A Dallas man who has already been sentenced to 10 years in prison for orchestrating a $9 million real estate scam has now been hit will civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the same scheme, the SEC announced Thursday.

The agency charged Carl Keith Battie with fraud for carrying out a real estate investment scam between 2008 and 2014 that raised at least $9 million from at least 70 investors. The complaint was filed in federal district court in Dallas.

The scheme involved raising money from investors, mostly senior citizens whom Battie recruited through investment seminars in luxurious hotels to buy distressed property in the St. Louis area, the SEC says. Battie, using a series of aliases and front men, described the investments as "truly passive and guaranteed" and asserted that they would generate returns ranging from 16 percent to 35 percent a year.

But the SEC alleges almost nothing told to investors was true. Battie artificially inflated the apparent market value of the properties by repeatedly selling them back and forth between companies he controlled. To the extent any tenants occupied the properties, they were uniformly high risk and low revenue, which forced Battie to rely on new investor funds to make Ponzi payments to earlier investors, the SEC says.

He was sentenced on a charge of wire fraud to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 million in restitution and interest after pleading guilty to the criminal charge filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. The SEC is not imposing additional penalties given his imprisonment and restitution order.