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International Law

: Misleading Advertising Law

Fraud News You can Use

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We are going to focus on recoveries for frauds, usually pennies on the dollar.

Greg Newton, writing at Naked Shorts, has the best headline I have seen for a while: Most Pointless $300m Order Ever.

"The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today announced that Paul Eustace of Ontario, Canada, was ordered to pay more than $279 million in restitution and a $12 million civil penalty, based on an order that resolves a CFTC enforcement action against him for defrauding commodity pool participants in four pools that he managed."

Read all of Greg's posts on Paul Eustace. (BTW, tell the CFTC I will execute on their order for a small upfront fee.)

Next, with a hat tip to Victoria Pynchon, who has several blogs, including Negotiation Law, alerted me to this little tidbit, by Kim Christensen writing for the LA Times.

"A federal judge has socked James R. Halstead with a $22-million summary judgment, ruling that the Santa Ana insurance salesman solicited the money for sophisticated investments but instead blew it on fast cars, a mistress and Las Vegas real estate.

Halstead, 61, also faces punitive damages in the scheme, in which he and Irvine securities lawyer Jeanne M. Rowzee allegedly took in tens of millions of dollars from individual investors who ran the gamut from wealthy developers to retirees on fixed incomes.

But the pair placed none of the money in the securities known as private investment in public equity, or PIPEs, that they promised would reap returns of as much as 40%, according to federal prosecutors and a raft of civil lawsuits."

Why do you think that wealthy developers jumped at the chance of a 40% return, given that Halstead was a convicted con? Uh, can you say: "Even the very rich fail to investigate phantom dreams."