CFTC v. Charles, The Borrowing Station (ponzi schemes, 2013)

Settled

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In August 2013 the CFTC announced a Maryland federal consent order requiring Sidney J. Charles, Jr. and The Borrowing Station, LLC to pay $254,236 in restitution and a $350,000 civil penalty over a forex Ponzi scheme.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$350k

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$350k

Alleged gain

—

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

The order, entered August 23, 2013 by Judge Grimm, finds that from October 2009 to July 2011 the defendants solicited $369,326 from 18 participants with promises of 25 percent a year or 10 percent a month and false guarantees against loss, put only part of it into trading, and lost most of that. It bans both from trading and registration. The headline figure of over $600,000 adds restitution to the penalty.

This library tags the matter as ponzi schemes because the document describes payments to earlier participants made from later participants' money. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's: agencies charge statutory provisions, not technique names.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Ponzi schemes — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2013-08-26 CFTC release published

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• CFTC release

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.