CFTC Sues Cash FX Group Over $950M Forex Ponzi Scheme

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission says Cash FX Group and its partners took in more than $950 million from investors while running what the agency calls a multilevel marketing Ponzi scheme. Participants in the alleged scheme lost at least $406 million, according to the CFTC's civil complaint.

What the CFTC is alleging

The CFTC filed a civil complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida against Cash FX Group S.A. and its chief executive, Huascar Jose Lopez Castillo, who operates out of Brazil; The Conversion Pros, Inc. and its chief executive, Ronald Pope of Oregon; and an individual promoter, Justin Halladay of Florida, according to FX News Group, which published the CFTC's statement in full. Multiple outlets, including a GNcrypto.news report and Cryptonomist, place the filing on Friday, September 25, 2026, though InvestmentNews reported the complaint was filed a day earlier, on September 24. The two-day gap likely reflects when the filing was docketed versus when the CFTC issued its public statement, but it has not been independently reconciled here.

The complaint accuses the defendants of soliciting money for a commodity pool — a fund that pools investor money to trade forex or other commodity-linked contracts — while falsely telling participants their money was being traded by professional traders using proprietary algorithms and artificial intelligence, according to InvestmentNews's review of the filing. Some participants were promised weekly returns of up to 15%, the same report says. The CFTC alleges that promise, and the trading behind it, was fabricated: Cash FX conducted minimal actual forex trading and instead used new participants' money to pay fictitious profits to earlier ones, a structure investigators describe as a Ponzi scheme, according to FX News Group's account of the agency's statement.

The numbers behind the case

How the alleged scheme worked

According to InvestmentNews's reporting on the complaint, Cash FX's founder and chief executive controlled the bitcoin wallets that received participant funds, and the filing alleges he personally retained at least $96 million of misappropriated money. The complaint also says Cash FX sent participants false account statements claiming they had earned commissions from forex trading — commissions the CFTC says did not reflect any real trading activity, per InvestmentNews. When the operation could not meet withdrawal requests, the complaint alleges certain defendants blamed the shortfall on hacker attacks rather than disclosing the lack of real trading revenue.

The complaint also quotes an internal exchange the CFTC says shows defendants were aware the payout structure was fraudulent. After a Facebook group presented evidence in February 2022 that The Conversion Pros was being paid from wallets holding participant funds, the complaint alleges TCP's chief executive responded: "Oh ya I know its all BS. I changed the wallets for payouts just to throw them off the trail," as quoted by InvestmentNews from the filing.

What the figures do and don't establish

Everything above is an allegation in a civil complaint, not a finding by a court. The CFTC has not obtained a judgment, and Cash FX's defendants have not yet had a chance to respond in the court record reviewed here. The $950 million figure is the amount the CFTC says was raised from participants over more than four years; it is not the same as current investor losses, which the agency separately puts at a minimum of $406 million — meaning a portion of the money raised may have been paid out to some participants as apparent "returns" that were actually funded by other investors' deposits, the hallmark of a Ponzi structure. The $96 million the CEO is alleged to have personally kept is a subset of the broader misappropriated total, not an estimate of total fraud proceeds.

The CFTC is seeking restitution for victims, disgorgement of the defendants' alleged gains, civil monetary penalties, trading and registration bans, and a permanent injunction against further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act, according to FX News Group's account of the agency's statement. None of those remedies has been ordered by a court yet, and how much money victims might eventually recover is not established in any of the reporting reviewed. CryptoTimes notes the case follows a separate CFTC action in July against Trevor L. Vernon and Argent Capital Management over an alleged $14 million commodity pool fraud, suggesting the agency has kept up a steady pace of enforcement against pooled-fund schemes, though that unrelated case does not establish any pattern specific to Cash FX.