WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced Wednesday that it filed a civil enforcement action charging an Australian corporation with operating a fraudulent off-exchange foreign currency scheme.
Charged are Senen Pousa of Australia, Joel Friant of Bellingham, Wash., and their company, Investment Intelligence Corporation.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, also charges Michael Dillard and Elevation Group, Inc., both of Austin, Texas, with registration violations.
The CTFC says that from at least Jan. 1 through the present, IIC - through Pousa, Friant and its other agents - and defendants Dillard and Elevation Group, utilized "wealth creation" webcasts, webinars, podcasts, emails, and other online seminars via the Internet to directly and indirectly solicit actual and prospective clients worldwide to open forex trading accounts at IIC.
They promised nine percent monthly returns and that the risk would be minimal, according to the CFTC. None of the defendants has ever been registered with the CFTC, it says.
The CFTC said that around May 16-17, the clients lost more than 60 percent of their investment when IIC entered more than 200 forex trades in each client's account in violation of the representations made by IIC.