NORTHGLENN, Colo. — A townhome in Northglenn is the center of business creation in Colorado, with nearly 16,000 businesses registered to the same home address.
But there's a problem.
The people who live in the house had no idea— and nothing to do with it.
The state alleges the businesses are fraudulent and it has filed a lawsuit against the man it says is responsible, Marcio Garcia Andrade.
In its legal filing, Colorado said the fraud started last year, around when the state lowered the cost to start a business to $1— a policy Governor Jared Polis (D) said quickly worked. "What we're celebrating is, in the month of July, we had over 10 thousand businesses formed in Colorado," he said in a Facebook Live video.
But now, the state says nearly 16,000 of the businesses formed while the fees were cheap were all registered to the same Northglenn address— some, mere minutes apart. The state said all were fraudulent filings, all came from a foreign IP address and all were filed by Andrade and his business, Jumpstart Incorporations, Inc.
Colorado's beef is that the fraudulent filings deprived legit companies from getting the discount. Of the $8 million Colorado allocated for the program, the state said Andrade used $766,000.
Calls to several businesses registered to Andrade were not answered Friday. On Monday, his attorney David Japha said Andrade "denies the substantive allegations in the complaint against him."
Japha said Andrade "acknowledges and regrets any inconvenience to the people who live at the Northglenn address." He declined to comment further ahead of a Nov. 9 court filing deadline.
The case against Andrade was first reported by BusinessDen.
Colorado said one of Andrade's companies sells "self corporations," which give buyers a clean, established business to improve their likelihood of obtaining credit.
The state calls Andrade a "self-styled serial entrepreneur." A blog post from one of his companies said he has employees around the world who also consider him a "father figure, stern but fair."
In a statement to 9NEWS, the Secretary of State's office said it referred the filings to the attorney general's office. "As soon as we discovered suspected fraud, the Department immediately implemented additional verification measures and blocked new submissions from specific IP addresses suspected of fraud."
Andrade has faced legal issues before. He settled a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, which Colorado's legal filing said prohibited him from "running fraudulent credit services businesses."
The young family that lives at the home in Northglenn said law enforcement— including the FBI and Secret Service— have knocked on their door regularly with questions about Andrade and the businesses. They have no answers and have signed documents, they said, confirming they have nothing to do with the legal filings.
Ben, who didn't want to give his last name, said their mailbox is constantly full of junk mail for businesses they know nothing about. At this point, he said, the thousands of businesses registered to his home is more annoying than anything else.
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