Facing prison, a 67-year-old phony tech inventor, who has stolen hundreds of thousands from investors across the country, fled his Santa Clara County sentencing for fraud charges last month and is now a fugitive.
In one case, Dennis Fountaine scammed a group of investors by pretending to invent a robot named Homer that would help dispense medication for the elderly and disabled. Fountaine was convicted on May 20 of three felony counts of grand theft by fraud and admitted to the aggravated white-collar enhancement for defrauding four victims of over $350,000. His sentencing was set for Aug. 5. He never showed up.
The District Attorney’s Office is asking for anyone who has information on his whereabouts to contact Investigator Justin DeOliveira at (408) 792-2420.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen said: “The man pretended he was an inventor, but he won’t be able to pretend for long that he’s not a wanted fugitive. Let us know where he is so we can make sure he doesn’t scam anyone else.”
Fountaine has a history of civil judgments against him for breach of contract and fraud in California and Florida. His scam involves asking for loans to fund inventions he claims are legitimate. They are not. He creates sham companies and websites touting these inventions.
One of his tactics is to create fake online articles or interviews from bogus websites to bolster his credibility as a successful inventor/investor. He has not paid back these loans and continues to defraud unwitting victims. His last suspected attempts to dupe investors dated to earlier this summer, a month after his conviction.
In Florida, he created a company named Screen Test, an entertainment software/hardware internet development and licensing company. He claimed that the company had technology to insert individuals into any type of visual medium, allowing those individuals to “act” or “sing” in a visual clip as the original actor or singer. He termed this technology, “Face Replacement Technology.” He used this false representation to convince the victims to loan him millions of dollars.
