September 7, 2023

In the highest civil monetary penalty ever ordered in a CFTC case, South Africa-based Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited (MTI) and its founder and CEO, Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, have been ordered to pay $1.7 billion for defrauding over 23,000 U.S.-based retail foreign currency (forex) investors and failing to comply with commodity pool operator regulations.  MTI and Steynberg solicited Bitcoin from U.S. as well as foreign investors, purportedly trading off-exchange retail forex through an unregistered commodity pool, when in fact they were enriching themselves through a multilevel marketing scheme.  CFTC

Tagged in: Cryptocurrency, Financial and Investment Fraud, Fraud in CFTC-Regulated Markets,