"I never realized anything we were doing was unlawful," wrote Keller, 56, of San Diego. "I have spent my life working to help people, not take advantage of them."

In court filings, prosecutors Lawrence Spong and Sanjay Bhandari sharply rebuked his assertions.

Keller, they said, personally rejected the refund requests from would-be homeowners.

"On a file by file, customer by customer basis, hundreds upon hundreds of times, defendant Keller heartlessly exploited these victims' pleas and took their money for himself and his co-conspirators," they wrote.

"Unlike his co-conspirators who have pled guilty and tried to make amends for the crimes, defendant Keller feels no such guilt, no such remorse," they wrote. "He continues to lie about his conduct and blame the victims of his offense for their losses."

Dennis Foster, the mastermind behind the company, pleaded guilty before prosecutors sought his indictment and was sentenced in 2002 to 21 months in prison.

A third conspirator, Kevin Canum, was given three years' probation after pleading guilty. He testified against Keller.

The company was started in the mid-1990s, first in La Mesa, and later moved to Miramar Road in San Diego.

According to federal authorities, it operated as a multilevel marketing system.

It recruited people to take out ads in the "homes for rent" sections of newspapers nationwide, promising houses to people with credit problems.

The 3,750 people who took out the ads paid $25 to $295 for the privilege of selling the home-buying system.

People who responded to the ads were shown a video promising that, in exchange for an advance payment of at least $1,500, they would get a home or their money back.

Prosecutors said that was a scam. To get their money back, the clients would have had to prove they failed 10 times in four months to enter into a rent-to-own deal.

But it was up to the company to decide whether clients had met the criteria.

Clients complained to authorities around the country.

When the FBI started looking into the company in 1997, workers – at Keller's request – threw hundreds of files in the trash, prosecutors said.

Detectives retrieved the files and found that more than half of the 986 customer files contained requests for a refund.

Investigators later found that the boilerplate rejection letter the company sent to people asking for refunds was stored in a computer file with an expletive in its name.