The investigation into Tony Pough, 45, Tim McQueen, 49, and Joseph Brunson, 43, continues and additional charges may be filed, state Attorney General Henry McMaster said in a news release.

The men did business as 3 Hebrew Boys LLC and Capital Consortium Group Inc., holding meetings in South and North Carolina to look for potential investors, according to the indictment.

They had more than 14,000 clients who gave them more than $82 million starting in January 2004. That would have obligated the men to pay back more than $950 million by the end of 2010, according to the indictment.

The men offered close to a dozen programs where an investor could put down a couple of thousand dollars and have a home, automobile or student loan paid off in less than two years, prosecutors said.

The men told potential investors that the high returns would mostly come through investments in foreign currency, according to the indictment.

Investigators describe the case as a Ponzi scheme, in which early investors are generously rewarded when they recruit investors. It is illegal to use money from those recruits, rather than real investments, to pay promised returns.

Authorities arrested the men in June, and a judge has frozen $17 million in accounts in a South Carolina bank.

The attorney for the men, Hemphill Pride, has said he thinks his clients were exempt from the licensing requirements. He also has accused the attorney general's office of going after Pough, McQueen and Brunson because they are black, an accusation prosecutors vehemently deny.

The men took the name "Hebrew Boys" from the Bible story of three Hebrew brothers who held steadfast in their faith even when faced with death in a fiery furnace, prosecutors said.

The men told investors they had been through their own test of faith financially and survived, according to the indictment.