CFTC v. Kantor et al. (rigged binary options execution, 2019)

Judgment entered

Machine-extracted, pending human review. The structured fields on this page were parsed automatically from the regulator's own release, linked below. Read the primary document before relying on any figure here, and tell us if something is wrong.

In 2019, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission obtained a default order against Blake Harrison Kantor, Nathan Mullins and four Blue Bit entities, alleging conduct this library classifies as rigged binary options execution. The order finds a computer program fraudulently altered binary options data to disadvantage investors, and orders a combined $4.25 million in penalties, disgorgement and restitution. Kantor separately pleaded guilty in a parallel criminal case and was sentenced to 86 months.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$2.8m

Disgorgement

$1.1m

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$3.9m

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 Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced on November 1, 2019, as release 8069-19, that a New York federal court had entered a default order eight days earlier against Blake Harrison Kantor, Nathan Mullins, and four companies tied to them — Blue Bit Banc, Blue Bit Analytics, Ltd., Mercury Cove, Inc. and G. Thomas Client Services — closing out a case the CFTC had filed back in April 2018.

Customers were pitched on binary bets tied to where a commodity's price would land at a chosen moment, the order finds, and what they were never told is why those bets so rarely paid: a piece of software Blue Bit Banc used had been set up to skew the underlying data feeding each customer's position, tilting the odds toward the house at the customer's expense. The order additionally finds most investors were steered toward sending money to an account in St. Kitts and Nevis specifically to complicate tracing it, and that customer balances were converted into ATM Coin — a cryptocurrency the order describes as worthless despite Kantor telling investors it held real value.

This library tags the matter as rigged binary options execution on the strength of the order's finding that the software altered outcome data directly, rather than merely misrepresenting risk.

Money orders in this case land in three buckets. A civil penalty totals $2,800,000 — $2.5 million against Kantor and the corporate defendants together, plus $300,000 against Mullins individually — and is recorded here as the penalty. Disgorgement totals $1,068,430: $515,759 from Kantor, $89,574 from Mullins, and a further $463,097 the order separately requires from Blue Wolf Sales Consultants, a Kantor-owned firm. A third figure, $846,405 owed to victims as restitution, is not restated as a separate number in this library's schema, which has no field distinct from disgorgement for money returned to customers; the release's own headline total across all three categories runs past $4.25 million. Kantor, Blue Bit Analytics and G. Thomas Client Services are separately found to have accepted customer money and acted as futures commission merchants without the CFTC registration that role requires.

A parallel criminal case in the same court produced a guilty plea from Kantor to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, plus an admission that he obstructed the CFTC's own investigation; his sentence was 86 months in prison.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

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.

• Rigged binary options execution — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2018-04-16 CFTC enforcement case filed
2. 2019-10-23 Court entered order of default

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 8069-19

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 29, 2026. submit a correction.