Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s one for your Bubba Blue notebook on the various ways to have a Ponzi scheme, as opposed to shrimp — and this one actually wafts with the myth of food — in this case, chicken and burgers. More than 200 investors have been fleeced in a bizarre scheme in which an Ohio […]

Longtime readers of the PP Blog may scarcely believe a year has passed since the AdViewGlobal (AVG) autosurf announced a new, offshore wire facilitator — on the same day President Obama announced a crackdown on international fraud. Obama delivered his remarks at 11:37 a.m. By 5:54 p.m., a member of an AVG forum operated by […]

The acts of Nevin Shapiro — a Florida man arrested in New Jersey yesterday on charges of orchestrating a $900 million Ponzi scheme — represent a “perfect example of greed run amok,” an FBI agent said. Separately, a grand jury in Colorado has charged two men under the state’s organized-crime statute with operating an $18 […]

The executive director of the newly created Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is a veteran federal prosecutor who served on the team that shined the light on the spectacular fraud of Enron Corp. and gained the convictions of former executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in 2006. Meanwhile, the Task Force now has its own […]

BULLETIN: (UPDATED 12:35 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) Trevor G. Cook, implicated in a $190 million Ponzi scheme that pushed tremendous sums of money all over the world and is believed to have fleeced investors out of at least $139 million, has entered a guilty plea in federal court in Minnesota. No sentencing date has been sent. […]

BULLETIN: Trevor Cook, the reputed head of a $190 million Ponzi scheme in Minnesota, has been charged criminally with mail fraud and income-tax evasion. Cook, 37, previously had been charged civilly by the SEC and the CFTC. The criminal charges filed today came after a probe by the FBI and the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit, […]

An Ohio man who graduated from West Point and earned a law degree in Washington state has been charged in a bizarre Ponzi and investment-fraud scheme that allegedly combined the science of physics with a unique “momentum filter” that purportedly enabled him to predict how the futures market would behave with “an uncanny degree of […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: At the moment, I don’t have the time to do this story justice. The allegations, however, are astonishing. And law-enforcement officials at both the state and federal level  are calling it another case that has been solved by the Interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. A New York man has been arrested on […]

A Florida man has been arrested by the FBI on 21 counts of wire fraud amid allegations he operated a forex Ponzi scheme, collecting more than $10.2 million and pocketing $1 million for himself. The announcement of the arrest of Patrick H. Rakotonanahary, 34, of  Punta Gorda, Fla., was made in Hawaii after a joint […]

A Florida man implicated in a pump-and-dump scheme tied to a Ponzi- and affinity-fraud scheme has been convicted and faces decades in federal prison. Michael J. Muzio, 46, of Tampa, was convicted on six counts of securities fraud, two counts of substantive wire fraud, two counts of lying to the SEC and the FBI and […]

UPDATED 5:18 P.M. ET (U.S.A.) A Florida company and four individuals have been charged with securities fraud by the SEC, amid allegations they fleeced investors in a children’s book company known as “Winning Kids.” Charged in the case were Winning Kids Inc. of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla; Christian Hainsworth, Winning Kids’ chief executive officer and […]