Anthony Farrer, 36, a social media personality known as the Timepiece Gentleman, who owned a Beverly Hills luxury watch consignment business of the same name, pleaded guilty in federal court on Oct. 11 to one count of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud.

According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Farrer—who founded his business in Dallas in 2017—regularly kept money from watch sales for himself instead of remitting it to clients who’d given him the watches on consignment. He also allegedly used his clients’ watches as loan collateral, without their knowledge or permission.

When a client would ask about the status of their watch, Farrer would say it hadn’t been sold even if it had, prosecutors said.

Farrer also ran a separate business of buying watches on behalf of clients, but he would spend the money on his own personal purchases, the statement said.

“Farrer often sent another watch to the client to tide the client over or lull them into a false sense of security regarding the status of the purchase,” according to the government statement. “Similar to a Ponzi scheme, the other watch Farrer sent to the client often belonged to other clients who had themselves sent him that watch for a consignment sale.”

In all, Farrer fraudulently obtained money and property from more than 40 victims, costing them at least $5.69 million, prosecutors said.

According to a long story earlier this year in Business Insider, Farrer achieved some YouTube notoriety for his “flex videos: private jets, sushi feasts, and doing doughnuts in his $170,000 cherry-red Audi R8 in an Office Depot parking lot (until a weary security guard asked him to leave).”

At its height, Farrer’s channel had 110,000 subscribers, and he was spending 15 hours a day on social media, the publication said.

But a 14-minute video he posted last year, as his business was coming apart, was not so glamorous. In it, a tank-top-clad Farrer admitted to making “a lot of bad decisions” and “a lot of dumb mistakes.”

He said in the video: “It’s gotten to where living this fake lifestyle, this ‘Look at me, I’m smart, I’m successful’…keeping up the appearances, it’s eating me alive. I drink every night just to be able to go to sleep.

“’I’ve lied to my employees, I’ve lied to my clients, I’ve lied to my friends, I’ve lied to my peers, and it was all keeping up this facade. It was not being willing to admit that I had made mistakes very early on.

“I’ll admit it: I got a little taste of success and never wanted to forget that feeling. So when I did make dumb decisions, I would write ’em off or I wouldn’t address them, because if I addressed something I did that didn’t work, then to me that was admitting failure. And my ego was too big…. Getting that type of attention, it ruined me.”

Farrer could not be reached for comment.

(Photo: Getty Images)

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