SEC Freezes Assets of Las Vegas Lawyer Behind $450M Ponzi Scheme
The asset freeze obtained by the SEC against Beasley and the other defendants prevents any further dissipation of investor funds.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has indicted several Las Vegas-area individuals and businesses allegedly behind a $449 million Ponzi scheme.
The regulator also secured an asset freeze against defendants who allegedly deceived hundreds of investors in a fraud involving alleged personal injury settlements.
According to the complaint, attorney Matthew Beasley and cohorts Jeffrey Judd and Christopher Humphries told hundreds of investors they would earn a 12.5% quarterly return by making risk-free investments in J&J Consulting Services.
But according to the complaint, none of the $449 million raised from investors over a five-year period was used for this purpose. Instead, they used investors’ money to buy luxury homes, cars, boats and a private jet for themselves, and paid fictitious returns to Ponzi-style investors to keep the project going.
Tanya Beard, Acting Director of the SEC’s Salt Lake Regional Office, said: “As alleged in our complaint, Beasley, Judd and others enriched themselves through lies and deception, using their faith and community networks to defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars after promising them an annual increase of almost 50% on their initial investment.
The asset freeze obtained by the SEC against Beasley and the other defendants prevents any further dissipation of investor funds. The SEC is seeking permanent injunctions and restitution of ill-gotten gains, along with interest and penalties.
Despite the success of the SEC and CFTC whistleblower program, residents of the United States continue to run the risk of being duped by Ponzi schemes because there will always be an optimistic scammer lurking, convinced that he won’t get caught.
Earlier this week, the US Court for the Southern District of New York permanently barred Casper Mikkelsen from trading commodity interest and ordered him to pay $1,191,286 in restitution and a fine of $3,573,860 for a Forex fraud brought to court by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The Danish citizen will have to pay triple the profits he made from committing the scam in which he promised clients he would use his discretion to trade forex on their behalf through his company, GNTFX. In turn, his clients invested at least $1,536,782.47, but rather than using these funds for forex trading, Casper Mikkelsen embezzled the funds in a typical Ponzi scheme, paying out alleged trading profits forex to customers.