Hollywood director convicted after scamming Netflix for $11m
December 12, 2025
A director hired by Netflix to make a science-fiction series was convicted this week of an $11 million (€9.3m) fraud.
Prosecutors said Carl Erik Rinsch, 48, secured funding from Netflix from 2018 to early 2020 to make the series, which was initially called White Horse and later renamed Conquest. But he put the money in a personal brokerage account and used it to trade securities instead of putting it toward the production.
Netflix cancelled development for the show in early 2021. After the company informed Rinsch that it would stop funding Conquest, he went on a spending spree with the show’s remaining production money, splashing on cryptocurrency, living out of luxury hotels in California and Spain, and buying five Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari.
Rinsch, who lives in LA, was arrested in March and charged with wire fraud, money laundering and making monetary transactions derived from unlawful activity. Rinsch said he believed the $11 million was meant to keep the production of Conquest afloat during the pandemic and to conduct pre-production on a potential second season of the show. Former Netflix executives testified that they had agreed to only one season of the show and that the $11 million was supposed to be used to finish episodes for that season, which Rinsch failed to do.
Rinsch never produced any episodes of the series, and Netflix consequently had to write off the $55 million it spent on the project.
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