Two men from Florida have been found guilty of foreign exchange fraud and are ordered to pay massive fines after spending over $1m of their clients’ money on things like cars, travel and restaurants
The US District Court for the Middle District of Florida ordered Joshua Gilliland and Chawalit Wongkhiao, who had previously been operating a company called Allied Markets, to pay $1.2m in a civil monetary penalty and to pay $1.2m in restitution to defrauded clients.
Their company was also permanently banned from engaging in any commodity-related activity and violating provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and Commodity Trading Commission (CFTC) regulations as charged. Gilliland and Wongkhiao had previously been banned from those activities in March this year.
These judgments follow from a CFTC complaint filed in 2015, charging the two with fraudulent solicitation and misappropriation of commodity pool participant funds, starting as early as 2012.
It alleged that the two had netted over $1m through their illegal activities, spending more than $64,000 on restaurants and entertainment, $33,000 on travel, hotels and rental cars and $66,000 on rent.
Gilliland and Wongkhiao had also pleaded guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in another case. This had landed Gilliland and Wongkhiao with 15 and 55 months respectively in jail.
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