SEC Accuses Elm Tree Investment Advisors, its Founder, of $17M Securities Fraud The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed fraud charges against Elm Tree Investment Advisors LLC and its founder Frederic Elm for running a Florida-based securities scam that raised over $17 million in a little over a year. The…
SEC Charges NY Firm, Fund Managers With Securities Fraud The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging VERO Capital Management, its CFO Steven Downey, President Robert Geiger, and General Counsel George Barbaresi with secretly taking investor money to support a side business. The three men ran funds with offering documents that…
Joseph Francis Bartholomew is charged with 30 felony counts related to his alleged operation of an $11 million Ponzi scheme. The 75-year-old former licensed insurance agent has been called Orange County, Ca.’s Bernard Madoff, after the financier who ran a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scam for decades. Bartholomew allegedly bilked over 27…
Six years after the collapse of Bernard Madoff’s multi-billion dollar Ponzi scam, over $10 billion has been recovered—that’s close to 60% of the principal that went missing after his arrest in 2008. Nearly $6 billion has been paid back to investors. Trustee Irving Picard recently provided these figures in an…
CGM Limited Pleads Guilty to Securities Fraud CGM Limited, a subsidiary of ConvergEx, must pay a criminal penalty and restitution of $26 million for conspiracy to commit both securities fraud and wire fraud, as well as for wire fraud. The U.S. Department of Justice says that CGM limited charged clients…
The Securities and Exchange Commission has said that it no longer intends to continue trying to get the Securities Investor Protection Corporation to pay back investors the losses they sustained in R. Allen Stanford’s $7 billion Ponzi scam. The decision comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District…
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is ordering Success Trade Securities Inc. and its President and CEO Fuad Ahmed to pay 59 investors, mostly current and ex-NBA and NFL players, about $13.7 million in restitution for losses they sustained in a Ponzi scam. Success Trade is now expelled from FINRA membership…
David McQueen, of Byron Township in Michigan, was found guilty of 15 felony charges, including those involving money laundering, mail fraud, and failure to file taxes. McQueen is accused of running a $46 million Michigan Ponzi scam that bilked over 800 victims. Many of them gave him their retirement money,…
According to Richard C. Breeden, who is overseeing the US Department of Justice’s Madoff Victim Fund, he has received some 51,700 claims worth approximately $40 billion from Ponzi scam victims seeking to recover their losses. That amount is three times more than the claims submitted during the bankruptcy proceedings for…
After a federal jury convicted Gary Lynn McDuff of conspiring to defraud investors, a U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas judge sentenced the 58-year-old to 25 years behind bar for the $11 million investment scam. McDuff’s co-conspirators, Robert Reese and Gary Lancaster, had both pleaded guilty-Reese has…