Aspiration Partners co-founder Joe Sanberg sentenced to 14 years in prison for US$248 million fraud

“This case has touched almost every badge of fraud.”

Joe Sanberg, the co-founder of fintech bank and carbon trading company Aspiration Partners, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for defrauding investors and lenders. In October 2025, Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud resulting in losses of US$248 million.

In a statement, first assistant US attorney Bill Essayli, said,

“This serial fraudster used his Cinderella-like background, impressive educational credentials, and virtue signaling skills to swindle investors and lenders out of hundreds of millions of dollars. This criminal case serves as a warning: Anyone can get duped by a con man.”

REDD-Monitor first wrote about Aspiration in 2022, after the company partnered with the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private sector lending arm.

The deal was part of IFC’s Carbon Opportunities Fund, which IFC described as, “a global investment platform that will raise private capital for an innovative model to source, tokenize and sell high-quality, verified carbon credits”.

It appears that the IFC’s due diligence did not pick up on Sanberg’s fraud.

Sanberg’s fraud

Sanberg’s scheme ran from 2020 and continued into 2025. He used his large share of Aspiration stock to defraud lenders and investors.

In 2020 and 2021, Sanberg and Ibrahim AlHusseini, who were both on Aspiration’s board of directors, fraudulently obtained US$45 million in loans from two lenders, by pledging shares of Sanberg’s Aspiration stock.

Sanberg and AlHusseini falsified AlHusseini’s bank and brokerage statements, fraudulently inflating his assets by more than US$200 million at one point.

Starting in 2021, Sanberg concealed from investors that he was the source of millions of dollars paid to Aspiration. Sanberg recruited companies and individuals to enter agreements with Aspiration. The companies and individuals committed to pay tens of thousands of dollars per month to Aspiration for tree planting services. The money for these payments came from Sanberg.

Reporting by Bloomberg reveals that these companies included:

• Young Israel, an orthodox synagogue in Beverley Hills that agreed to pay US$25,000 per month to Aspiration for tree planting.

• A non-profit called the Hidden Light Institute, that produces documentaries about Israeli figures and events, agreed to pay US$300,000 per month to Aspiration for tree planting. That’s almost ten times Hidden Light’s revenue for the whole of 2021.

• A company called 539 N. Alta Vista LLC, apparently named after a house in Los Angeles, agreed to pay US$50,000 per month.

• ETZ Partners LLC was formed within days of its deal with Aspiration by another LLC that was registered anonymously in Delaware. ETZ agreed a multimillion-dollar tree planting deal with Aspiration.

Sanberg made other deals were with an actor, several retired footballers, and a model, all from Colombia.

As a result of these sham deals, Aspiration’s financial statements fraudulently showed much higher revenue than the company actually received. Sanberg continued to try get investments in Aspiration into 2025.

Aspiration under investigation

In 2023, Meta signed a deal to buy 6.75 million carbon credits from Aspiration. In a July 2023 blog post about the deal, Aspiration wrote that,

Meta selected Aspiration for this partnership in large part due to the company’s rigorous standard for evaluating nature-based carbon removal initiatives — ensuring that the projects it supports are high quality with verifiable carbon removal and well-managed risks to the durability of carbon storage.

The following year, the Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission started an investigation into whether Aspiration had misled customers about the quality of the carbon offsets it was selling.

At the time, Aspiration listed three projects from which it was buying carbon offsets:

• Renewable Wind Power Project by Adani, Gujarat, India

• Northern Kenya Improved Grasslands, Samburu County, Kenya

• Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project, Mai Ndombe Province, Democratic Republic of Congo

All of these projects are extremely problematic.

Climate Home pointed out in 2024 that,

Experts have long written off the vast majority of credits produced from renewable energy as junk because they often already provide the cheapest sources of power in most of the world and selling offsets to fund them does not have any additional impact on emissions.

The carbon credits ratings agency Calyx Global gave the Adani wind project an E rating — its lowest possible score. “Calyx Global has Low Confidence that the carbon credit reliably represents a unique and permanent metric tonne of emission reduction or removal.”

The Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project in Kenya has been suspended twice by Verra, the Washington DC-based carbon certification company. The project covers an area of almost 2 million hectares and is carried out by the Northern Rangelands Trust.

More than 100,000 people live inside the project area, including Indigenous Peoples who are pastoralists whose livelihoods depends on cattle, camels, sheep, and goats. The project imposes “planned rotational grazing” which is a concept dreamed up by a Zimbabwean rancher called Allan Savory but which has little or no scientific backing.

The Mai Ndombe REDD project in the Democratic Republic of Congo is run by Wildlife Works. The project was set up without a meaningful process of free, prior and informed consent of the people living there.

The number of carbon credits generated by the project was exaggerated by selecting a reference area 600 kilometres away that has been almost completely deforested.

Local communities have received few, if any, benefits from the project.

Calyx Global gave the Mai Ndombe project its lowest rating: E.

Two REDD projects in Brazil

We got another glimpse into Aspiration’s carbon deals with a court case between Zero Carbon Holdings and Aspiration. In 2021, Aspiration was trying to win a deal to offset emissions from the 2022 World Cup, held in Qatar. Aspiration was hoping to buy carbon credits for the World Cup deal from a company called Zero Carbon Holdings.

The carbon credits were supposed to be generated from two REDD projects in Brazil: the Zero Carbon Aripuanã Valley REDD project 1; and the 413 REDD project. But by December 2021, only feasibility studies had been carried out on the projects. Nevertheless, Zero Carbon Holdings convinced Aspiration to make an advance payment of US$29.5 million for 6.5 million carbon credits.

As security, if Zero Carbon Holdings did not deliver the carbon credits, Aspiration would take over the REDD projects in Brazil.

The REDD projects did not deliver the carbon credits. They have still not generated any carbon credits. Aspiration did not win the World Cup deal. The whole thing ended up in court.

The Clippers deal

And then there’s Steve Ballmer, ex-CEO of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.

In September 2021, the Clippers announced a US$300 million partnership with Aspiration. The Clippers’ new arena, the Intuit Dome was going to operate “100 per cent carbon free”. The Clippers and Aspiration planned to launch a fund that would give fans the opportunity to “offset their own carbon impact” when they bought tickets to a game.

In September 2025, sports journalist Pablo Torre obtained 3,487 pages of internal corporate documents from Aspiration. It turned out that Aspiration had given a US$28 million endorsement deal to Clippers’ player Kawhi Leonard. Under the deal, Leonard did not have to do anything.

There is a salary cap under National Basketball Association rules, which prevents rich owners from persuading the best players to move to their team by offering bonuses, gifts, or donations.

Pablo Torre spoke to a former Aspiration employee who said that he was told that the deal with Leonard was “to circumvent the salary cap. LOL.”

The NBA is carrying out an investigation into the salary cap allegations.

Ballmer and the Clippers deny any wrongdoing. Leonard also denies wrongdoing. “I understand the full contract and services that I had to do,” he said in reply to questions from reporters about the Aspiration deal. “Like I said, I don’t deal with conspiracies or the click-bait analysts or journalism that’s going on.”

In April 2026, Ballmer’s lawyers sent a letter to the judge ahead of Sanberg’s sentencing. The letter states that “Sanberg flagrantly defrauded Mr. Ballmer, and his actions have significantly damaged Mr. Ballmer’s reputation.” Ballmer invested US$60 million in Aspiration.

The Clippers also lost US$20 million that was held in escrow to buy carbon offsets. Aspiration neither delivered the carbon offsets nor returned the money.

Ballmer’s lawyers wrote that,

Sanberg’s representations turned out to be lies, and what he promised by way of an environmental mission turned out to be nothing more than a lure to bilk Mr. Ballmer and others. As a result, Mr. Ballmer lost his entire investment in Aspiration — an investment that was intended to promote sustainability and benefit charitable causes.

ESPN reports that the judge, Stephen V. Wilson, said in the Los Angeles federal courtroom that Sanberg’s actions were “among the worst I’ve ever seen” in his 41 years as a federal judge.

“This case has touched almost every badge of fraud,” Wilson said.