Croft, who is originally from Duluth, Minnesota, began his career in insurance. As a salesman for Northwestern Mutual, he had been “ranked 6th out of approximately 1,500 financial professionals in the country,” Croft wrote in his online bio. In 2008, Croft was permitted to resign from Northwestern Mutual while under internal review for “allegedly altering and failing to disclose material information” on a customer’s application, and for allegedly “failing to disclose material information” on two of his own insurance applications, according to a regulatory disclosure.
Frost, a certified accountant, comes from a wealthy Chattanooga family. His father, Steven Frost, is the owner of Tuftco Corp., a carpet mill machinery supplier with 250 employees. The younger Frost, while running Croft & Frost and promoting various investment schemes, was also working for his dad’s company: in an email seen by Forbes dated October 2022, Frost Jr. was using a Tuftco email address. (J.D. Frost no longer works at Tuftco, Gary Patrick, a lawyer representing his father Steven Frost, told Forbes).
Croft and Frost purportedly grew their advisory by employing a niche strategy—filing amended tax returns for previous years’ tax filings to get bigger refunds for their clients, according to the Illinois complaint. During its short-lived heights, the business employed about 60 people, many of whom worked in Chattanooga out of an office building Frost had purchased. “[It] started as a legitimate accounting firm with a traditional accounting practice, [but] over time Croft and Frost eventually saw the accounting firm and its clientele as a potential for recruiting investors,” the federal complaint states.
In 2021, Frost began soliciting money for a renewables venture, Solarcode Investments, from clients in Well Fund, LLC, a real estate investment firm in which Frost was a partner, according to the Illinois and federal complaints. Jordan Foe, who worked for Emerald Life Insurance, a small life insurance broker owned by Croft, recalls that he and other Emerald employees were offered the chance to invest in the Well Fund, and that they were instructed to pitch the investment opportunity to clients and prospective life insurance clients. “The whole setup didn’t seem right to me,” recalls Foe, who worked for Emerald for six months beginning in January 2021. He says that one of his colleagues (who could not be reached for comment) invested, and lost, $36,000 in the venture. “The nail in the coffin for me was when J.D. [Frost] refused to provide a prospectus on what the Well Fund was investing in.”
Solarcode, it turns out, is affiliated with professional hockey player Robin Lehner, the star goaltender for the Vegas Golden Knights, who filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in December, claiming $27.4 million in debts and assets of just $5 million. Solarcode was – and may still be – owned by Michael Lehner, Robin’s father, according to Patrick Downes, an attorney who represented the hockey star. It appears that Croft and Frost were using investor money to lend it to Robin Lehner, whose bankruptcy filings reveal that Croft and entities controlled by Croft were among Lehner’s many creditors. One source familiar with the matter told Forbes that two entities controlled by Croft and Frost, Taurus and Well Fund, transferred over $3 million to Robin Lehner and Solarcode.
“Mr. Robin Lehner was unaware of any capital being raised by Paul Croft,” Zachariah Larson, another attorney representing Robin Lehner, said in an emailed statement to Forbes. “Robin’s understanding was Croft was a financier of his father’s company.” Yet, Solarcode “had no actual business operations and shuddered in or around January or March of 2022,” the federal complaint states.
Solarcode and the Well Fund were preludes to Croft and Frost’s bigger scheme: Rhino Onward International LLC, which they incorporated in early 2022. “Out of nowhere, this renewable company was pulled out of thin air one day,” recalls Bivans, the Croft & Frost director. “They started saying employees had the opportunity to invest.”
To convince investors the business was legit, Croft and Frost put together sophisticated investor documents, full of charts and spreadsheets, touting ROI, its supposedly proprietary technologies in green hydrogen, and all the money it would make ($36 million of net income in 2024, the firm projected). Croft and Frost also hired staff for ROI, many of whom were former employees at their other business ventures. Some employees at ROI were also investors who lost money, according to individuals familiar with the case, but others seemingly benefited from the alleged fraud. “Paul and JD had random people on payroll that were making more money than people on the executive team and they weren’t even employees at the company,” says Bivans. “Tons of money went to these random friends.”
Despite supposedly partnering with multinational corporations, ROI was always asking for more money from Frost’s and Crost’s clientele and contacts. “I remembered [Frost] was saying, ‘We just need another $3 million to start building the plant,” Woolbright recalls.
In April 2023, Frost encouraged ROI’s investors to put in more money during an investor videoconference (a recording of which Forbes obtained). “We’re going to ask you to consider whatever amount you’ve invested, to invest another 10 to 20% of that amount,” said Frost, who claimed that ROI needed the money to complete its Series B investment round. “We will also have our Series C and Series D funds open up once we start construction, so that gives you the opportunity to roll your investment again,” he added. In June 2023, on another investor video call (a recording of which was also seen by Forbes), Frost again encouraged ROI’s investors to put in even more money. By then, Croft and Frost were likely in crisis mode. In December 2022, their tax business failed to pay employees on time—and when they did make the payments, the paystubs came from Rhino Onward International, rather than Crost & Frost. During the first half of 2023, Crost & Frost repeatedly missed payroll for its employees, only to make up the payments later, says Blivans. “We would go 4 to 6 weeks without pay, then they’d get caught up,” she recalls. “There was always this excuse… They were just moving money around and paying from any account they had money in.”
By September the gig was finally up. Croft and Frost abruptly shut down their accounting business on September 12, 2023, notifying all employees they’d been terminated with immediate effect, and leaving all of their accounting and tax clients stranded three days before their quarterly tax filings were due. When investors in ROI asked what was going on, Croft and Frost allegedly ignored them.
“I cried for probably a month straight,” says Bivans, whose boyfriend also invested in ROI—a whopping $500,000 of his savings, she told Forbes. “I felt this heavy sense of guilt.”
After Croft & Frost closed, the younger Frost put up for sale the Chattanooga office building where the firm had been headquartered. Joseph Investments, an entity controlled by Frost’s parents, purchased the building at auction for $4.6 million, according to the federal class action lawsuit, which states that Frost’s Parents also acquired adjoining lots for $1.2 million. “Frost, with the intent to hinder, delay and defraud his Creditors… orchestrated the fraudulent transfers,” says the complaint, which names Steven Frost and Lisa Frost as defendants. Gary Patrick, the attorney representing Steven Frost, said that the transaction was above-board, and that the Frost parents deny any wrongdoing and are seeking to be removed as defendants from the lawsuit.
In New York, lender Redstone Advance is seeking $7.8 million in payment from Croft and Frost. Frost’s accounting license was permanently revoked in February, when he entered into a consent order with Tennessee’s Department of Commerce and Insurance. Last week, Doug McCloy, a Chattanooga man and partner in the Well Fund who had sued Frost last year for allegedly siphoning Well Fund investor capital, reportedly obtained a $6 million judgment from a Tennessee judge against Frost, who did not dispute the allegations in court. In the Illinois case, the plaintiffs lawyers are scheduled to present a motion for class certification on May 6.
Despite the legal peril, Croft has not deactivated his Instagram, which includes many photos of himself with his cars. In one, Croft, wearing a checkered red sport coat, stands proudly in front of his neon green Ferrari. “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty,” reads the caption, a quote from Philippians 4:12-13. “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”
