Worst personal bankruptcy ever — the yearslong hell that happens when a billionaire says he's worth $3,850

Miles Guo once controlled some 500 bank accounts holding hundreds of millions of dollars. He flaunted his yachts, mansions, and sports cars in YouTube videos.

Yet when Guo filed for bankruptcy in 2022, he proclaimed himself a pauper. Even as he spent $18 million renovating his Gilded Age mansion in New Jersey, Guo swore in a bankruptcy filing that he was worth essentially nothing: just $3,850.

And when a court-appointed trustee started proving otherwise — and began selling the yachts, homes, and cars — Guo went on the offensive.

In the year between filing for bankruptcy and his 2023 federal fraud arrest, Guo unleashed an international army of devotees who believed he would one day be the next president of China.

At his urging, they flooded his bankruptcy docket with hundreds of nuisance claims, doxxed his creditors, and picketed outside the trustee's home and his law offices in New York, London, and Tokyo. Sometimes they held signs showing the trustee's photo — his teeth dripping with blood.

Welcome to the personal bankruptcy from hell — an ongoing Chapter 11 liquidation nightmare playing out as Guo sits in jail, awaiting sentencing on a billion-dollar fraud conspiracy.

It is also the story of a debtor run amok, a cautionary tale of how someone with wealth and influence can hijack the bankruptcy system, delaying justice to victims whose claims go back decades.

Four years after the bankruptcy was filed, the trustee is still locating assets and untangling more than 1,000 claims filed by his followers. Creditors have yet to recoup a penny of their debts.

"I don't think it's going out on a limb at all to say that there's never been a bankruptcy case quite like this one," Nicholas A. Bassett, a lead lawyer for the trustee, told Guo's bankruptcy judge last year.

Guo, who is scheduled to be sentenced in April, declined an interview request. Attorneys repping him in the bankruptcy and criminal case declined comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

The story of Miles Guo begins in the 1970s in northeast China, where he describes dropping out of middle school to sell jeans and radios to help his seven brothers and staunchly anti-Communist parents.

"As a child, Guo would regularly check the communal water well to find his mother when he would lose sight of her, to make sure she did not commit suicide by jumping into the well to end the constant suffering," according to Guo's 2018 defamation lawsuit against a rival anti-Communist activist.

In the 1990s, Guo — who in China went by Guo Wengui and Ho Wan Kwok — began investing in and later developing commercial properties, most notably the Pangu Plaza, a hotel and office complex built in Beijing in 2008.

In late 2014, Guo moved to New York City, where he quickly established his capitalist bona fides.

He spent $67.5 million on a penthouse overlooking Central Park, spanning all 7,000 square feet of the 18th floor of the Sherry-Netherland hotel.

In news interviews from his penthouse, he called himself a dissident and asylum seeker, explaining he'd come to America to live abundantly as an anti-Communist activist.

During his criminal trial, federal prosecutors described what they called the real reason Guo left China: spiraling debt and a business partner's arrest on corruption charges.

Guo began his fraud scheme one month after the Chinese government froze his Hong Kong bank accounts in 2018, prosecutors told a Manhattan jury.

Using social media and Mandarin-language music videos aimed at the international Chinese diaspora, Guo spent the next five years tricking thousands of adherents into pouring $1.3 billion into fraudulent investment and cryptocurrency schemes — all in the context of helping him overthrow the Chinese government.

The proceeds funded a lifestyle that included a 150-foot superyacht called the Lady May, a smaller racing yacht, three private planes, and a fleet of a dozen European motorcycles and luxury cars, including a sleek black Bugatti Chiron worth more than $4 million.

His Manhattan penthouse, Connecticut mansion, and estate in Mahwah, New Jersey — built by a railroad magnate's heir in 1907 — have a combined 42 bedrooms.

One fraud victim testified at his criminal trial that she was won over not just by Guo's anti-Communist message, but by the wealth and success he displayed, including in a YouTube video where she recalled him boasting he dined on seafood "so rare, it's almost extinct."

She took out a second mortgage to buy $14,000 in sham stock for GTV, an anti-Communist-China video-sharing website Guo founded with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

Bannon, who has not been accused of wrongdoing in the Guo case, was arrested on board Guo's Lady May in 2020 in connection with a fundraising campaign to build a wall on the US southern border. He took a no-jail plea to a single count of defrauding donors.

In February of 2022, Guo was ordered to pay a $134 million fine for moving the Lady May, his most valuable asset, out of US waters in violation of a New York state judge's orders. Guo filed for bankruptcy six days later.

"He could have had a very good career life and could have been very famous as a real dissident," Queens attorney Ning Ye — who is seeking a $10 million defamation claim against Guo in the bankruptcy — told Business Insider. "But he destroyed himself."

It took a Connecticut bankruptcy judge just four months to order that a trustee manage the Chapter 11 case she called "unusual, complicated, and often contentious."

For newly appointed trustee Luc Despins and his team of lawyers at the Manhattan-based Big Law firm of Paul Hastings LLP, that would prove an understatement.

Assets were hidden around the world in what federal prosecutors called a web of alter-ego shell companies in the names of at least 80 entities and individuals, including Guo's chef, bodyguard, chauffeur, and children.

Guo's physical assets were likewise scattered, and many remain unsold or mired in litigation.

The penthouse and Gilded Age mansion have been listed for sale for months. And the trustee is still finding more of Guo's possessions. His $130,000 Bosendorfer grand piano turned up in a warehouse in Staten Island in May. His Mercedes-Maybach was auctioned off last month after being recovered from a New Jersey tow lot.

Guo was also an audacious and combative debtor.

Soon after filing for bankruptcy, he asked to borrow $8 million against the estate, a request quickly rejected by the judge.

Guo also argued that he should keep using the yacht, homes, and cars because they were actually owned by his family members and supporters.

At one early bankruptcy hearing, an attorney for the LLC behind the Gilded Age mansion argued it was the US headquarters of the New Federal State of China, of which Guo was president-in-waiting. Guo no more owns the 21-bedroom estate than President Biden owns the White House, the lawyer argued.

After extended litigation, the property is now on the market for $19 million.

In his final eight months of freedom, Guo launched what the bankruptcy judge called an "intimidation campaign," the details of which have been documented in hundreds of pages of court filings in the bankruptcy and criminal case.

Despins and his team of lawyers at Paul Hastings, LLP, where he is a partner, complained of death threats.

"Luc, you are CCP's running dog," an anonymous caller told Despins in a voice mail, referencing the Chinese Communist Party. "Your end is so close," the caller said.

When a Delaware woman filed a $5,000 bankruptcy claim, Guo called her a "gangster" and a Communist spy on the social media platform Gettr. Six days later, a Guo supporter posted her ID on Gettr, showing her photo and home address.

In social media posts and livestreams, Guo urged his global network of supporters to picket his biggest creditors, the bankruptcy trustee, and their family members. Guo provided the relevant home and office addresses in his posts.

"They will suffer calamities!" Guo said in an online broadcast in November 2022.

In December 2022, posters were taped to the scaffolding outside Paul Hastings' Manhattan offices. The swastika-bedecked signs used Despins' law firm profile photo, doctored to depict him as a uniformed Nazi and with blood dripping, vampire-like, from his mouth. "EXTORTIONIST," the posters read.

Some of the firm's New York employees stopped coming to work after weeks of running a gauntlet of shouting Guo supporters, some carrying a large banner reading "New Federal State of China." Employees were chased through the lobby and up an escalator by screaming picketers.

Guo's conduct "is having a chilling effect on potential witnesses and creditors," the judge said in issuing a restraining order, adding, "There is a very real risk that the Chapter 11 trustee will ultimately be forced to resign if the debtor does not stop his conduct."

Picketers demonstrated at the home of Despins' ex-wife and across the street from the elementary school where his daughter worked.

At Despins' own home, picketers handed out leaflets calling him a racist communist sympathizer, the trustee told the judge in January 2023, after a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction failed to rein in the demonstrations.

When federal Marshals handed the protesters copies of the restraining order, they were "thrown on the ground," Despins told the judge.

After Guo's arrest in March 2023, the protests stopped. But the damage, at least financially, had been done.

In preparation for four days of court hearings challenging the protests, the trustee had hired a team of certified translators to convert hundreds of videos and social media posts from Mandarin to English. "It's extraordinarily expensive," Despins told the judge.

The firm also spent "dozens of hours" meeting with US Marshals and with partners over whether the trustee should resign. Outside firms were hired to counter a possible cybersecurity risk.

The cost of these efforts, which Despins called a "costly distraction," was billed against the bankruptcy estate.

The biggest delay is ongoing.

In one of his last acts of mischief before his arrest, Guo urged his followers to fill the bankruptcy docket with what the trustee, in a recent court filing, called "non-meritorious" debt claims designed "to introduce chaos into the claims process."

"Maybe you can become a billionaire!" Guo had posted, along with instructions for adding debt claims to the bankruptcy docket.

"Let the attorney's fees accumulate to $1 trillion!" Guo urged in a video two months before his arrest.

The list of creditors soon swelled. Some 1,200 claims totaling $18 billion were filed against the estate, each of which must be examined by the trustee's team of lawyers, a lengthy, ongoing process.

That's on top of the routine expense of maintaining Guo's estate, including some $1 million to repair, maintain, and sell the Lady May, court records show. Until it's sold, Guo's New York City penthouse is costing the estate $98,000 a month in fees.

On January 21, the trustee filed the bankruptcy's most recent balance sheet listing total receipts of $156 million, the amount recovered during four years of litigation and asset sales.

Half of that money is gone.

Disbursements from the estate total $77 million, including $70 million on court-approved legal and professional fees.

Two dozen law firms have been paid for working the case, including firms hired on behalf of Guo and his LLCs. Paul Hastings, the trustee's lead law firm, has so far invoiced for $47 million.

The bankruptcy remains in asset-recovery mode; no creditor has yet received compensation.

"If there's something left, maybe they'll get one dollar out of every $1,000," Queens attorney Kevin Tung told Business Insider. He represents nine clients, large construction companies with claims for $100 million in unpaid contracting work from Guo's days as a hotel developer in China.

"If there's nothing left for us, tough shit," Tung added. "I told them not to get their hopes up."