BULLETIN: CFTC Charges 5 Florida Residents And Mexican National In Alleged Forex Scheme With Tentacles In Panama; Scheme Was Promoted On MoneyMakerGroup, TalkGold Ponzi Forums

BULLETIN: The CFTC has gone to federal court in Florida, charging a company and six individuals in an alleged international Forex and commodities fraud scheme that gathered at least $1.7 million and bilked residents of Florida, California and Puerto Rico.

Charged in the case were Alpha Trade Group S.A. (ATG), which also is known as Revolution Network Ltd. of Panama. Individual defendants include Jose Cecilio Martinez Beltran of Orlando; Welinton Bautista Castillo of Orlando; Maria Alvarez Gutierrez of Orlando; Yehodiz Padua Valentin of Orlando; and Maria Asela Rodriguez of Orlando.

Francisco Amaury Suero Matos of Mexico also was charged.

Customers were solicited to invest in commodity pools known as Orsa Investment Group LLC and Online Marketing Solutions, the CFTC charged. Investments were positioned as “risk free” with payouts of up to 25.5 percent a month.

Records show that the scheme was promoted on the Ponzi cesspits MoneyMakerGroup and TalkGold.

This screen shot shows the first post about Alpha Trade Group appeared at the MoneyMakerGroup Ponzi forum on Oct. 7, 2009 -- days after a U.S. bank already had closed an account linked to the scheme amid fears it was being used to launder money.

A small sum of money is believed to have gone to a trading company in Anguilla, but the defendants misappropriated “at least several hundred thousand dollars of pool participant funds for their own personal benefit, including financing international trips to Spain, Switzerland and Panama,” the CFTC charged.

Customers were given bogus statements that showed fictitious returns, the CFTC said.

See August 2010 story that outlined a developing criminal investigation and forfeiture case.