A year and a half after the Eaton fire broke out, a real estate agent has been sentenced in one of the first criminal price gouging cases tied to the deadly blazes.
Mike Kobeissi, who calls himself “Mr. La Cañada,” has been sentenced to 12 months of probation, 100 days of community service, mandatory ethics training and a requirement to pay $20,000 to a disaster relief fund, LAist reported. He will also have to write an apology letter to the couple who first reported him to the Attorney General’s Office.
Kobeissi’s attorney Dale Galipo noted that Kobeissi was not ultimately sentenced for violating the section of California’s penal code related to post-disaster price gouging, and was instead convicted of false advertising in a separate misdemeanor charge.
“This was an unfortunate situation,” Galipo said. “Mike did not make $1 off of this situation. And it’s unfortunate that it happened, but we were happy to get it resolved.”
Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office charged Kobeissi with violating California’s ban on post-disaster price gouging in January 2025, just a few weeks after fires ripped through Altadena and left thousands without homes or facing exorbitant rent increases.
State law bars landlords from raising rents by more than 10 percent from what they were before disasters like the Eaton fire. Bonta’s office said that a couple who lost their home in the Eaton fire applied to rent a property listed by Kobeissi and learned that the rent jumped 38 percent from the listed amount. The renters notified the Attorney General’s Office of the price hike.
Bonta’s office did not provide an answer to why the price gouging charge was dropped. Kobeissi told LAist last year that prosecutors had the case “all wrong.”
Other real estate agents and landlords are facing charges for violating the ban on post-fire price gouging in cases that have yet to be resolved. Los Angeles County ended its post-fire rent gouging ban in May.
This wasn’t Kobeissi’s first run-in with the law. In 2022, a civil jury found that the Kobeissi Properties founder sexually abused his cousins when they were children and ordered him to pay more than $24 million, KFI reported. The victims alleged that Kobeissi married their older sister, who is Kobeissi’s first cousin, in order to more easily continue the abuse. Kobeissi denied the claims, saying he and his family were “devastated by the recent news going around.”
“I vehemently deny any type of the behavior that are alleged by our cousins,” he said. “It is very simple: These events did not happen.”
— Chris Malone Méndez
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