ECF No. 19, filed April 8, 2024 in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of California. A sworn declaration, submitted under penalty of perjury by an attorney named D. Edward Hays, stating that Tyler Brandon Davis was “the managing member of TopDevz, LLC.”

ECF No. 28, filed April 29, 2024, same court. A second sworn declaration. Same attorney. Same assertion. Same signature block from the sixth floor of 9454 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. Same penalty-of-perjury clause.

And somewhere between those two filings, according to a 185-page civil RICO complaint filed less than two years later, a document titled “Unanimous Written Consent of the Members of TopDevz, LLC” was transmitted through bankruptcy counsel. The complaint calls that document a forgery.

Two false declarations and a forged corporate governance instrument. In most fraud cases, documents like these are the evidence. In this one, according to Case 3:26-cv-00080-GPC-BJW, they were the weapons. The complaint alleges that D. Edward Hays used them to transform the federal bankruptcy system from a shield designed to protect a debtor into a mechanism for completing what six years of state court litigation, a disputed arbitration, and an alleged criminal enterprise had failed to finish on their own.

The word the complaint uses for Hays is not “participant.” Not “facilitator.” The complaint calls him “the architect of the bankruptcy fraud schemes.”

Before the Architect Arrived

For six years before Hays entered the picture, the alleged enterprise had been running through other channels.

Tyler Brandon Davis, a Folsom, California businessman who held a 49% minority membership stake in a La Jolla software company called TopDevz, is named in the complaint as the principal organizer and leader of the criminal enterprise. The complaint alleges his capital contribution of $787,240 was itself tainted from the start, derived from embezzlement and PPP loan fraud according to sworn testimony and documentary evidence provided in August 2023 by a witness named Todd Belluomini.

Scott Carpenter, a Newport Beach attorney, had been working on Davis’s behalf since at least 2020. The complaint accuses Carpenter of filing hundreds of fraudulent court pleadings, seizing control of TopDevz’s Wells Fargo bank account through forged documents, and threatening the company’s founder with immigration consequences to coerce a settlement.

Josh Lintz, the former TopDevz COO, had already incorporated a competing company called TalentCrowd in Wyoming and built it on stolen trade secrets, generating over $12 million in its first year.

An arbitration proceeding had produced a $9.3 million judgment against the founder. State courts were contested battlegrounds. The enterprise, as the complaint describes it, had been productive. But it had not achieved total victory. The founder still had claims. The founder still had standing. The founder still had the ability to fight back.

Then the founder filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on February 26, 2024. And according to the complaint, the enterprise saw something the founder did not: an opportunity to end the war in a courtroom where none of the prior battles would matter.

That is where D. Edward Hays came in.

A System Designed to Protect

To understand the mechanics of what Hays is accused of doing, you have to understand what a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is supposed to be.

Chapter 11 is reorganization. It exists so that a debtor overwhelmed by obligations can restructure, renegotiate, and emerge with a viable path forward. The debtor retains control of the estate. The debtor makes decisions about which claims to pursue and which to settle. The debtor has a voice. The entire framework is designed around a single premise: that the person who filed for protection deserves the opportunity to rebuild.

Chapter 7 is the opposite. It is liquidation. A court-appointed trustee takes over. The debtor loses control. Assets are sold. Claims are resolved. The estate is dismantled. A Chapter 7 proceeding does not ask how to save the debtor. It asks how to divide up what remains.

The distinction between these two chapters is not a technicality. It is the difference between survival and dissolution. And the complaint alleges that D. Edward Hays, California State Bar No. 162507, deliberately engineered the conversion from one to the other through false sworn statements to a federal court.

The Machinery of the Pivot

The complaint constructs a precise timeline of how Hays allegedly turned the bankruptcy proceeding into the enterprise’s final weapon.

Hays joined the criminal enterprise between August and December 2023, according to the filing. The language is deliberate. The complaint does not describe a lawyer who drifted into questionable representation. It describes a specialist recruited for a specific purpose: to navigate the bankruptcy system on behalf of an enterprise that had spent six years operating through other legal channels and needed someone who could operate through this one.

The first act the complaint attributes to Hays is the pair of sworn declarations. ECF No. 19, April 8, 2024: Davis is “the managing member of TopDevz.” ECF No. 28, April 29, 2024: same claim, restated under oath. The question of who managed TopDevz was not ambiguous. The company’s operating agreement designated a sole manager with exclusive authority. Davis was a 49% minority member. He did not manage the company. He was not authorized to manage the company. The operating agreement made this explicit. For Hays to swear otherwise under penalty of perjury, the complaint argues, was not a matter of legal interpretation. It was a fabrication submitted to a federal court to alter the factual landscape of the proceeding.

Then came the forged document. The complaint accuses Hays of transmitting a “Unanimous Written Consent of the Members of TopDevz, LLC” through bankruptcy counsel. The complaint characterizes this instrument as fabricated. A unanimous written consent is a corporate governance document that records a decision made by all members of an LLC without a formal meeting. If this document was forged, it was manufactured evidence designed to create a paper trail for authority that did not exist.

And then came the false proofs of service. Proofs of service are the filings that certify documents were properly delivered to all parties entitled to notice. If those proofs were fabricated, it means parties who should have known about proceedings affecting their rights may never have been notified. Decisions may have been made in their absence. Objections that could have been raised were never heard.

The complaint presents these three categories of filings as the foundation for what followed: the motions to convert the bankruptcy from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7. Hays filed those motions, the complaint alleges, based on the false representations he had already placed on the court’s docket. The conversion was approved. And with that approval, the debtor lost control of the estate.

A trustee was appointed. The debtor’s voice was silenced. And the enterprise, according to the complaint, had its instrument in place.

The Trustee’s Settlements

The Chapter 7 conversion resulted in the appointment of Christopher R. Barclay as bankruptcy trustee. What happened next is the mathematical core of the complaint’s fraud theory.

On September 26, 2024, the trustee settled claims against TalentCrowd and its principals for $100,000. These were the claims arising from the alleged theft of a 2.5-million-record contractor database, the deletion of over 130 client projects, and the creation of a competing company that generated $12 million in its first year of operation using stolen assets.

On October 15, 2024, the trustee settled claims against Davis himself for another $100,000. Davis, the man the complaint identifies as the principal organizer of the entire criminal enterprise.

Combined: $200,000 to resolve approximately $75 million in claims. A recovery rate of roughly 0.27 percent. Less than three tenths of a penny for every dollar at stake.

The complaint does not present these numbers as the result of difficult negotiations between adverse parties operating in good faith. It presents them as the planned outcome of a scheme in which the conversion, the trustee appointment, and the settlements were sequential steps in a single operation. An operation, the complaint alleges, that Hays designed.

The Capstone: Selling the Estate to the Accused

If the false declarations were the foundation and the settlements were the structure, the sale of estate claims was the roof.

On April 2, 2025, a motion was filed to sell the bankruptcy estate’s remaining claims. The claims included the right to appeal a $9.3 million judgment, the estate’s interest in TopDevz, and related litigation rights. These were the surviving causes of action that the settlements had not extinguished. The last legal ammunition the estate possessed.

The buyer was Tyler Brandon Davis.

Not a litigation finance company. Not a distressed asset fund. Not an independent third party. The buyer was the same man the RICO complaint identifies as the principal organizer of the criminal enterprise. The same man whose capital contribution was allegedly derived from embezzlement and PPP fraud. The same man who had just settled his own claims against the estate for $100,000 less than six months earlier.

The purchase price: $100,000.

The motion was approved on July 30, 2025. The sale closed on August 14, 2025.

Consider what this transaction accomplished. Once Davis owned the estate’s claims against himself, those claims ceased to exist as a practical matter. He controlled both sides. He could dismiss them. He could settle them with himself for nothing. He could let the statutes of limitations run. The evidence could gather dust in filing cabinets. The causes of action could quietly expire. The entire apparatus of legal accountability built over six years of litigation could be dismantled by a single transaction in bankruptcy court.

The complaint argues this sale was void on its face. A person accused of perpetrating a fraud cannot purchase the legal claims arising from that fraud. But before the sale could be challenged, it closed. The estate’s remaining value transferred to the man the complaint accuses of destroying the company that created it.

The Geometry of the Scheme

What distinguishes the Hays allegations from a simple story of aggressive lawyering is the geometry of the operation as the complaint describes it.

For six years, the alleged enterprise operated through horizontal channels: state courts, arbitration, corporate bank account seizures, trade secret theft, competing company formation. Each of these channels produced results but also generated exposure. Every filing created a record. Every forged document created a liability. Every fraudulent transaction created a cause of action. The enterprise was building value for its members, the complaint argues, but it was also building a mountain of potential claims against them.

The bankruptcy, as the complaint constructs it, was the vertical move. A single proceeding that could cut across every prior channel. Convert the case from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7, and you remove the debtor’s ability to prosecute claims. Install a cooperating trustee, and you control how claims are resolved. Settle $75 million in claims for $200,000, and you extinguish six years of exposure in two transactions. Sell the remaining claims to the enterprise leader, and you eliminate everything the settlements missed.

The complaint’s theory is that this was not opportunism. It was architecture. Someone had to understand bankruptcy procedure well enough to design this sequence. Someone had to know how to draft declarations that would survive initial scrutiny. Someone had to know how to file motions to convert and how to present false representations in a format that would move a court to act. Someone had to be a licensed attorney with the credibility to file sworn statements that a federal court would credit.

That someone, the complaint alleges, was D. Edward Hays.

The Stay Order

On October 6, 2025, the California Court of Appeal intervened. The appellate court issued a stay order, freezing proceedings while it reviewed the challenges to the sale.

Stay orders are not routine. They require the challenging party to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits and a risk of irreparable harm if the stay is denied. The Court of Appeal’s decision to issue the stay signals that a reviewing court found enough substance in the debtor’s objections to warrant halting the transaction while the legal questions were examined.

By the time the stay issued, the settlements had been executed and the sale had closed. The damage, as the complaint describes it, was functionally complete. But the stay introduced something the alleged scheme may not have anticipated: an appellate court willing to look behind the bankruptcy proceedings and ask whether what happened there was legitimate.

What the Bar License Means

D. Edward Hays holds California State Bar number 162507. He practices at Marshack Hays LLP, 9454 Wilshire Boulevard, 6th Floor, Beverly Hills, California 90212. That bar number is not merely a professional credential. It is a promise. It means Hays swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of California. It means the State Bar determined he possessed the moral character and professional fitness to be entrusted with the power to file documents in courts, to make representations to judges, and to submit declarations under penalty of perjury.

Every document Hays filed in the bankruptcy proceeding carried the implicit authority of that license. When a licensed attorney submits a declaration under oath, a court does not treat it the same way it treats a statement from a layperson. The attorney’s bar number functions as a guarantee. It says: I am an officer of this court, and I am telling you this is true.

If the complaint’s allegations are proven, Hays did not merely break that guarantee. He allegedly used it as leverage. The false declarations worked, the complaint contends, precisely because they came from a licensed attorney. The forged document was transmitted through bankruptcy counsel, lending it an additional layer of professional credibility. The motions to convert were filed by an attorney who, by the standards of the court, was supposed to be trustworthy.

The complaint’s theory is that the bankruptcy fraud worked because the system trusted D. Edward Hays. And that Hays exploited that trust to achieve outcomes the system was designed to prevent.

The Enterprise Behind the Architect

Hays did not operate in isolation. The 185-page RICO complaint, Case 3:26-cv-00080-GPC-BJW, names fifteen defendants across an alleged criminal enterprise spanning eight years, from 2017 through 2025. The complaint catalogs more than 750 separate predicate acts of racketeering, including wire fraud, bank fraud, bankruptcy fraud, tax fraud, identity theft, money laundering, trade secret theft, and obstruction of justice. The enterprise allegedly generated approximately $75 million in fraudulent financial transactions.

But the complaint draws a sharp distinction between the enterprise’s earlier operations and the bankruptcy phase. For six years, the scheme ran through state courts, arbitration panels, and corporate back channels. It produced results but left exposure everywhere. When the debtor filed for Chapter 11 protection, the enterprise allegedly pivoted. The pivot required someone who understood how to weaponize the bankruptcy system itself.

The complaint says Hays was that person. The architect who designed the endgame. The attorney who allegedly turned a proceeding meant to protect a debtor into the mechanism that completed his destruction.

What Comes Next

The allegations against D. Edward Hays are, at this stage, allegations in a civil complaint. He has not been convicted of any crime. He has not been sanctioned by the State Bar. He has not been found liable in any civil proceeding related to these claims. He is entitled to every presumption of innocence and to present whatever defense he chooses.

But the complaint itself is remarkable in its specificity. It identifies exact ECF numbers. It cites the dates of each filing. It names the dollar amounts of every settlement and every sale. It describes the sequence of declarations, the content of each sworn statement, and the mechanics of each transaction with the granularity of someone who watched it happen from inside the courtroom.

The source complaint and related coverage are publicly available. The case is pending before Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel in the Southern District of California.

The question at the center of it is not whether a bankruptcy proceeding went badly for a debtor. Bankruptcy proceedings go badly for debtors all the time. The question is whether a Beverly Hills attorney walked into a federal courthouse with a law license and a set of false declarations and used them to turn the bankruptcy system into the final instrument of an eight-year criminal enterprise.

That question will be answered by evidence, not allegations. By a federal court, not a complaint. The case number is 3:26-cv-00080-GPC-BJW. The courthouse is in San Diego. And the docket is open.

Case 3:26-cv-00080-GPC-BJW is pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. All allegations described in this article are drawn from the plaintiff’s complaint and have not been adjudicated. D. Edward Hays has not been charged with any crime and is presumed innocent of all allegations.

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The full court filing referenced in this article is available for download: View complaint (PDF). Additional source documentation: slideshare.net. All allegations are civil claims in a filed complaint; no findings have been made by any court.