Shiloh Luckey spent months handing out tax advice on TikTok while federal investigators were looking into whether she lied about being a certified public accountant to raise millions for her tax startup. Now she is facing 15 federal charges.
Luckey, 42, of Inglewood, California, who also goes by Shiloh Johnson, was arrested Sept. 6 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as she was about to board a cruise ship for a vacation. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles say she took at least $13.3 million from investors, most of them venture capital firms, which are companies that invest in young startups in exchange for a piece of the business. According to prosecutors, those investors lost every dollar.
Luckey founded ComplYant in 2019 and pitched it as an app that helped small business owners keep up with tax rules in exchange for a monthly subscription. Between 2020 and 2023, prosecutors say, she told investors the company already had paying customers and strong monthly revenue that kept coming in, the kind of steady income investors look for before writing big checks. Prosecutors say she claimed revenue as high as $250,000 a month.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that polices the stock and investment markets, tells a very different story. In a civil lawsuit filed in November 2025, the SEC said ComplYant brought in about $250 a month on average and signed up fewer than four new subscribers each month. The agency also said Luckey told investors she was a licensed CPA when she was not.
According to the SEC, Luckey spent at least $2.2 million of investor money on herself on top of her salary, including her home, Super Bowl tickets and a destination wedding in the Caribbean. The federal indictment adds a Tesla to that list.
Prosecutors also accuse Luckey of check kiting to buy her Inglewood house in 2022. Check kiting means writing a check from an account that does not have the money, depositing it at another bank, and spending the funds before the first bank realizes the check is bad. Prosecutors say Luckey wrote a $1.5 million check from a ComplYant account that did not have the money, deposited it into another ComplYant account at a different bank, and wired the cash to buy the house. They say she later covered the shortfall with more money from investors.
By December 2025, Luckey was under federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. That did not slow her down online. At the time, Shiloh Luckey was regularly posting tax and money tips to more than 23,000 TikTok followers under the name “Shiloh, the accountant,” with videos about tracking mileage and building habits that make tax season easier. Records also show she started a new company in October 2025 called HabitLoop, described as a digital financial assistant to help people manage their money.
The indictment, returned Sept. 1, charges her with nine counts of securities fraud, which means lying to investors to get them to put money into a company; three counts of wire fraud, which covers schemes carried out through phone calls, emails or electronic transfers; one count of bank fraud; and two counts of money laundering, which means moving money around to hide where it came from.
Luckey was released on bond and is expected to appear in federal court in Los Angeles in the coming weeks. She has not publicly responded to the charges, and there is no record yet of how she will plead. An indictment is an accusation, and she is presumed innocent unless she is proven guilty in court.
