The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has accused a Panama-based foreign exchange pool of operating a massive Ponzi scheme that collected more than $950 million from over 400,000 accounts worldwide. In a complaint filed September 24 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, the agency alleges that Cash FX Group S.A. and four co-defendants defrauded investors between June 2019 and December 2023.
According to the CFTC, Cash FX, incorporated in Panama in 2018, promised participants that their money would be pooled for forex trading using professional traders, proprietary software, and artificial intelligence. Some investors were promised returns as high as 15% per week. However, the agency alleges that the actual trading was minimal—less than 1% of participant funds were used for trading. Instead, new investor money was used to pay earlier participants, and substantial sums were diverted to the individual defendants for personal use.
The complaint also names The Conversion Pros, Inc. (TCP), a Nevada company that allegedly built the platform's back-office infrastructure, including systems for logging contributions, calculating commissions, and processing withdrawals. The CFTC alleges that TCP and its chief executive helped enable the scheme and profited from it. Cash FX's founder and CEO controlled bitcoin wallets that received participant funds, and the filing claims he retained at least $96 million of misappropriated funds for personal use, out of at least $121 million that flowed to wallets he owned or controlled.
TCP's CEO allegedly received at least $15.4 million in misappropriated funds through wallets he or TCP controlled. A third individual defendant, described as a Florida-based promoter who led Cash FX's "Power Team" and had a significant online following, allegedly received at least $16 million. The CFTC says the scheme was sustained by fabricated data: the CEO manually entered daily trade return rates into the back-office system, with no evidence that trading actually occurred. Between July 2019 and July 2023, Cash FX supposedly never had a losing day—every daily return entered was positive, and some were entered days in advance.
Private messages cited in the complaint suggest that TCP's CEO was aware of the fraud. In a January 2020 message, he reportedly wrote to Cash FX's CEO: "I noticed you do not have any trade rates set for today and beyond. Just letting you know you might want to do that or it won't pay out [Trade Returns] today." By February 2022, after a Facebook group presented evidence that TCP was being paid from wallets holding participant funds, he allegedly responded: "Oh ya I know its all BS. I changed the wallets for payouts just to throw them off the trail."
Cash FX also sent participants false account statements claiming they had earned commissions from forex trading, according to the complaint. When the operation struggled to meet withdrawal requests, certain defendants blamed hacker attacks. However, internal records showed that Cash FX's CEO's own account had canceled withdrawals in January 2022. He initially denied responsibility but later admitted he was the "admin" who reversed them.
Regulators from at least 19 countries issued public warnings about Cash FX during the period covered by the complaint. The UK Financial Conduct Authority flagged the operation as early as December 2019, warning consumers to "beware of scams." Approximately 81% of pool participants collectively lost at least $406 million, and more than 6,000 U.S.-resident accounts contributed at least $27 million of the total.
The CFTC alleges that none of the defendants were registered with the agency. Cash FX was legally dissolved in Panama in October 2022 but continued accepting deposits through at least May 2023, before taking down its website that October. The agency is seeking court orders to stop the alleged conduct, along with financial penalties, disgorgement, restitution, and trading and registration bans. The complaint brings five counts, including fraud in connection with forex trading, fraud by an unregistered pool operator, and failure to keep participant funds separate from personal accounts.
This case echoes other recent Ponzi schemes in the financial advisory space, such as the Texas advisor sentenced for a $35M scheme and the California advisor sentenced in a $9.5M fraud. The CFTC's action underscores the importance of due diligence for investors and the regulatory scrutiny on unregistered forex pools.
