A Massachusetts travel agent who stole over half a million dollars from Florida students hoping to study abroad must now return the money as part of a plea deal with prosecutors.
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Robert Goodwin, 56, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, took $637,000 to arrange foreign trips for eager students at Flagler College and Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, only to suddenly cancel plans and break off contact, claiming his company went under after he was a victim of fraud.
But investigators pegged him as the true fraudster, leading to his December arrest, according to court records.
Goodwin pleaded no contest Thursday to two counts of grand theft in exchange for prosecutors dropping two fraud-related charges against him. He was sentenced to time served and 25 years of probation, had to surrender his passport, is not allowed to leave the country and cannot organize group travel, records show.
He must also return $637,000 to his victims. He has already paid $194,000 of that, according to prosecutors.
Goodwin, as the owner of his own travel agency, made arrangements with Flagler College beginning in late 2023 for faculty-led custom travel packages to a dozen destinations including Europe, Brazil, South Korea and Cambodia that were supposed to take place in the summer of 2024, according to an affidavit detailing the accusations against Goodwin.
The St. Augustine college paid him about $559,000 in advance. But just before the first planned trip to Sicily was scheduled to depart in May 2024, Goodwin suddenly informed the college over email that it had been canceled. Emails and phone calls to him went unanswered. Flagler officials also discovered the liability insurance Goodwin had presented to them was fraudulent, the affidavit said.
A year earlier, Goodwin also made arrangements with faculty and parents at Daytona Beach’s Seabreeze High School for a senior’s study abroad trip to Italy and Greece, even twice traveling from Massachusetts to have in-person meetings with students at the school, the affidavit shows. Those plans were made in late 2022.
He worked mostly with Christopher Weinrich, a long-time teacher at the school who had been organizing annual senior trips for years. The two had met when Weinrich escorted a school trip to London in 2022.
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Weinrich told investigators he at one point questioned Goodwin about the relatively low cost of the planned 2024 trip, but Goodwin said he had donors to help lower costs.
The 13-day excursion for Italy and Greece was planned for June 2024. The trip’s 104 participants paid at least $3,550 upfront for the trip, with many chaperones paying extra to upgrade their airfare or accommodations. Four weeks before the trip, participants received emails from Goodwin saying the trip had been canceled as his company had become insolvent.
Participants requested a refund, but none were ever received, the affidavit said.
Weinrich’s emails and phone calls to Goodwin went unanswered, and previously operating email and phone numbers for the company became inactive. The total amount of money Goodwin received from the 104 was about $489,000.
When investigators from the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office spoke to Goodwin, he said he had been unable to provide the promised services to the schools because he himself had been the victim of a “massive fraud” by a New York investment firm. He said he filed a complaint with the New York State Attorney General’s Office, the affidavit said.
But the attorney general’s office told investigators it could not take action because it couldn’t find a financial institution with the names provided in Goodwin’s complaint.
In addition to giving his customers fraudulent documents, such as insurance records, to further his scheme, he also gave false documents to law enforcement when they began looking into him, such as records claiming he had secured airline reservations for the Seabreeze High students, the affidavit shows.