The ‘Shark Tank’ Star Who Scammed Lovelorn Women

It took a Tinder match, three weeks of constant communication, and a few Google searches for DeAnn Jansen to agree to meet Nate Holzapfel at her Utah home in August 2021.

The 53-year-old hospice worker had lost her husband 13 months prior, and she was struggling. But Holzapfel skillfully convinced DeAnn to ignore her rule about only meeting a first date in public. He even confided in her about his stint on ABC’s reality show Shark Tank, where the 44-year-old scored a celebrity investor for his belt company.

So despite the blaring mental alarm bells about ignoring her first-date rules, she agreed to a midweek visit at her home. And she almost immediately regretted it.

“It was almost an eight-hour date,” DeAnn said. “He mentioned his kids, his divorce, and how his father was kind of high-ranking in the LDS [Latter-Day Saints] church. He also talked about his successful companies.”

Holzapfel pushed “intimacy,” she said, and then afterward sat on her couch in the nude for hours. When he finally left, DeAnn said she wasn’t too optimistic about a potential love match with Holzapfel.

The entrepreneur, however, had other plans. He ingrained himself into her life with elaborate promises and proactive steps to help DeAnn get her life back together. So despite their weird first meeting and a few other red flags—DeAnn says Holzapfel praised Hitler for his leadership style—the couple embarked on a whirlwind romance.

“I always had this little nagging thing in my mind. But he was also charismatic,” DeAnn said. “He’s a salesman, and he sold me on a good dream.”

Publicly identifying herself for the first time, DeAnn told The Daily Beast that, about a month into their relationship, Holzapfel pressured her into putting $50,000 of her late husband’s life insurance policy into one of his new companies, which he promised would eventually return 20 times her investment.

“I gave him the money but immediately knew it was a bad idea and wanted my money back,” she said, adding that by that time, he had also taken and sold one of her cars, an AR-15 rifle, and some ammunition. “But he kept changing the topic and never gave it back.”

That con was the start of a living nightmare for DeAnn, who realized that the man she was planning to spend her life with had swindled her out of thousands of dollars. Then she learned she was not the first woman Holzapfel had hustled.

Targeting Vulnerable Women

For years, prosecutors say Holzapfel was not just the married Mormon father-of-two who appeared on Shark Tank.

Instead, the Utah County Attorney’s Office said in 2021 that Holzapfel was responsible for swindling several “vulnerable” women he met on social media apps, luring them in with the prospect of a new romance before pressuring them to turn over their money and other assets with the promise of an investment return.

Among those women were DeAnne and Courtney Morton, a 46-year-old divorced cancer survivor who said that in 2020, under the guise of romance, Holzapfel swindled her out of nearly $200,000 and the house she specifically outfitted to accommodate her disabled adult son.

“Nate found me during a very hard time in my life,” Courtney told The Daily Beast about the 2020 affair. “It was the perfect storm for someone like him to target someone like me.”

And Holzapfel’s crimes didn’t stop there. Prosecutors also said he sexually harassed at least three women, including one who told The Daily Beast that she was pinned against a truck and groped during a July 2020 incident.

“During the assault, Nate said things like, ‘If I wanted to rape you, I would have done it already, just relax,’” said Sammi, a 45-year-old business owner who suffers from multiple sclerosis and wished to only be identified by her first name.

“This guy is a sexual predator. This is a power trip for him. He used to say that Hitler was his hero. He wanted to see how many people he could control and manipulate,” she added.

Holzapfel was ultimately charged in connection with criminal cases involving six different victims for alleged crimes he committed between 2018 and 2021—including the incidents involving DeAnn, Courtney, and Sammi. But the three told The Daily Beast that despite their reservations, the Utah County Attorney’s Office came to a plea agreement with Holzapfel’s defense team.

He pleaded guilty in June to three counts of communications fraud, a second-degree felony, and three misdemeanor counts of sexual battery in accordance with the plea agreement that dismissed over a dozen other charges. (Holzapfel’s time on Shark Tank is not connected with any of his crimes.)

Last month, however, Utah Fourth District Judge Thomas Low shocked a courtroom when he rejected the plea agreement that came with a recommendation that Holzapfel only serve 48 months of supervised probation and pay approximately $300,000 in restitution. He is now serving his one- to-18-year sentence in a Utah state correctional facility.

“The treachery and abuse that has occurred also occurred over a long period of time,” Low said before sentencing Holzapfel.

Holzapfel’s family did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Holzapfel, however, told The Daily Beast that while he has “generally no comment on this matter,” he believed some of the allegations against his client were “made without any support” or “greatefuly [sic] exaggerated.”

“For instance, there has never been any allegation that Holzapfel ‘loved Hitler and his leadership style,’” attorney Nathan Crane said. “This allegation is not true, and it is not something Holzapfel has ever said.”

A ‘Shark Tank’ Star

Even before Holzapfel made national headlines, his name was recognized in Utah because of his father’s prominence in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

For over two decades, Richard Holzapfel taught Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University and wrote several books. But Holzapfel did not follow in his father’s footsteps, instead choosing to drop out of college to pursue a career in sales. In a July 2015 podcast episode, Holzapfel revealed how he quickly became an expert on the art of the sale, learning how to talk someone into buying a car, a home over the phone, or even insurance in Mexico.

After several years of selling other people’s products, Holzapfel decided it was time to quit his job and invest $90,000 to launch his own product with his brother in 2012. The company, Mission Belt, set out to satisfy two slightly disjointed problems: create a stylish leather belt without holes and help stop world hunger.

Inside the Heartbreaking Cons of America’s Most Prolific Romance Scammer

Desperate to launch the product beyond a door-to-door sales approach, Holzapfel secured a spot on episode 422 of ABC’s Shark Tank, a reality TV show where startups pitch their products for funding to five wealthy investors in exchange for a stake in their company or profits.

“It’s like a giant zip tie for your pants,” Holzapfel explained in his 2012 episode about the ratcheting mechanism for the perfect customizable fit for his belt. He added that one dollar for every sale would go to funding microloans to help battle world poverty.

After all the other ‘Sharks’ bowed out of the pitch, Holzapfel found a partner in celebrity multi-millionaire Daymond John, who agreed to invest $50,000 for a 37.5 percent stake in the Mission Belt if Holzapfel was responsible for leading the sales department. The night Holzapfel’s episode aired in May 2013, the company reportedly sold $180,000 worth of belts, and Mission Belts quickly became known as one of the Shark Tank success stories. (Holzapfel also appeared with John in a 2015 episode of ‘Beyond the Tank.’)

In a statement to The Daily Beast, John stressed that Holzapfel “was vetted by the show, and no red flags came back during due diligence.” “After seeing Nate have one of the most successful nights in Shark Tank history (at that time) in terms of sales, I thought he would be able to assist some of my future Shark Tank entrepreneurs with sales support and prepping for the incredible opportunity of being seen by millions of viewers,” John said.

Among those put under Holzapfel’s wing were retired NFL star Al “Bubba” Baker and his daughter, Brittani. The father-daughter duo were set to appear on the show’s fifth season in 2013 to secure funding to expand their family’s popular barbecue boneless baby back ribs and sauces, Bubba’s Q, into a national chain.

Brittani told the Los Angeles Times that John brought in Holzapfel, whom he called an “an internet genius,” to help Bubba’s Q launch their e-commerce platform. But Brittani told The Daily Beast that once they began working with Holzapfel, she and her father immediately had reservations about him.

In addition to his “very cocky, know-it-all attitude,” Brittani said Holzapfel forgot to install a feature to collect sales tax on their website—a mistake that forced them to refund nearly 14 percent of their initial order profit after they launched.

“I have not hidden the fact we brought in Nate to work on the Baker’s website, and it is well documented that all parties were very happy with the website not crashing (like most Shark Tank entrepreneurs dealt with initially) and the sales he created from it,” John added.

Ammie Black, who worked for Holzapfel for about five months in 2014, told The Daily Beast that she was surprised by how “out of the loop” her boss kept the other Shark Tank business owners when it came to their own companies’ finances. During her stint that began in December 2013, when Black was doing customer service for Bubba’s Q and another start-up, she added that ​​Holzapfel only seemed interested in his relationship with John.

“Nate’s relationship with Daymond was everything to him, like a badge or a flag he always had to wave around and brag about,” Black added.

Eventually, the Bakers cut ties with Holzapfel in June 2014. John added in his statement that his team also “gradually stopped working with him because the more we worked with him and got to know him, the more we realized he was not a fit for us professionally or culturally.”

Around that time, Holzapfel also parted ways with Mission Belt. A company spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Holzapfel left around 2015 to “pursue a different career path in TV, public speaking, and his own brand, The Nate State of Mind,” and has not been associated with Mission Belt over the last eight years.

But despite Holzapfel’s commitment to becoming a public speaker, the Utah father did not make national headlines until 2018. The headlines were once again about Holzapfel’s relationship with another celebrity mogul, but were drastically different from his Shark Tank success story.

In a November 2018 lawsuit, Larry King Enterprises argued that the legendary journalist had agreed to record a mock interview with Holzapfel “as a favor to a family member.” The 2013 interview, the lawsuit states, was only to be used in a “sizzle reel” to privately submit to TV producers to land gigs. Instead, Holzapfel used quotes from the fake interview on his electronic press kit alongside quotes from John and Mark Cuban.

“You’re selling me on laughing,” King said in the mock interview that Holzapfel promoted. The lawsuit added that Holzapfel also falsely claimed that King “loved” his personal brand and endorsed his “commercial activities when, in fact, he had not done so.” In 2019, Larry King Enterprises was awarded a $250,000 default judgment against Holzapfel.

They Thought It Was Love

Courtney Morton had no idea who Holzapfel was when she saw his name pop up in her Instagram friend requests in February 2020. And the request could not have come at a better—or worse—time.

She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2014, spurring grueling treatment that included chemo, a double mastectomy, radiation, and two reconstructive surgeries. About a year into treatment, Courtney got divorced and became the main caretaker of her disabled adult son. In 2019, her father passed away and his death instantly tore her whole family apart, putting Courtney in a uniquely alienated position when Holzapfel found her online.

“I was lonely,” Courtney admitted. “At first, it was just small talk, and then it quickly escalated.”

In their conversations, Courtney said, the two bonded over discussions on religion, politics, Mission Belt, and their shared failed relationships. Holzapfel claimed to have been a recently divorced father who was thankful for “having a really good co-parenting situation” with his ex, which Courtney said “was a check mark in his favor.”

About three weeks into constant texting and phone calls, Holzapfel asked Courtney to meet in person at her house. Courtney said that she normally would never agree to the request to meet in private if not for COVID “hitting hard” at that time.

“I remember opening the door for him, and I immediately had a feeling that this wasn’t a good idea,” Courtney said. “I wish I could go back to that moment and slam the door. But at the time, I just didn’t have trust in myself or my gut instincts.”

During the hours-long date, Courtney said that gnawing feeling that something was wrong only continued to grow as Holzapfel monologued about himself. She said she continued to ignore the feeling after he left, when Holzapfel began “constant communication that ultimately lasted for months.”

“All of a sudden he was texting all of the time, calling all of the time, and we were seeing each other almost daily. It felt nice to have someone care for me and look after me,” Courtney said. “It never even entered my mind that he could still be married, because how could he have been married if he was talking and seeing me so much?”

The relationship eventually turned romantic and continued to progress very quickly. Soon, Courtney said, Holzapfel began talking about living together, getting married, and preparing to blend their families.

“It’s actually so disgusting. We even talked about the details of the wedding, even though now I know he obviously had no intention of marrying me,” Courtney said. “One thing he made clear was that if we were going to start our new life together, he did not want to live in the house where my ex once lived, and I understood that. So that’s how we started talking about selling my home.”

The conversations quickly centered around how much equity Courtney had in her home and how she needed to protect that equity by putting it into an LLC. Courtney said that suggestion did not seem too out of the ordinary because her parents had several properties in LLCs. But, she said she did find it off-putting that Holzapfel demanded she put her home into an LLC for one of his companies, Save My House, instead of starting one herself.

“He kept saying we were going to build a life together and that doing this would protect my equity from high taxes when we needed to sell,” Courtney said.

But Courtney said that despite the vague conversations, she was still surprised in May 2020 when Holzapfel took her to a title company to sign a pre-drafted deed that transferred her ownership interest in her home into his LLC. The “Quit Claim Deed” stated that she would transfer ownership to Holzapfel’s company for “ten dollars and other good and valuable consideration,” according to an arrest affidavit.

Courtney said that when she saw the document, she began questioning Holzapfel about the transaction request. She eventually relented, she said, and signed because she believed that Holzapfel had her best interests at heart. (The affidavit notes that at the time Courtney signed the document, Holzapfel was facing financial problems, had recently been sued, and still had the King default judgment to pay.)

Courtney said she quickly changed her mind shortly afterward and asked Holzapfel multiple times to transfer ownership of her home back to her. Instead, she said, he “ignored” her request and instead pressured her into selling her home.

In July, Holzapfel listed Courtney’s home and sold it in a matter of weeks. Courtney said she did not even know the sale negotiations were underway until the deal was done at the end of August—and that Holzapfel refused to give her any paperwork afterward.

The affidavit states that Holzapfel made $207,773.13 from the sale and put the proceeds into an LLP registered in Alaska, where he and his wife are listed as general partners. Later, Holzapfel moved the house funds into other accounts to pay off his credit card bills, attorney fees, car payments, and buy firearms and gun supplies.

“When I learned he sold my house, I demanded my money,” Courtney said. “Instead, he manipulated me into investing it in another one of his businesses, Bristle & Beard.”

Courtney said that by the fall of 2020, her relationship with Holzapfel had turned sour after her constant requests for her money back. When Holzapfel offered her a contract to invest in his business, she decided to have a lawyer look it over.

At that time, she said, she had only received about $11,000 from the sale of the house and was starting to worry. Especially since, Courtney said, Holzapfel also convinced her to sell her car, which was also outfitted to transport her son, and to sell one of her guns.

“The lawyer called me back and just said, ‘Your boyfriend is not a good guy. Don’t sign anything,’” she said through tears.

Weeks later, in November 2020, Courtney said she finally threatened to go to the police if Holzapfel did not cough up her money. Instead of gaslighting her like she said he had done over the last nine months of their relationship, Holzapfel just vanished.

“I didn’t hear another word from him,” Courtney said. “I felt like the dumbest girl in the world. I was suicidal. It was the worst time of my life—and I’ve been through some shit.”

“But then I got angry, and I went out there on every platform I could think of, posting about what he did to me,” she added. “I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.”

From Charming to Dangerous

Holzapfel was married, financially struggling, and in the depths of his con against Courtney when he saw Sammi at a Utah auto shop on July 14, 2020.

Divorced just a month prior and in the throes of opening up her healing center while caring for a child with high medical needs, Sammi said that she stopped into the shop to get a part taken off her newly purchased truck. Deep in a conversation with the cashier, Sammi mentioned her budding business—a topic she said immediately spurred the person next to her to interrupt.

“It wasn’t even a conversation; he just overheard me talk about my business and asked a question or two,” she said.

Sammi said she then left the store without giving Holzapfel another thought—until about four hours later, when she suddenly got a text from a random number.

“Sammi?” the 8:24 p.m. text read.

After she asked who was texting, Holzapfel responded: “Nate i met you at the audio shop and i thought you seemed so fun an [sic] cool i googled you! The number on facebook looked like a cell so i took a guess. You sell some crazy stuff! Lol.”

The banter quickly turned playful, and Sammi said she was initially “a little bit flattered” by the lengths he went to to get her number. That positive emotion, she said, was almost immediately quashed when she began to ask him his last name.

“I don’t know urs tho u could be a rapist. A serial rapist. Which is worse? A one time or casual rapist. Or a serial rapist,” Holzapfel said in a string of messages reviewed by The Daily Beast. “On one hand, the serial rapist would prob be better at [it] But also kind a whore.”

Despite the peculiar messages, Sammi decided to give Holzapfel the benefit of the doubt and continued to chat with him over the course of the next day. He then persuaded her to meet him at her store to talk about business.

“He was talking a lot about his past businesses, his successes, and how he helped people save their businesses,” she said. “I didn’t need saving…but I was naive. And I think there was a part of me that was like, ‘Maybe down the road, this guy could be interesting.’”

The following night, Sammi said she drove down to her store to meet Holzapfel and let her friend know what was going on in case of trouble. When Holzapfel walked in, Sammi said the first thing she noticed were his “big dark circles under his eyes,” which she attributed to long days at the office. Sitting in chairs about six feet apart, Sammi said he wasted no time talking about business and trying to convince her to disclose her personal and business finances.

“I immediately shut that down,” she said. “I think he was pissed that I was not giving up information. After that, he changed focus, asked me about my personal life.”

Then, Sammi said, Holzapfel started talking to her about cars, and asked if he could see the truck she brought to the auto shop the day prior. The pair went outside the back of her shop to look at the car and there, she said, things took an awful turn.

“He grabbed my waist and pulled me close, and we started walking. My arms were right down by my side, and I said, ‘Woah, I told you I am not in a space to be in a relationship,’” Sammi said. “And he said, ‘Well, this doesn’t have to be a relationship.’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand, I don’t want you to touch me.”

“And this was like fuel to his fire. Absolute fuel to his fire,” she said.

Despite her objections, Holzapfel pinned her against a truck with her arms above her head and used his body to hold her in place against the car. A criminal affidavit states that when she tried to resist, Holzapfel “shoved his hands down” her pants, touched her butt, and also touched the bottom of her breasts.

As he was continuing to assault her, Sammi said Holzapfel also taunted her, saying that he was bigger than her and that if he wanted to rape her, he “would have done it already; just relax.” Sammi said that she asked not to be kissed multiple times—and that he actually made her say it—as he held his face inches from hers and “smiled.”

“I don’t remember how I ended up getting out,” Sammi states, adding that she hurried back into her shop while Holzapfel trailed her. Just before she got back into her store, she says, Holzapfel told her: “We’ll do this again sometime.”

Later that evening, Holzapfel texted Sammi, asking if he had “gone from being ‘bad ass’ to just bad.” Sammi responded with a lengthy message, detailing how he pushed her boundaries and touched her even though she pushed him away.

“I was thrown off guard, confused, and when I left, felt violated,” she added in the text, to which Holzapfel responded with an apology and comment that he felt they were “having a good time.”

By then, she said, she had already notified the police. But for three years, despite thousands spent on trauma therapy, she suffered in silence out of fear of what Holzapfel could do to her.

That fear lasted until October 2021, after Holzapfel met DeAnn.

The Women Band Together

Ultimately, Holzapfel’s demise came the same way most of his scams began: with a social media platform and the promise of a date.

It was a few weeks after Holzapfel had pressured DeAnn into giving him $50,000, and she was hounding him to return the funds. But Holzapfel was dodging her requests and trying to change the subject.

“Something still felt off, so I decided to Google his name. I had done it before, but one Saturday I decided to look a little deeper,” DeAnn said. That’s when I found a Reddit post that Courtney had written about him, where she described what he did to her.”

In the post, DeAnn found devastating similarities to her own story and immediately set out to track down Courtney’s number. She finally got a hold of her the next day, and the two women began to compare notes.

“That’s when I learned that Courtney had already called the police and had a case going with this detective but that they couldn’t find him to arrest him,” DeAnn said about the Oct. 3, 2021, conversation. “And I said, ‘Well, I’m having lunch with him tomorrow.’”

The ball began to move quickly once Courtney and DeAnn realized they had a rare opportunity to catch Holzapfel. After briefly meeting with the police that Monday, DeAnn said she called Holzapfel and told him to meet her at a specific location. When he agreed, the police went off to arrest Holzapfel at their lunch meeting spot: Carl’s Jr.

“I actually sat across the street at a bank and watched him get arrested at Carl’s Jr.,” DeAnn said. “That was our date spot; we would go to Carl’s Jr. Big spender.”

But the relief Holzapfel’s victims felt after his arrest was short-lived after he quickly posted bond. Then, prosecutors began proposing the idea of a plea deal.

Utah County Deputy Attorney Peter Reichman explained to The Daily Beast that there were a “handful of factors” that went into his team’s decision to consider the plea agreement, including securing the most amount of restitution from Holzapfel’s victims and the state of Utah’s court system.

“Our courts are backed up, and if we wanted to take every case to trial, this would have dragged on for years,” Reichman said. “The continued litigation would also reduce the likelihood of restitution going to the victims. They probably wouldn’t have gotten anything. So that also goes into the algebra when considering a plea agreement.”

Reichman, however, admitted that it was “not a cheerful discussion” when he spoke to each of the victims about the plea agreement and that “each of them were reluctantly ok with proceeding in that direction.” (All three women told The Daily Beast that they only agreed to the plea agreement after feeling pressured to agree for the benefit of all the victims.)

That deal ultimately led to Holzapfel pleading guilty on June 21 to several charges against him. It also came with a provision that Holzapfel could withdraw from the deal if Low did not sentence him to probation in accordance with the prosecution’s recommendation—and allowed him to enter a plea in abeyance for two charges of communications fraud.

On the day of the Aug. 4 sentencing, DeAnn admitted that she and her fellow victims were not particularly hopeful when they arrived at the Provo courthouse. Courtney, Sammi, and DeAnn all spoke at the hearing, detailing how Holzapfel came into their lives during a vulnerable time and lied and manipulated them with the promise of intimacy, romance, and monetary security.

“I was promised the world, and I was delivered a nightmare. It’s all purposeful, and I can see that now. Everything is plotted and planned," Courtney said in court.

Holzapfel himself even spoke to the court, taking the time to call each of his victims “some of the nicest people in the whole darn world, just lovely, nice people” from his spot at the defense table. Defense lawyer Nathan Crane agreed, stating in court that Holzapfel agreed to receive mental health treatment and be listed on the state’s white-collar crime registry. Crane added that his client took “full responsibility” for his actions but just wanted to move on.

“I really do feel sorry for everybody who’s so upset over things. And I can understand why. There’s a lot going on here,” Holzapfel said in court, according to KSL-TV. “And it’s my sincerest concern about the issues, whatever they are; I want everyone to feel good.”

In the end, however, it was Low who ensured justice for Holzapfel’s victims. In a searching speech, Low rejected Holzapfel’s provision that allowed him to withdraw his guilty plea if he did not like the sentence, stating that the agreement is “directly contrary to Utah law.”

​​“I understand that this negotiation was developed over a long period of time, and that’s been made clear to the court,” Low said. “The life-altering impacts you have had on these victims…are shocking.”

All three women admitted they were astonished when they realized that Low was overriding the plea deal and sentencing Holzapfel to jail. Sammi said her “jaw was on the floor” when she saw Holzapfel’s lawyers stand up to loudly object to Low defying the agreement and sentencing their client to prison. As Holzapfel was handcuffed and taken into custody after the hearing, DeAnn said she finally felt “heard.”

“I didn’t realize how healing it would be to see Nate in handcuffs. When I heard them click, I felt the energetic chains on me break and fall to the ground,” Sammi said. “I was elated he was going to prison. I’ve never been more surprised and relieved, and grateful I took a stand.”

Even though Holzapfel is now behind bars, all three women admitted that they do not feel vindicated as they hoped. The Utah County Attorney’s Office confirmed that at least two of Holzapfel’s victims were not included in their caseload because the statute of limitations on their allegations had passed.

And Holzapfel’s victims now believe that investigators only scratched the surface of the Shark Tank contestant’s misdeeds.

“There are still people coming forward saying they were also duped by Nate,” Courtney said. “People are so full of shame and embarrassment, and I think there are so many more out there that haven’t come forward from across the country. And it’s terrifying to think about how much deeper this goes.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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