The Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force continues its long tradition of leadership in the prosecution of securities and commodities fraud and other cases affecting the integrity of the financial markets. For example:

• CaaStle Founder Pleads Guilty To $300 Million Fraud Scheme: Less than one month after the bankruptcy announcement of CaaStle Inc. (“CaaStle”), a retail fashion technology business, founder and former Chief Executive Officer, Christina Hunsicker was indicted in connection to a scheme to defraud investors. On March 4, 2026, United States Attorney Jay Clayton announced the guilty plea of Hunsicker, to one count of securities fraud in connection with a scheme to defraud hundreds of investors in CaaStle. As part of her plea, Hunsicker agreed to forfeit nearly $300 million in proceeds from her illegal scheme, as well as from a scheme to defraud investors in P180, a related business venture.  Hunsicker is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken on August 5, 2026.
• First Brands Executives Charged With Multibillion-Dollar Fraud: In January 2026, Patrick James, the founder and former CEO of First Brands Group, LLC, and Edward James, a former senior executive at First Brands, were charged in connection with a years-long scheme to defraud lenders regarding the company’s liabilities and financial condition. As alleged, the defendants used fake collateral, double- and triple-pledged assets, and misleading financial statements to obtain billions of dollars in financing. First Brands ultimately filed for bankruptcy in September 2025, leaving lenders and creditors facing billions of dollars in losses.
• Principals Of ‘Pre-IPO’ Funds Plead Guilty To Defrauding Investors: In January 2026, Mario Gogliormella, Steven Lacaj, and Karim Ibrahim pled guilty in connection with a scheme to defraud investors in the StraightPath Funds, the Legend Funds, and related pre-IPO funds. The defendants used boiler room-style call centers and false and misleading disclosures to sell shares in private companies at arbitrarily inflated prices while concealing hidden markups and fees, defrauding investors of $185 million. The three principals of StraightPath—Michael Castillero, Francine Lanaia, and Brian Martinsen—were also prosecuted by this Office and convicted at trial in November 2025.
• CEO, CFO, COO Charged In Connection With Billion-Dollar Collapse Of Tricolor Auto: In December 2025, Daniel Chu, the founder and former CEO of Tricolor Holdings LLC, and David Goodgame, Tricolor’s former COO, were charged in connection with a scheme to defraud Tricolor’s lenders and asset-backed securities investors. As alleged, the defendants and their co-conspirators repeatedly double-pledged collateral and manipulated loan data to make near-worthless assets appear to meet lender requirements. By August 2025, Tricolor had pledged approximately $2.2 billion in collateral despite having only approximately $1.4 billion in real collateral; former CFO Jerome Kollar and former finance executive Ameryn Seibold also pled guilty.
• Founder And CFO Of 777 Partners Charged With $500 Million Fraud Scheme: In October 2025, Joshua Wander, the cofounder of investment firm 777 Partners, was charged in connection with a scheme to defraud the firm’s private lenders and investors out of more than $500 million. As alleged, Wander and others obtained funds by double-pledging collateral, falsifying bank statements, and making other material misrepresentations about 777 Partners’ financial condition. The firm’s former CFO, Damien Alfalla, previously pled guilty and is cooperating with the Government.
• Do Kwon Extradited To The United States From Montenegro To Face Charges Relating To Fraud Resulting In $40 Billion In Losses: Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs, was charged with orchestrating schemes to defraud purchasers of Terraform cryptocurrencies. Kwon made false and misleading claims regarding the stability and efficacy of Terraform’s cryptocurrency stablecoin protocol, its use of blockchain technology, and its development of functioning and reliable financial technologies. As Kwon knew, however, core Terraform products did not work as Kwon had claimed. Rather, Kwon manipulated Terraform products to create the illusion of a functioning, stable, and decentralized financial system. Kwon’s conduct inflated the value of Terraform’s cryptocurrencies but ultimately contributed to the collapse of the crypto ecosystem, leaving investors and users with billions in losses. Kwon was extradited to the United States in January 2025, and U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton announced his guilty plea in August 2025. In December 2025, District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer sentenced Kwon to 15 years in federal prison.
• Defendants Charged In Over $200 Million Water Vending Machine Ponzi Scheme And Related Investment Fraud: In August 2025, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton announced the unsealing of an Indictment and Superseding Indictment in connection to Water Station Management LLC (“Water Station”), a water vending machine company.  The first Indictment charges Ryan Wear, the former owner and operator of Water Station, with securities and wire fraud in connection with Wear raising more than $200 million from investors by selling them water vending machines that, in many cases, did not exist, and paying promised returns through new investor money.  The second, Superseding Indictment charges Jordan Chirico, a former fund portfolio manager and investment adviser, with investment adviser fraud in connection with purchasing more than $100 million of Water Station bonds while concealing his personal financial stake in the company and, eventually, his knowledge of the fraud that had been perpetrated by WEAR.  Together, the defendants’ conduct caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to Water Station investors and bondholders.  This criminal case remains pending.
• Celsius Founder And Former CEO Alexander Mashinsky Pleads Guilty To Multi-Billion Dollar Fraud And Market Manipulation Schemes: Alexander Mashinsky, the former CEO of Celsius Network LLC, was charged with securities fraud and commodities fraud in connection with a yearslong scheme to mislead customers and market participants regarding the market value and interest in Celsius’s proprietary crypto token CEL.  Mashinsky did so by manipulating the price of CEL through causing Celsius to spend hundreds of millions of dollars purchasing CEL in the open market with the objective of artificially supporting and inflating the price of CEL.  At various times during Mashinky’s tenure, Mashinsky and his co-conspirators also caused Celsius to use its own customer deposits to fund these market purchases of CEL in order to prop up CEL’s price, without disclosing this fact to Celsius’s customers.  Mashinsky pled guilty in December 2024, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison in May 2025.
• Founder And Head Of Archegos Capital Management Bill Hwang Sentenced To 18 Years In Prison For Orchestrating Massive Market Manipulation And Fraud Schemes: In July 2024, Bill Hwang and Patrick Halligan were convicted following a nine-week jury trial of racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud, market manipulation, and wire fraud. Hwang and Halligan ran Hwang’s private investment fund, Archegos, through a pattern of fraud and manipulation. Hwang used manipulative trading techniques to alter the prices of certain stocks in the marketplace and Hwang, Halligan, and their conspirators intentionally deceived Archegos’s trading counterparties to obtain margin loans and trading capacity, often by misrepresenting the composition and concentration of Archegos’s portfolio. The scheme collapsed in March 2021, causing billions of dollars in losses to market participants, Archegos’s trading counterparties, and innocent Archegos employees. Hwang was sentenced to 18 years in prison, and Halligan was sentenced to 8 years in prison.
• Former Chief Investment Officer Of Global Bond Investment Firm Charged With Over $600 Million Investment Adviser Fraud: In November 2024, the Office charged Kenneth Leech II with defrauding clients of the investment-management company WAMCO by engaging in a $600-million criminal “cherry picking” scheme.  To compensate for losses in his marquee investment strategy, Leech assigned trades that performed well during their first day into client accounts associated with that investment strategy, and assigned trades that performed poorly over their first day into the accounts of other clients, who were not aware that Leech was causing them losses to favor others.  Leech’s victims included institutional and retail investors who trusted Leech to manage their savings and pension plans.
• British Investor And Billionaire Businessman Joseph Lewis Pleads Guilty To Insider Trading Scheme: In January 2024, Joseph Lewis, a billionaire businessman and investor, pled guilty to securities fraud.  Lewis controlled board of director seats at various companies and deputized employees to serve on the company boards.  Through these employees, Lewis received material, non-public information about the companies.  On multiple occasions over the course of several years, Lewis misused and misappropriated this confidential information to provide stock tips to various individuals, including his employees, romantic partners, and friends.  These individuals, in turn, traded on the tips provided by Lewis for vast personal gain.  In April 2024, Lewis was sentenced to three years’ probation and a $5 million fine.
• Founder and Chief Executive of International Crypto Exchange Convicted of Masterminding a Multi-Billion-Dollar Fraud: On November 2, 2023, less than a year after the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange that he founded, Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted at trial of masterminding a wide-ranging scheme to misappropriate billions of dollars of customer funds deposited with FTX and mislead investors and lenders to FTX and to Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund.  The proof at trial established that Bankman-Fried used billions of dollars of stolen FTX customer funds to pay for his personal luxuries, to make investments and millions of dollars of political contributions to federal political candidates and committees, and to repay billions of dollars in loans owed by Alameda.  Bankman-Fried also defrauded lenders to Alameda Research and equity investors in FTX by concealing his misuse of customer deposits in financial information that was provided to them.  On March 28, 2024, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The Office’s Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit as well as prosecutors assigned to the Office’s White Plains Division have pursued a wide range of significant fraud cases involving both individual and corporate defendants.  For example:

• North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence: In March 2026, Michael Smith pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his role in a scheme to defraud music streaming platforms and musicians of royalty payments. Smith created hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and used automated programs called “bots” to fraudulently stream those songs billions of times in order to mimic genuine consumer activity. Through the scheme, Smith fraudulently obtained more than $8 million in royalties.
• Financial Advisor Convicted Of Scheme To Defraud Professional Basketball Players: In March 2026, Darryl Cohen was convicted following a five-week jury trial for defrauding three former financial advisory clients—professional basketball players Chandler Parsons, Courtney Lee, and Jrue Holiday—of more than $5 million. Cohen exploited his advisory and fiduciary relationships with those clients to induce them to purchase viatical life insurance policies at massive markups and used substantial portions of the proceeds to pay personal expenses, including home renovations and other luxury spending.
• Creator Of “OnlyFake” Charged And Pleads Guilty To Selling More Than 10,000 Digital Fake Identification Documents: In February 2026, Ukrainian national Yurii Nazarenko was charged and pled guilty for his role in operating “OnlyFake,” a website that sold fake photos of identification documents such as passports and driver’s licenses. From approximately 2021 through 2024, OnlyFake generated at least approximately 10,000 fake identification documents and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency from customers. The fake IDs allowed users to circumvent Know Your Customer requirements at banks and cryptocurrency exchanges and to launder money by concealing their true identities.
• Startup CEO Charlie Javice Sentenced To 85 Months In Prison For $175 Million Fraud: In September 2025, Charlie Javice was sentenced to 85 months in prison for falsely and dramatically inflating the number of customers of her company, Frank, to fraudulently induce J.P. Morgan Chase to acquire the company for $175 million. Javice and her co-defendant, Olivier Amar, were convicted in March 2025 following a six-week jury trial. As the proof at trial showed, Javice repeatedly claimed Frank had 4.25 million users when, in fact, it had approximately 300,000.
• Leaders of Multibillion-Dollar Cryptocurrency Scheme “OneCoin” Prosecuted:  In September 2023, Sebastian Greenwood, one of the co-founders of OneCoin, a fake cryptocurrency multi-level marketing scheme, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in stealing more than $4 billion from at least 3.5 million victims.  In 2019, Mark Scott, a former equity partner at international law firm Locke Lord LLP, was convicted at trial for his role in laundering hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud proceeds on behalf of the leadership of OneCoin.  In January 2024, Scott was sentenced to 10 years in prison.  Ruja Ignatova, the co-founder of OneCoin, remains at large and was added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Top Ten Most Wanted List in June 2022.
• New York Physician Pleads Guilty To Multimillion-Dollar COVID-19 Insurance Fraud Scheme: In April 2026, Ali Rashan, a medical doctor and the CEO and founder of ClearMD LLC, pled guilty to fraudulently billing insurance companies for COVID-19 testing services and submitting fraudulent medical records in furtherance of his scheme, causing at least $24 million in losses. From 2021 through 2023, Rashan used ClearMD clinics in New York City to bill insurers for services that were not provided as claimed, including evaluation and management services that were never performed and multiple testing codes when only a single test had been administered. When insurers sought supporting documentation, Rashan directed staff to create fake medical records to justify the billings.
• Hollywood Director And Writer Convicted Of $11 Million Fraud On Subscription Streaming Service: In December 2025, Carl Erik Rinsch was convicted following a one-week trial for stealing $11 million from a subscription video-on-demand streaming service in connection with a planned science fiction television show called “White Horse,” and then laundering that money. Although the funds were supposed to be used to complete the show, Rinsch instead transferred the money through various bank accounts, used it to make speculative securities and cryptocurrency trades, and spent millions more on personal expenses and luxury items, including Rolls-Royces, a Ferrari, furniture, antiques, and a Swiss watch.
• Miles Guo Convicted In Billion-Dollar Fraud Conspiracy: In July 2024, Miles Guo was convicted at trial of racketeering conspiracy and various securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering charges for his role in a scheme that solicited investments from thousands of his online followers through false statements tied to GTV Media Group, the Himalaya Farm Alliance, G|CLUBS, and the Himalaya Exchange. Guo and his co-conspirators obtained more than $1 billion from victims and used victim funds to finance luxury purchases and other personal expenses