Criminal Proceedings

January 31, 2020

A former financial adviser, Li Lin Hsu, AKA Yilin Hsu Lee, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay $5.3 million in restitution to the 20 victims of her $8.1 million Ponzi scheme.  Hsu began her scheme in 2014 while employed at Ameriprise Financial, promising victim investors, including her own relatives, that their funds would go toward low risk municipal bonds when in fact they were going toward homes in affluent neighborhoods, a luxury car, a luxury vacation, and luxury goods for Hsu herself. When Ameriprise discovered the misconduct in 2015, Hsu was fired and then barred by FINRA from working in the investment business, but not before she began her own companies, American Trading Group LLC and American Capital Republic, Inc, where she managed to defraud additional investors.  USAO CDCA

January 27, 2020

Practice Fusion, Inc., a provider of electronic health records systems, will pay $145 million to resolve criminal and civil charges that it accepted unlawful kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies and misrepresented the capabilities of its EHR software.  As part of the settlement, the defendant entered into a deferred prosecution agreement, paying $26 million in criminal fines and forfeitures, agreeing to compliance policies and monitoring, and admitting that it accepted payment from an unnamed opioid manufacturer in exchange for including "clinical decision support" alerts within its EHR system that were designed to increase prescriptions for the pharma company's drugs.  The civil settlement – $119 million for the federal government and up to an additional $5.2 million for states that choose to opt in – resolves the kickback allegations related to the opioid manufacturer and 13 other such arrangements, as well as allegations that Practice Fusion knowingly misrepresented the capabilities of its EHR system in order to secure federal certification for the software and secure eligibility for federal incentive payments for providers adopting its software.  DOJ; USAO VT

January 21, 2020

Australian proprietary trading firm Propex Derivatives Pty Ltd has been ordered to pay $1 million and submit to a deferred prosecution agreement after a former trader, Jiongsheng (Jim) Zhao, was found to have engaged in spoofing on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange E-mini S&P 500 futures market.  His actions caused about $464,300 in market losses over the course of the five year scheme.  CFTC; DOJ

January 10, 2020

Richard Carter of Illinois has been ordered to pay $2.5 million for his role in a $1.76 million commodity pool fraud operated by Blue Guru, LLC.  According to the CFTC, from 2014 to 2018, Carter misrepresented the profitability of the commodity pool to current and prospective customers, while misappropriating customer funds, ignoring customer requests to withdraw, and lying to customers about disbursement issues.  Carter's co-defendant, Mark Slobodnik, was previously ordered to pay about $400,000, while Blue Guru was ordered to pay $7 million.  CFTC

January 9, 2020

After being charged with defrauding brokerage customers in May 2018 and pleading guilty in December 2018, a former registered investment advisor, Steven Pagartanis, has been sentenced to over 14 years in prison and ordered to pay $6.5 million for orchestrating the 18-year, $13 million fraud.  Pagartanis had targeted elderly women and promised an 8% return on investments.  However, he secretly laundered their investments and used the money on personal expenses, causing investors to lose over $9 million in total.   USAO EDNY

December 20, 2019

Florida residents and married couple Rodolfo Pichardo and Marta Pichardo were sentenced to 15 years and 8 years, respectively, following earlier guilty pleas to healthcare fraud and wire fraud.  Defendants were also ordered to pay over $34 million in restitution. The Pichardos ran a network of home health agencies, pharmacies, and therapy staffing companies, that submitted more than $38 million in false claims to Medicare.  Defendants paid kickbacks to patient recruiters and medical clinics for patient referrals.  USAO SD FL

December 19, 2019

Lee Elbaz, the former CEO of Yukom Communications, Ltd., was sentenced to 22 years in prison following his conviction for fraud in offering and marketing a binary options scheme to U.S. investors.  DOJ