Accused fraudster Justin Costello has history of posing as

“It’s easy to be someone you’re not, but hard to be yourself,” Wisconsin teenager Justin Costello wrote under his senior photo in the Oconomowoc High School yearbook in 1999.

Twenty-three years later, an FBI SWAT team would arrest Costello hiding from police outside of San Diego, in part, because he was posing as someone he wasn’t: a billionaire with a Harvard MBA who was a twice-wounded Special Forces Iraq veteran.

None of those claims were true, authorities say.

The now-42-year-old was charged Sept. 28 with criminal wire and securities fraud for allegedly swindling $35 million from thousands of investors and others whose trust he won because they thought he was a war hero who had become a wealthy and successful cannabis billionaire, federal prosecutors say.

Although he didn’t do any of those things, according to prosecutors, he did make it on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for failing to surrender to authorities.

Costello skipped town with a fake ID, cash and bars of gold after the Justice Department unsealed a 25-count indictment that detailed multiple schemes involving penny stocks, cannabis companies and a banking firm, prosecutors say.

When he was apprehended in California, FBI agents said Costello had taken on yet another new identity: “Christian Bolter,” according to the driver’s license he was carrying. He also had $60,000 in U.S. currency, $10,000 in Mexican pesos, and six gold bars valued at $12,000 when he was nabbed, court records show.

A federal magistrate judge in San Diego ordered him detained without bail on Oct. 25, saying he was “an economic danger to the community.”

Prosecutors had argued that Costello, who has ties to California, Las Vegas and Washington, was “a serious flight risk.”

Another San Diego judge then ordered Costello back to Washington state to face trial in DOJ’s criminal case in U.S. District Court, court documents show.

That’s the same court where Costello and another man, David Ferraro, were slapped in October with a civil lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused Costello of conduct that is mirrored in the criminal complaint.

The SEC last week agreed to settle the civil allegations against Ferraro, a 44-year-old Radford, Virginia, resident who was accused of using his Twitter account to help Costello with multiple penny stock pump-and-dump schemes.

A judge on Monday signed off on the deal with Ferraro, who agreed to several conditions, while neither admitting nor denying the allegations. The judge has yet to determine monetary penalties against Ferraro, who is not charged in the criminal case.

Costello’s recent arrest is not the first time he has run into trouble with the law — or posed as a billionaire, court and police records show.

Three years before his latest arrest, he brazenly…