A Bad Axe man has been sentenced to serve three years in prison and pay over $900,000 in restitution after pleading guilty last August to one count of financial institution fraud.
George P. Janssen Jr was sentenced Friday, April 10, 2026 by United States Senior District Judge David M. Lawson, with his 36 months in prison to be followed by 3 years of supervised release.
Janssen owned Bay Auto Brokers, which was the center of his fraud scheme, but also gained notoriety as a four-time World Series of Poker Circuit Ring winner.
Prosecutors say that from June 2016 until November of 2023, Janssen knowingly devised and executed a scheme to defraud multiple financial institutions by providing materially false information to said institutions so he and others enlisted by him could fraudulently obtain multiple vehicle loans by the same respective vehicle.
According to prosecutors, in many instances of the scheme, unbeknownst to the defrauded institutions, Janssen did not possess nor intend to possess the vehicles allegedly being used to secure the loans. During this time, Janssen and Bay Auto Brokers deposited a series of checks valued at roughly $1.4 million, with those checks being returned due to insufficient funds, but not before the credit union hosting the deposits issued a little over $1.3 million in valid checks to Janssen.
In August of 2023, the Michigan Department’s State Office of Investigative Services determined Janssen had used the same vehicles on multiple loan applications, with Janssen telling an investigator that he had “floated the loan,” i.e. that he had obtained more than one loan on a vehicle without paying off the first loan. This caused him to lose his license to sell cars in the state for five years. It was later learned that Janssen and enlisted help had applied for and obtained more than $1.94 million in vehicle loans.
Not long after Janssen lost his license to sell cars in October 2023, he went missing for about 33 days, ultimately returning in December of 2023 with the claim that he had been kidnapped by a cartel, who had also extorted him for $2 million over the previous two years. What might have been an attempt to misdirect investigators backfired on Janssen, as investigators were still receiving information about other unpaid or fraudulent loans while Janssen was “missing.”
Though police determined that Janssen had faked his abduction and staged his December 2023 reappearance so that he was found bloodied and zip-tied along a Huron County roadside, he was ultimately not charged with filing a false report.
Janssen is to surrender to authorities no earlier than Tuesday, June 30, 2026, so that he can begin serving his time at either Minnesota’s Federal Prison Camp Duluth or Kentucky’s Federal Correction Institution Ashland. He has been ordered to pay a total of $908, 235.57 between five financial institutions, including one in Pennsylvania. Janssen has also been ordered to participate in the Inmate Financial Responsibility Program.
