The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is pushing for entries of default against Daniel LaMarco and his fraudulent Forex scheme GDLogix Inc. The request was filed on March 11, 2022, with the New York Eastern District Court.
The Commission explains that the defendants have failed to file an answer or otherwise move with respect to the Complaint.
Let’s recall that the CFTC charged LaMarco and his company with Forex fraud back in 2017. According to the CFTC’s Complaint, from January 2011 through March 2016, LaMarco fraudulently solicited and accepted $1,492,650 from 13 individuals to trade off-exchange leveraged or margined retail derivatives Forex contracts in a commodity pool operated by the defendants. LaMarco solicited pool participants by word-of-mouth, by email, by the Internet, by the use of mails, and/or other means, according to the Complaint.
Further, as alleged, LaMarco solicited pool participants by falsely representing to them the purported success of his personal investments in forex trading and the purported safety of his Forex investment strategy. All of these representations were material and false, the complaint alleges.
To conceal and perpetuate his fraud, beginning on or about February 2011, LaMarco emailed participants fabricated monthly statements purported to provide the pool’s profits, losses, and net balances of each participant. However, according to the Complaint, all of the information in the monthly statements was false. LaMarco also allegedly misappropriated pool funds, which he spent on personal expenses or lost in unprofitable trading in his personal accounts.
In February 2016, the monthly statements falsely represented to pool participants the total value of the commodity pool had increased to $1,797,126. In reality, however, LaMarco had lost nearly all of pool participants’ funds through unsuccessful trading and by diverting $630,050 of the total principal invested to some participants as purported “profits” in the nature of a “Ponzi” scheme, as alleged.
As FX News Group has reported, the CFTC said in February 2022 that it does not believe that further negotiations would be productive at this point in the litigation and would only serve to delay and waste the Court’s time.
Let’s note that the entries of default are usually followed by default judgments, which stipulate the penalties -fines, bans, etc.