Financial and Investment Fraud

August 14, 2014

Azzeddine El Amine of Costa Rica pleaded guilty to money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in connection with his role in running Liberty Reserve, a company that operated one of the world’s most widely used digital currency services. Liberty Reserve was created to help users conduct illegal transactions anonymously and launder the proceeds of their crimes, and it emerged as one of the principal money transfer agents used by cybercriminals around the world to distribute, store, and launder the proceeds of their illegal activity. El Amine served as a principal deputy to Liberty Reserve founder Arthur Budovsky. Before being shut down by the government in May 2013, Liberty Reserve had more than one million users worldwide, including more than 200,000 users in the United States, who conducted approximately 55 million transactions through its system and laundered more than $6 billion in suspected proceeds of crimes, including credit card fraud, identity theft, investment fraud, computer hacking, child pornography and narcotics trafficking. DOJ

July 24, 2014

An $80M False Claims Act judgment was entered against BNP Paribas for submitting false claims for payment guarantees issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The judgment resolves government charges that from 1998 to 2005 the French bank participated in a scheme to defraud the USDA’s Supplier Credit Guarantee Program under which American agricultural companies are encouraged to sell their products abroad. DOJ

July 21, 2014

Jing Wang, the former Executive Vice President and President of Global Business Operations for Qualcomm Inc., pleaded guilty to insider trading in shares of Qualcomm and Atheros Communications. He also pleaded guilty to laundering the proceeds of his insider trading using an offshore shell company. DOJ

December 22, 2015

Participants in an alleged credit card “laundering” scheme have agreed to settle FTC charges that they illegally helped provide access to payment networks, thereby enabling scammers to place bogus charges on consumers’ credit cards. According to the FTC’s complaint, PayBasics, Todd Hatch and Jimmy Shin helped the defendants behind the Tax Club fraud to open and maintain merchant accounts used to process credit card payments for sales made by a number of different third-party scammers. The defendants in the Tax Club work at home scheme settled FTC charges last year. FTC

December 16, 2015

The CFPB ordered EZCORP, Inc., a small-dollar lender, to refund $7.5 million to 93,000 consumers, pay $3 million in penalties, and stop collection of remaining payday and installment loan debts owed by roughly 130,000 consumers for illegal debt collection practices. The CFPB found that EZCORP collected debts from consumers through unlawful in-person collection visits at their homes or workplaces, risked exposing consumers’ debts to third parties, falsely threatened consumers with litigation for non-payment of debts, and unfairly made multiple electronic withdrawal attempts from consumer accounts, causing mounting bank fees. CFPB

November 20, 2015

The New Jersey Bureau of Securities filed legal action against, and separately revoked the registrations of, two individuals who are alleged to have defrauded over 170 investors out of millions of dollars in a scheme involving investment in a Florida condominium complex called Esplanade at Millennia Condominiums. NJ

November 18, 2015

The CFPB filed an administrative lawsuit against an online lender, Integrity Advance, LLC, and its CEO, James R. Carnes, for deceiving consumers about the cost of short-term loans. The suit seeks redress for harmed customers, injunctive relief, and a civil monetary penalty. CFPB

October 26, 2015

The operators of an advance fee recovery scheme that falsely claimed it could recover money for consumers that they had lost to telemarketing scams will be banned from selling recovery services, and from telemarketing, under a court order. The court order resolves a 2014 FTC complaint that charged Consumer Collection Advocates and Michael Robert Ettus with illegally collecting money from consumers, many of them elderly people harmed by timeshare resale and precious metal investment frauds. FTC

October 5, 2015

The head of a sham debt relief operation agreed to a judgment of more than $7.9 million to settle FTC charges that he deceived consumers and charged them thousands of dollars while providing nothing in return. In a complaint filed in May 2014, the FTC alleged that the DebtPro 123 LLC defendants falsely told consumers their programs would settle all of their debts and repair their credit. Then they told them to stop paying and communicating with creditors, which led to more debt and worse credit because of accrued interest, late charges, creditor lawsuits, garnished wages, and sometimes bankruptcy. FTC

August 10, 2015

A New Hampshire investment advisor was sentenced to up to 7 years in prison for fraud. Richard M. Higgins plead guilty to one felony count of engaging in a course of conduct involving a scheme to defraud in connection with the purchase and sale of securities, and one felony count of a course of business that operated as fraud in connection with acting as an investment advisor. Beginning in late 2006 and continuing through August 2007, Higgins solicited investors for a pooled investment in the form of a limited partnership, making a number of false and misleading statements. Higgins then further defrauded the investors by providing them quarterly statements which regularly overstated the performance of their investments. NH