Business Lawsuit Over 16,000 Fake Firms at a Northglenn Home

Colorado’s lawsuit over the 16,000 fake businesses registered to a Northglenn home ended in a September 2024 consent judgment against Marcio Garcia Andrade, who used a temporary state fee discount to register more than 15,600 sham LLCs to a single townhome and then marketed them as aged “shelf corporations.” He agreed to pay $75,000, dissolve the entities, and stop filing noncompliant registrations, without admitting wrongdoing.¹

What Andrade Did and How the Fee Discount Enabled It

Between February 2022 and August 2023, Andrade filed more than 15,600 new LLCs through Colorado’s online business registration system. The timing was deliberate. The Colorado Business Fee Relief Act had temporarily cut the LLC registration fee from $50 to $1, and Andrade’s filings absorbed roughly $766,000 in taxpayer-funded fee credits over the discount window.²

The filings came from foreign IP addresses, often in batches of hundreds submitted within minutes of each other. The companies were never meant to operate. They were created to sit on paper and age, then be sold as “shelf corporations” to buyers who wanted the appearance of an established business. Andrade ran a website called Wholesale Shelf Corporations that sold the Colorado LLCs for roughly $10,000 to nearly $16,000 each.² Andrade did not live in Colorado and was not eligible to act as a registered agent in the state.³

The Northglenn Address and the Family Living There

Nearly every one of the 15,600-plus filings listed the same address: a townhome at 2236 East 109th Drive in Northglenn. The homeowner had not authorized Andrade to use the property as a business address or registered agent location.⁴

The residents told 9News they had “nothing to do with” the companies. Their mailbox stayed stuffed with junk mail addressed to businesses they had never heard of, and agents from the FBI and Secret Service came by regularly asking about Andrade and the filings. One resident called it “more annoying than anything else.”⁵

Why the Fake Companies Were Dangerous

The Attorney General’s Office said shell entities with a Colorado address and the look of a paper history can be used to open bank accounts, obtain loans and lines of credit under false pretenses, bid on government contracts, conduct anonymous real estate deals, or import counterfeit goods including fake safety equipment and medications.² Attorney General Phil Weiser said the filings put consumers at risk of being pulled into transactions with illegitimate actors.³

How the State Caught On

The Colorado Secretary of State’s office flagged the activity on May 10, 2023, after staff noticed a flood of new registrations all tied to the same Northglenn address and originating from foreign IP addresses. Cross-referencing payment methods and digital logs confirmed the pattern, and the office referred the matter to law enforcement two days later.⁶ The Attorney General’s Consumer Fraud Unit took over and filed a civil complaint in Denver District Court in September 2023, alleging violations of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act. The state said Andrade continued selling and transferring entities to third parties even after the suit was filed.³

What the September 2024 Settlement Required

The consent judgment was filed in Denver District Court in September 2024, averting a trial scheduled for November at which the state had planned to seek roughly $766,000 in damages.¹ The terms:

Dissolve all of the fraudulent entities he had registered.
Pay $75,000 over 18 months, broken into $20,000 in attorney fees, a $20,000 civil penalty, and $35,000 in disgorgement of profits.³
Submit to an injunction barring any new business filings that do not comply with Colorado law, with additional penalties for violations.⁴

Andrade did not admit liability. His attorney called the matter “a clerical error and a misunderstanding,” saying Andrade had a contract with a registered agent who lived at the Northglenn townhome but moved without telling him, and that Andrade had a “good faith belief” he had consent to use the address.¹

The $75,000 payment was far below the roughly $766,000 in fee credits the scheme consumed. The Attorney General’s office did not seek recovery of those credits because they were not cash payments to Andrade; they were subsidies that reduced what he owed the state for each filing.²

Andrade’s Prior FTC Case

The Colorado case was not Andrade’s first fraud matter. In June 2019, the Federal Trade Commission obtained a court order freezing the assets of Grand Teton Professionals, a Wyoming LLC Andrade co-operated. The FTC alleged the company ran a credit repair scheme that charged consumers illegal upfront fees while falsely promising to remove negative items from their credit reports, taking in at least $6.2 million.⁷ Andrade and other defendants settled in January 2020, with a $9.6 million judgment largely suspended on inability to pay and a lifetime ban on Andrade operating or promoting any credit repair service.⁸

What Colorado Changed Afterward

The case pushed the state to tighten its business filing rules. House Bill 24-1137, signed on June 3, 2024, implemented recommendations from a working group the Secretary of State had convened in early 2023 to study fraudulent filings.⁹

Effective July 1, 2025, individual registered agents must verify Colorado residency with a state-issued ID or driver’s license, or complete an alternative verification by receiving a mailed passcode. Business entities acting as registered agents must be in good standing with the Secretary of State. Post office boxes and commercial mailbox addresses no longer qualify as a registered agent’s official address.¹⁰ The law also lets the Secretary of State mark entities “delinquent” when they are found to have been created fraudulently and permits law enforcement to initiate complaints about suspicious filings.⁹

1
BusinessDen. Man Who Created 16K Fake Companies Settles State’s Lawsuit
2
Colorado Sun. Thousands of Business Filings in Colorado Fraudulent, Northglenn
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The Center Square. Fraudulent Business Filings Colorado Northglenn
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Colorado Attorney General. Attorney General Phil Weiser Cracks Down on Bogus Business Filings With the State
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9News. Nearly 16 Thousand Businesses Registered to Northglenn Home
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Colorado Secretary of State Amended Complaint. Andrade Amended Complaint
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FTC. Defendants in FTC Credit Repair Scheme Case Agree to Settle Charges
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FTC. Grand Teton Professionals Order
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Colorado General Assembly. HB24-1137 Implement Fraudulent Filings Group Recommendations
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Colorado Secretary of State. Registered Agent Changes