Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought charges against two ex-directors of investments at Woodbridge Group of Companies LLC for their involvement in a large-scale Ponzi scheme.
The California-based defendants, Ivan Acevedo, and Dane R. Roseman were individually apprehended and charged by criminal specialists, alongside with Woodbridge founder Robert H. Shapiro.
The SEC earlier charged Woodbridge and Shapiro, and some of Woodbridge’s top brokers who are not registered. In January, a federal judge in Florida ordered Woodbridge, related companies, as well as Shapiro to pay $1 billion altogether for being involved in this particular Ponzi scheme.
According to the complaint from the SEC, though Roseman and Acevedo are not registered in any crime with the SEC before, they have been responsible for fraudulently raising about $1.2 million from well over 8,400 retail investors, many of them seniors, and together received more than $3 million commissions.
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The complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, claims that Acevedo was in charge of Woodbridge’s fundraising for Woodbridge’s securities from 2012 until he left in 2015, and then Roseman succeeded him.
Also according to this specific complaint, the defendants had been in charge of hiring and even training Woodbridge’s sales team, certified fraudulent marketing materials plus sales scripts, and aided in creating a false impression that Woodbridge was a new legitimate organization while in real life it had been a Ponzi scheme that used cash from new investors in order to pay existing investors.
The SEC’s complaint charges Acevedo as well as Roseman with violating securities registration, broker-dealer registration, and anti-fraud provisions regarding the federal securities laws and regulations, and seeks disgorgement regarding allegedly ill-gotten gains, together with interest, and financial fees and penalties.
