Forex fraudster lying about top bank guarantees gets 36 months in prison
Judge Deborah A. Batts at the New York Southern District Court on Tuesday issued a 36-month prison sentence to Israeli citizen Fadi Ewiess over Forex fraud charges.
A Forex scam case, captioned USA v. Ewiess (1:16-cr-00697), has led to a prison sentence. On Tuesday, September 26, 2017, Judge Deborah A. Batts of the the New York Southern District Court issued a 36-month prison sentence to Israeli citizen Fadi Ewiess, also known as Fadi Awise over fraud charges. Otisville was recommended to the Department of Corrections.
The Defendant was also ordered to forfeit all monies, land and personal property or substitutes. He shall pay restitution, without interest, in the amount of $2,105,619.91, to the victims of his fraudulent scheme, the minutes from the proceedings say.
Mr Ewiess defrauded investors through the operation of a purported FX trading company called Golden Bridge FX. As he himself has admitted, he had lied to prospective investors about his company’s expertise in Forex markets. In addition, he had sent investors forged ‘guarantees’ from top New York banks to lure them to invest with him. Mr Ewiess and others are said to have generated more than $5 million from victims across the world. Instead of investing the money raised, Mr Ewiess spent the bulk of it on gambling, personal expenses, and transfers to family members.
The defendant operated Golden Bridge FX from about 2015 through about 2016. The company claimed to host an online Forex trading platform. Investors using this platform either made investments themselves or authorized representatives from Golden Bridge to do so on their behalf. Ewiess and others at Golden Bridge often promised artificially high rates of return for managed accounts, and, in other cases, falsely told investors that their trading was guaranteed against losses by top-tier US banks. Ewiess even distributed forged documents that misleadingly appeared to have been (but in reality were not) issued by the relevant banks.
In a Ponzi-like manner, some of the investor money was used to pay returns to investors so that they would invest or refer additional money to Mr Ewiess and Golden Bridge.
