The complaint is 185 pages long. It names 15 defendants. It describes more than 750 separate predicate acts of racketeering spread across eight years. It alleges approximately $75 million in fraudulent transactions. And it identifies one man, living at 149 Parkshore Drive in Folsom, California, as the person who organized and ran all of it.
That man is Tyler Brandon Davis.
Case 3:26-cv-00080-GPC-BJW was filed January 6, 2026, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. It is a civil RICO action, not a criminal prosecution. All allegations are contested. But the scope of what the complaint describes, and the number of people it implicates across multiple California law firms, bankruptcy court, and the federal court system, makes it one of the more extraordinary pieces of litigation to come out of California's tech sector.
The Company in Question
TopDevz, LLC was a software development staffing company headquartered at 7460 Girard Avenue in La Jolla, California. Founded in 2017, it placed contract software developers with enterprise clients. Its client list included HBO, Procore Technologies, DriveTime Automotive Group, and Becton Dickinson. By 2021, it had logged nearly $30 million in cumulative revenue. Independent analyses valued the company at between $18 million and $30 million.
Davis was a 49% minority member of the company from its inception. The operating agreement, signed May 9, 2017, established TopDevz as a manager-managed LLC. Under that structure, Davis had no authority to hire employees, execute contracts, or represent the company in any binding capacity. He was, on paper, a passive investor.
According to the complaint, that arrangement was unacceptable to him. And so, the filing alleges, he spent eight years building the infrastructure to take what the operating agreement said wasn't his.
The Alleged Scheme
The complaint traces Davis's allegedly fraudulent activities to the moment he acquired his ownership stake.
His $787,240 capital contribution to TopDevz, according to the filing, came largely from fraudulent sources: approximately $750,000 allegedly embezzled from Porter Consulting, LLC, one of his own business entities, and $37,240 laundered through another entity, Mason Building & Design, from a fraudulent $328,300 Paycheck Protection Program loan obtained through Tri Counties Bank. If that allegation holds, Davis's ownership claim was built on fraud before the company had generated a dollar in revenue.
From there, the complaint describes a years-long campaign to seize the company through litigation, bankruptcy proceedings, and the alleged cooperation of multiple California attorneys. The complaint accuses Davis of recruiting legal help through personal and church connections, including attorney Scott Carpenter of Cummins & White LLP in Newport Beach, who the filing alleges seized TopDevz's Wells Fargo bank account through fraudulent wire communications and filed hundreds of fraudulent court pleadings on Davis's behalf.
The corporate architecture Davis allegedly used to shield and move money runs to five entities: Porter Consulting, Mason Building & Design, Grigio LLC, Humble Provisions LLC, and Riley's Doggie Day Care. The complaint presents these not as independent businesses but as instruments of a financial structure designed to move money while obscuring its origins.
The Bankruptcy Play
The most detailed section of the complaint concerns the TopDevz bankruptcy proceeding.
According to the filing, Davis, working with attorneys including D. Edward Hays of Marshack Hays Wood in Irvine, allegedly manipulated the bankruptcy case to convert a Chapter 11 reorganization into a Chapter 7 liquidation. In Chapter 11, the original owner retained a voice in the proceedings. In Chapter 7, control passed to a court-appointed trustee.
The trustee, Christopher R. Barclay, then allegedly settled all of the estate's claims, valued by the debtor at $75 million, for a combined $200,000. After that, the complaint alleges, Barclay filed a motion to sell the remaining estate litigation rights to Davis himself, for $100,000.
The bankruptcy malpractice aspects of the case are the subject of a separate adversary proceeding, Case 26-90003-CL, filed the same day as the RICO complaint.
The 185-page federal complaint describes the full arc of the alleged scheme, from the allegedly fraudulent capital contribution in 2017 through the bankruptcy sale in 2024.
Folsom, California
Davis lives in Folsom, a Sacramento suburb known primarily for its namesake prison, its lake, and its comfortable residential neighborhoods. He also controls Porter Consulting, listed in Paradise, California, and operated Mason Building & Design across Northern California.
The distance from Folsom to La Jolla, where TopDevz operated, is roughly 500 miles. The complaint presents that geography as intentional: Davis allegedly managed the scheme from the Sacramento suburbs while his legal infrastructure operated in Southern California. Newport Beach. Irvine. Beverly Hills. The San Diego federal courthouse.
Whether the allegations are proven in court will depend on discovery, testimony, and the strength of the documentary evidence the plaintiffs say they have. The case is active. No criminal charges have been filed. Davis has not been convicted of anything.
What the complaint describes, if proven, would represent one of the more methodically executed corporate fraud schemes to work its way through California's legal system, planned from the day an ownership stake was acquired, executed over eight years through the legal and bankruptcy systems that were supposed to protect against exactly this kind of outcome.
