CFTC v. Dean and The Entrepreneurs Headquarters (ponzi schemes, 2018)

Judgment entered

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In January 2018 the CFTC charged Dillon Michael Dean of Colorado and his UK-registered company The Entrepreneurs Headquarters Limited in Brooklyn with a Bitcoin and binary options fraud. On July 9, 2018 the Eastern District of New York entered a default judgment ordering $1,497,792.12 in penalties and $432,184.79 in restitution, with permanent trading and registration bans.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$1.5m

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$1.5m

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 complaint, filed January 18, 2018 in the Eastern District of New York, alleged the defendants solicited Bitcoin by saying it would be pooled and invested in products including binary options, misappropriated funds and failed to register as a pool operator. The record carried "Colorado Resident" and "His Company" inside names.

Outcome: a CFTC press release of July 23, 2018 says that on July 9, 2018 Judge Feuerstein entered an order and default judgment against Dean and the company. The release says the court found they solicited at least $499,264.04 in Bitcoin from at least 127 people and misappropriated it, and ordered them jointly and severally to pay $432,184.79 in restitution and a $1,497,792.12 civil penalty, with permanent trading and registration bans and an injunction. This was a default, so the findings were not contested. Restitution has no field here. The release does not say how much was collected.

This library tags the matter as ponzi schemes because the original document describes payments to earlier participants made from later participants' money. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's.

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. 2018-01-19 CFTC release published
2. 2018-07-09 Eastern District of New York enters default judgment against Dean and The Entrepreneurs Headquarters

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
• CFTC press release 7760-18 (default judgment)

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.