Archive

September 9, 2015

Donovan Davis Jr., a former principal of Capital Blu Management, LLC, was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison on multiple counts of criminal conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in connection with the operation of a fraudulent $17 million commodity pool.  CFTC

September 8, 2015

Forex Capital Markets, LLC has agreed to pay $843,000 to settle charges that it failed to diligently supervise its officers’, employees’, and agents’ handling of accounts held in the name of a fraudulent foreign currency exchange pool, Revelation Forex Fund, LP. CFTC

September 8, 2015

The CFTC has charged Rodney Scott Phelps, Jason T. Castenir, and the companies they control - Maverick Asset Management, LLC and Maverick Investment Holdings, LLC – with fraudulently soliciting at least $1.2 million from members of the public to trade commodity futures in a pool, misappropriating more than $800,000 of pool participants’ funds for their personal use, and misrepresenting the profitability of their trading.  CFTC

August 28, 2015

Ron Earl McCullough and David Christopher Mayhew, both from Raleigh, North Carolina, have been ordered to pay $3.7 million for their roles in a Ponzi scheme involving at least 11 investors.  CFTC

August 25, 2015

An Illinois federal court has ordered Charles Mosley, a former senior vice president at Sentinel Management Group, Inc., to pay over $2 million to resolve charges of misusing customer funds.  CFTC

August 19, 2015

INTL FCStone Markets, LLC, a provisionally registered swap dealer, has agreed to pay a $200,000 penalty to settle allegations that it failed to diligently supervise traders in its Kansas City Energy Group.  CFTC

August 10, 2015

A New Hampshire investment advisor was sentenced to up to 7 years in prison for fraud. Richard M. Higgins plead guilty to one felony count of engaging in a course of conduct involving a scheme to defraud in connection with the purchase and sale of securities, and one felony count of a course of business that operated as fraud in connection with acting as an investment advisor. Beginning in late 2006 and continuing through August 2007, Higgins solicited investors for a pooled investment in the form of a limited partnership, making a number of false and misleading statements. Higgins then further defrauded the investors by providing them quarterly statements which regularly overstated the performance of their investments. NH

August 7, 2015

The CFTC has filed an enforcement action against Gary Creagh and Wall Street Pirate Management, LLC, both of New York, for making false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or omissions to the National Futures Association.  CFTC

August 7, 2015

The FTC charged a data broker operation, including Sequoia One LLC and Gen X Marketing Group LLC, with illegally selling payday loan applicants’ financial information to a scam operation that took millions of dollars from consumers by debiting their bank accounts and charging their credit cards without their consent. According to the FTC’s complaint, the data broker enterprise bought loan applications from the operators of payday loan websites, and got others directly from consumers via their own payday loan websites. Instead of passing on those applications to legitimate payday lenders, the defendants sold the information to companies that raided the consumers’ accounts for at least $7.1 million. FTC

August 6, 2015

The CFTC ordered Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC to pay a $300,000 penalty for failing to hold sufficient U.S. dollars in segregated accounts in the United States to meet all of its obligations to cleared swaps customers.  CFTC