The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has filed an anti-fraud civil lawsuit charging defendants Randall Lynn Stuckey of St Peters, M., and his Missouri-based business entities, Stuckey Group, LP, Stuckey Group II, LP and Oakwood Development Company LP, with operating an illegal off-exchange foreign currency (forex) scheme that defrauded more than 65 customers out of at least USD2.8 million.
The CFTC complaint, filed on February 18, 2011, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, alleges that Stuckey fraudulently solicited and accepted funds from members of the general public from January 2007 through July 2010 to trade leveraged or margined off-exchange forex contracts. Stuckey operated the scheme via the Internet out of his residence in St. Peters, according to the complaint. Stuckey allegedly misrepresented to customers that their funds were being traded profitably when, in fact, Stuckey knew that he was losing money trading customers’ funds and that the Stuckey Common Enterprise defendants had incurred substantial losses trading customers’ funds in forex futures. For example, Stuckey allegedly falsely claimed that customers’ investments had increased in value from an original aggregate investment of USD2.85 million to approximately USD4.8 million.
To conceal and perpetuate his fraud, Stuckey provided customers with monthly account statements showing false account values and false returns on their funds, the complaint charges. Additionally, the account statements falsely reported monthly trading profits from one to six percent, even though the Stuckey Common Enterprise defendants were losing money on trades, according to the complaint.
In a proposed consent order filed with the court on February 18, 2011, the defendants consent to permanent injunctive relief prohibiting further violations of federal commodity law, as charged in the complaint. The proposed consent order, however, leaves the amount of restitution and the amount of any civil monetary penalty to be determined at a later date as part of the CFTC’s ongoing civil litigation.
In connection with the same conduct, Stuckey earlier pled guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of making false reports in violation of the Commodity Exchange Act in a criminal action filed on October 27, 2010, by the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, (United States v. Randall Lynn Stuckey, Criminal No. 4:10-cr-00444-CEJ (E.D. Mo.)). On February 7, 2011, Stuckey was sentenced to 36 months imprisonment and 36 months of supervised release. Stuckey was ordered to pay USD2,298,454 in restitution to defrauded customers and to forfeit USD919,000 in financial accounts in the federal criminal prosecution based on substantially the same facts as alleged in the CFTC’s civil enforcement action.
