CFTC seeks to impose $1.5m penalty on binary options, Bitcoin fraudsters
Dillon Michael Dean and The Entrepreneurs Headquarters Limited have failed to respond in any way to the CFTC’s complaint against them.
The United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has taken another step in its action against Dillon Michael Dean and The Entrepreneurs Headquarters Limited (TEH), charged with commodity pool operator fraud, options fraud, and failure to register with the Commission, in violation of the Commodity Exchange Act and Commission Regulations.
The CFTC alleges that from around April 2017 through the present the defendants engaged in a fraudulent scheme to solicit funds (mainly in Bitcoin) for participation in a pooled investment vehicle for trading commodity interests. TEH has also failed to register with the Commission as a commodity pool operator, and Dean has failed to register with the Commission as an associated person of a CPO.
Late last week, the CFTC requested that the New York Eastern District Court enters a default judgement in favor of the Commission and against the defendants. The regulator requests that the Court orders Defendants to be held jointly and severally liable and to make restitution in the amount of $432,184.79 plus post-judgment interest.
In light of the unjust gains to defendants, the egregiousness of defendants’ intentional conduct, and their failure to accept any responsibility, the CFTC also seeks, as a deterrent, to impose a civil monetary penalty of triple the monetary gain to the defendants, that is, $1,497,792.12.
To date, neither defendant has appeared in the case personally or through a representative, and despite service on defendants of numerous court papers, and multiple other attempts by the Commission to contact the defendants, the regulator has not received any response to this lawsuit or communication of any kind from Dean and his company.
As FinanceFeeds has reported, Dillon Michael Dean and TEH have been out of reach. There had been visits to Dean’s addresses in Colorado, emails and phone messages, as well as calls. The regulator even resorted to a skip trace performed on March 15, 2018, using CLEAR, an online investigative platform commonly utilized by law enforcement agencies and operated by Thomson Reuters. But it revealed no further address, email, or telephone information for Dean.
A Deputy with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office has spoken with a woman who identified herself as Christina Kielnecker who stated that Dean no longer lived at the residence. She stated that “he packed up and moved his belongings out of the residence, after all the stuff started coming down.”
The case is captioned Commodity Futures Trading Commission v. Dean et al (2:18-cv-00345).
