Michael Mente desired a rare sports car.
The Los Angeles resident and founder and CEO of Revolve, a popular online fashion retailer, had a specific one in mind: a limited edition Mercedes-AMG ONE, a plug-in hybrid featuring Formula One-derived technology. The luxury car manufacturer only made 275 of them, Mente alleged in a federal lawsuit filed last month.
The price? $5.4 million.
So in 2021, Mente was put in touch with a Colorado attorney named Scott Oliver, who, according to the complaint, claimed to represent an exotic car dealer from France named Jean-Pierre M.R. Clement.
Clement, Oliver told Mente, purchased a “build slot” from Mercedes-Benz for the hypercar once it was completed, the lawsuit alleges.
Months went by. Mente waited for the date when he’d be able to select custom features for the car. But that date never came, because Jean-Pierre M.R. Clement wasn’t real. And the $5.4 million car? He didn’t have that, either.
Instead, in June 2022, Mente learned from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that he had been allegedly defrauded by a Texas man named Traveon Rogers, a serial con artist posing as the French dealer.
Mente, who could not be reached for comment, outlined these allegations in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of Colorado on Feb. 18 against Oliver and Rogers, accusing them of orchestrating a multimillion-dollar heist. The lawsuit seeks the return of the $5.4 million plus further damages.
Rogers, who also could not be reached, is now in a Texas prison stemming from a criminal conviction last year.
Oliver, in a brief phone interview, said he simply served as the transactional attorney on the deal and knew nothing of the scheme. He did not say how he came to be connected to Rogers.
“Rogers was quite a character,” said the Longmont attorney, who has no disciplinary record with the Colorado Supreme Court. “Clearly he was able to convince people and get them to pay money and defraud people out of a lot of money.”
A 2023 video of Rogers went viral on TikTok after he claimed to be worth more than $1 billion by investing early in Snapchat.
“I can sell (expletive), literally, and people will buy it,” he said in the video.
Indeed, his LinkedIn profile touts two billion-dollar exits and six multimillion-dollar exits — referring to when an investor sells part or all of their ownership of a company. He claims to have been a board member of Blue Apron, the meal delivery company, and an investor in major companies such as TaskRabbit, AngelList and BitPay. Rogers also says he was briefly an “athlete” in the National Football League.
In reality, court records show Rogers has accrued numerous arrests and convictions for a variety of schemes.
In 2019, Houston prosecutors charged him with felony theft for perpetrating a similar luxury car venture. In that operation, he forged contracts and banking documents and impersonated representatives from Aston Martin and a Cleveland Car dealership, court documents show.
A Texas judge last year sentenced Rogers to seven years in prison for the offense.
In 2023, Rogers faced another lawsuit over the same Mercedes-Benz AMG One hypercar scheme — also using Oliver’s law firm in Longmont, though the attorney is not named as a defendant in that case. He then took some of the $3.19 million earned from the transaction to buy a house in Houston, the complaint alleges.
Over the years, Rogers has been accused of inventing a twin brother to police investigating a sexual assault case, insurance fraud, perjury and assaulting a pregnant woman, among a litany of other charges.
His schemes prompted multiple YouTube video breakdowns and long tweet threads delving into to the myriad cases.
The Department of Homeland Security would not comment on its investigation of Rogers.
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