Investor's Watchdog.com: Stock, finance and investment protection for investors

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a civil injunctive action against Mark R. Hamlin and two companies he owned, Kingdom First Trading, LLC, and Kingdom First Corp, for fraudulently selling approximately $2 million in unregistered securities.

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The SEC has halted an alleged fraud run by Paul G. Merklinger of Novi, Michigan and his company, Encore Associated Leasing, LLC.  According to the SEC:  (more…)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has shut down another offering supposedly earning profits from foreign currency trading.  The SEC claims that Gregory N. McKnight (McKnight) and Legisi Holdings, LLC (Legisi Holdings) raised more than $72 million from more than 3,000 investors in all fifty states and several foreign countries by promising returns of as much as 15% per month.  The SEC claims that the offering was a classic Ponzi scheme, with the defendants using amounts invested by later investors to pay earlier investors supposed distributions.  (more…)

Ty and Monette Klotz, of Mason, Michigan, orchestrated a Ponzi scheme that they described as a “private hedge fund.”    Operating through companies called Aurifex Commodities Research Co. and Aurifex Research LLC, the Klotz’s told investors that investments in Aurifex had produced average returns of 20 percent per month, that the investments were without risk, and that they were insured through Lloyd’s of London.   To keep the scheme going, Ty Klotz sent fraudulent account statements to investors.  (more…)

WSBT in Detroit reports:

A suburban Detroit man was in court to answer charges of running a so-called Ponzi scheme.

Fifty-two-year-old Raymond Joseph of Bloomfield Hills was arraigned Thursday on two counts of wire fraud, two counts of transportation of stolen money or property, and nine counts of monetary transactions in criminally derived property. (more…)

On November 29, 2007 the SEC charged Daniel N. Jones and Azure Bay Management, LLC (”Azure Bay”) with fraud in connection with their management of The Addington Fund LP, a private hedge fund. According to the Commission, under Jones’s management the Fund sank in value from $2.1 million to $200,000 while Jones represented to investors that the Fund was profitable, sending them false account statements and taking excessive, unearned fees from the Fund. 

Jones is a resident of Battle Creek, Michigan.  The SEC’s action against him is pending in the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan.  The Court has issued a temporary (more…)

The Securities and Exchange Commission today filed charges against Detroit-area resident Edward May and his company E-M Management Co. LLC alleging that they ran a $250 million fraud for nine years between 1998 and July 2007. According to the SEC, May and E-M defrauded 1,200 investors, many of them senior citizens by falsely representing that they had contracts to provide telecommunications services to several Las Vegas hotels.  May and E-M used “investment seminars” to attract potential investors, touting deals with such major hotel chains and casinos as Hilton, MGM Grand, Motel 6, Tropicana and Sheraton.  The SEC claims that no such deals or contracts ever existed.

The alleged scheme took in investors from several states, including Michigan, California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio and New Jersey.  The case is pending in the U.S. District (more…)