CFTC v. Defendants Harbor Light Asset (ponzi schemes, 2014)

Judgment entered

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In 2014 the CFTC announced an order against Harbor Light Asset Management and its owner Michael Jenkins for solicitation fraud and misappropriation in a Ponzi scheme, requiring $1,301,406.60 in restitution and a $3,904,219.80 civil monetary penalty.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$3.9m

Disgorgement

—

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 order, entered by an Eastern District of North Carolina judge after a complaint filed in November 2012, permanently bans both defendants from trading and registration. The earlier complaint alleged a Ponzi scheme that drew in at least $1.79 million from roughly 377 people.

The headline ("over $5.2 million") combines restitution and penalty; the record had entered $5.2 million as the penalty, and had cut the defendant name down to "Defendants Harbor Light Asset".

This library tags the matter as ponzi schemes because the order or release 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. 2014-02-11 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 20, 2026. submit a correction.