--- title: "United States v. Chu: the charges, the guilty pleas and the defence" language: en canonical: https://dossiertwist.com/dossiers/tricolor-holdings/criminal-case/ as_of: 2026-10-13 keywords: ["Tricolor Holdings","Tricolor Auto Group","Tricolor Auto Acceptance","Ganas Investors","Daniel Chu","Tricolor Auto Securitization Trust","Tricolor Funding SPV 4","warehouse facility","subprime auto loans","asset-backed securities","JPMorgan Chase","Fifth Third","Barclays","Origin Bank","TBK Bank","BlackRock","Chapter 7","Anne Elizabeth Burns","Vervent","Wilmington Trust"] --- # United States v. Chu: the charges, the guilty pleas and the defence **Question.** What do prosecutors allege against Tricolor's executives, and where does the criminal case stand? **Answer.** Prosecutors allege that from at least 2018 Chu and others double-pledged and disguised collateral to borrow from lenders and sell asset-backed securities, leaving a gap of about $800 million between the collateral pledged and the real collateral. Kollar and Seibold pleaded guilty in December 2025 and Goodgame in June 2026, all cooperating with the government. Chu, charged in an eight-count superseding indictment with running a continuing financial crimes enterprise and with bank, wire and securities fraud, has pleaded not guilty, is presumed innocent and was reported to face trial on January 25, 2027. ## The charges - Analysis: On December 15, 2025 a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York indicted Daniel Chu, Tricolor's founder and chief executive officer, and David Goodgame, its chief operating officer (United States v. Chu and Goodgame, 25 Cr. 579); the indictment was unsealed and both were arrested on December 17, 2025. Chu was charged with organising a continuing financial crimes enterprise (18 U.S.C. § 225), conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud affecting a financial institution, bank fraud, and wire fraud affecting a financial institution; Goodgame with the last three counts. Count One alleges that from 2018 to September 2025 Chu organised, managed and supervised such an enterprise with at least four persons, receiving $5 million or more in gross receipts in a 24-month period, and lists ten violations by lender and facility: the Lender-1 credit line and the Lender-2 inventory line, the SPV4 warehouse (2020 to September 2025), the SPV5 warehouse (2021 to 2023) and the SPV6 warehouse (2022 to September 2025), each charged as bank fraud and as wire fraud. The U.S. Attorney's Office lists life imprisonment as the maximum and 10 years as the mandatory minimum for Count One and 30 years for each other count. The indictment is an accusation, not a finding, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Chu and Goodgame each pleaded not guilty on January 13, 2026; Goodgame later pleaded guilty to a superseding information, and Chu's trial has not taken place. The office brought the case with the FBI and the FDIC's Office of Inspector General, thanked the SEC for its assistance, and assigned it to its Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. [src-004] [src-043] [src-096] [src-011] - Analysis: On June 24, 2026 a grand jury returned an eight-count superseding indictment naming Chu alone. According to his lawyers, it adds bank fraud and wire fraud counts arising from the SPV5 warehouse facility (Counts Five and Six) and two securities fraud counts, conspiracy and substantive securities fraud (Counts Seven and Eight), based on alleged misrepresentations to investors in Tricolor's asset-backed securities; the superseding indictment itself is not retained, and its counts are described from the defence letter of June 29, 2026 and the SEC complaint. Chu pleaded not guilty to the original four counts on January 13, 2026 and, according to a news agency report, to all eight counts of the superseding indictment. On March 19, 2026 Judge Castel had set a four-week jury trial for October 19, 2026; on June 29, 2026 Chu's lawyers asked to adjourn it to no earlier than the second quarter of 2027, citing the superseding indictment, Goodgame's cooperation and the volume of discovery. A news agency reported that on August 14, 2026 Judge Castel refused Chu's request to dismiss the continuing financial crimes enterprise count, which carries a mandatory minimum of 10 years and up to life in prison: Chu had argued that the indictment did not identify the enterprise, how he ran it, who else was involved or how he profited, and the judge said it "more than satisfies" the legal standard by identifying ten violations, victims, credit agreements and dates. Chu's lawyer Matthew Schwartz said the court had recognised the count as "an infrequently charged crime" raising important legal questions and that "many of the allegations that have been made against Mr. Chu are inaccurate, as will be clear when the real facts come out." The count stands, the ruling itself is not retained, and the same agency reported that a trial was scheduled for January 25, 2027; the order moving the trial date is not retained. [src-053] [src-001] [src-043] [src-086] ## What the indictment alleges - Analysis: The indictment alleges that from at least 2018 through September 2025 Chu, Goodgame and others defrauded the lenders and asset-backed securities investors of Tricolor Holdings and its affiliates. At Chu's direction, it says, Tricolor executives "double-pledged" collateral, pledging assets for one loan and then pledging the same assets to another lender, and manipulated the descriptions and classification of collateral so that ineligible, near-worthless assets appeared to meet lender requirements. By about August 2025, according to the indictment, Tricolor had pledged about $2.2 billion of collateral to lenders and investors but had only about $1.4 billion of real collateral, a difference of about $800 million; those figures come from an August 2025 analysis attributed to Jerome Kollar. Like all the indictment's allegations, these are accusations, not findings; the U.S. Attorney's Office notes that the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Chu pleaded not guilty to the original counts on January 13, 2026 and, according to a news agency report, to all eight counts of the superseding indictment; his lawyer said in August 2026 that many of the allegations against him are inaccurate, and there has been no verdict. [src-004] [src-043] [src-011] [src-086] - Analysis: The indictment traces the scheme to 2018. It alleges that in about 2018, under liquidity pressure, Chu told Kollar to pledge delinquent loans that Tricolor had already charged off to the credit line of "Lender-1" and to make them look like performing loans by moving them to a fictitious portfolio company in Tricolor's dealer management system, where employees entered fake payments; that these loans stayed pledged to Lender-1 for years until the collapse; and that Chu at the same time served on Lender-1's board, the indictment not naming that bank. Chu's lawyers told the court in June 2026 that the "fictitious portfolio company" is not mentioned once in the discovery produced and that there is virtually no documentary evidence that the scheme began in 2018; the government pointed to Kollar's statement to law enforcement that the loan misrepresentations began in about 2018 at Chu's direction. The indictment further alleges that from at least 2021 Chu directed Kollar to keep sold vehicles on the borrowing base of the "Lender-2" inventory line, although they were supposed to be removed once sold, a practice it says continued until the bankruptcy, and that Tricolor pledged to other lenders the loans on cars that were still pledged to that line; it quotes an April 20, 2021 text in which Chu wrote that "we buy and increase inventory by $10mm and then we can move the sold units off the borrowing base". As accusations in the indictment, none of this is a finding, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. [src-011] [src-053] - Analysis: For the warehouses the indictment alleges that from at least 2022 Chu, Goodgame, Kollar, Seibold and others manipulated borrowing base data and double-pledged collateral across the SPV3, SPV4, SPV5 and SPV6 warehouses and the "Lender-9" credit line, with Kollar directing Seibold to submit false reports. Its examples include Chu's July 25, 2022 text "Can we work the > 60s", Kollar's November 16, 2022 report that working the delinquency buckets yielded about $1.3 million more, an April 26, 2022 text in which Kollar said they had obtained $1 million from the SPV4 warehouse "when we should have only received $300k", and a March 1, 2023 message in which Seibold told Goodgame he was "taking accounts from SPV6 and pledging on SPV3 to get liquidity out of SPV3" and was "then possibly taking SPV5 accounts and double pledging on SPV6"; on September 8, 2023 Seibold wrote that SPV6 and SPV3 were capped out and that there was some room on SPV5 "but are trying to keep it relatively clean". The indictment also alleges that, with Chu's and Goodgame's knowledge, Kollar and Seibold fabricated backup records such as loan payment ledgers and records of which lender a loan had been pledged to when borrowing bases were audited, citing a July 22, 2021 text in which Kollar told Chu the auditor must not "tie out" the Lender-1 line, to which Chu replied "I know", and a July 28, 2023 text in which Chu asked Kollar to "reconstruct" the Lender-1 borrowing base. None of these allegations has been proved at trial: the indictment is an accusation, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. [src-011] - Analysis: According to the indictment, a borrowing base audit begun in about February 2025 was still unfinished in August 2025, when a lender in the SPV4 facility ("Lender-6") noticed that loans Tricolor reported as current showed no reduction in principal. On recorded calls on August 17 to 19, 2025, it says, Chu proposed explaining non-paying loans with a "Trump administration deferment" policy that did not exist, described Lender-6's finding of "$63 million of loans that have not had a payment in 180 days that are marked as current", heard Seibold say he had been "holding 8,000 outstanding charge offs on every report", and told Lender-6 that the cause must be a "system issue"; the quotations are the indictment's transcription of secretly recorded calls. On an August 30, 2025 call, the indictment says, the executives discussed a settlement with "Lender-4", which by then had identified double-pledged and manipulated collateral and terminated its facility, and Chu compared Tricolor's position with Enron and discussed blaming the banks for ignoring red flags as leverage for a favourable settlement, saying "That Enron case is fucking perfect, I think." These remain the indictment's accusations, not findings, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. [src-011] ## Guilty pleas and cooperation - Analysis: Jerome Kollar, Tricolor's former chief financial officer (United States v. Kollar, 25 Cr. 584), and Ameryn Seibold, its former senior director of finance (United States v. Seibold, 25 Cr. 585), waived indictment and pleaded guilty on December 16, 2025 before Judge Lewis J. Liman to all seven counts of an information: conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud affecting a financial institution, false statements to financial institutions, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud and destruction of records. The U.S. Attorney's Office said both were cooperating with the government, and their bail conditions refer to cooperation agreements; both cases were reassigned to Judge Castel on December 23, 2025. The retained docket copies end in December 2025 and record no sentencing of either defendant. [src-004] [src-052] [src-045] - Analysis: On June 24, 2026 Goodgame waived indictment and pleaded guilty to all six counts of a superseding information: conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud affecting a financial institution, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud, and making materially false statements to FBI agents on or about October 20, 2025 about the existence, nature and value of Tricolor's pledged collateral. He admitted the forfeiture allegations and agreed to cooperate with the government. In his allocution Goodgame said he knew that Jerry Kollar, Ameryn Seibold and others were manipulating the loan data and that this was defrauding the banks; his attorney said afterwards that Goodgame "pled guilty to a number of federal violations, in each of which his role was minor." Sentencing had not taken place at the cutoff; the control date was December 4, 2026. [src-043] [src-053] ## The defence, the evidence and the trustee - Analysis: In a June 29, 2026 letter Chu's lawyers told the court that the government had produced 972,509 documents by the February 19, 2026 deadline for first-round motions and another 954,448 after it; that its review of material seized from Chu's devices was improper and violated his Fourth Amendment rights; and that they would seek a bill of particulars because the superseding indictment does not identify a single specific misstatement in the alleged securities fraud. They called it a "three-cooperator case" in which Kollar, Seibold and Goodgame each have incentives to blame Chu, and said the government had produced Brady material on their prior statements that is exculpatory of Chu. These are the defence's arguments; the court's rulings on them are not retained. [src-053] - Analysis: According to the government's May 2026 letter, Tricolor hired Alvarez & Marsal in late August 2025, and days before the bankruptcy filing the firm imaged the company laptops of about ten employees, including Chu, Goodgame, Kollar and Seibold; the images became estate property and were produced to the government under a grand jury subpoena on about September 17, 2025. One passage of the letter dates the imaging "September 4, 2026", but elsewhere the same letter gives September 4, 2025 and places it before the filing. The government obtained a warrant for two of Chu's iCloud accounts in September 2025 and seized his electronic devices under warrants in October 2025. On May 18, 2026 prosecutors asked Judge Castel to rule that Chu had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his Tricolor e-mail accounts and devices, citing the employee handbook, or alternatively that he waived any personal privilege when he handed his company laptop to Alvarez & Marsal on September 4, 2025, and to release that material to the case team; Chu's counsel maintained that he had not waived privilege, and the ruling is not retained. The Chapter 7 trustee, Anne Elizabeth Burns, appears in the case as an interested party: in August 2026 she sought to quash a subpoena served by Chu's defence, and on September 22, 2026 her counsel asked for more time to submit a privilege log; the subpoena's contents and the final ruling are not retained. [src-096] [src-043] ## Sources - [src-004] CEO, CFO, COO charged in connection with billion-dollar collapse of Tricolor Auto (press release), U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, 2025-12-17 - [src-043] Court record source · src-043 - [src-096] Court record source · src-096 - [src-011] Indictment, United States v. Daniel Chu and David Goodgame (S.D.N.Y.), U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York - [src-053] Court record source · src-053 - [src-001] Complaint, SEC v. Daniel Chu, Jerome Kollar and Ameryn Seibold (S.D.N.Y. 26-cv-7041), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2026-08-18 - [src-086] Media source · src-086 - [src-052] Court record source · src-052 - [src-045] Court record source · src-045