CFTC v. Matthew J. Marcus and Tech Power Inc. (matched orders, 2016)

Judgment entered

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In July 2016 the CFTC announced a consent order requiring Matthew J. Marcus and his company Tech Power Inc. to pay a $250,000 civil penalty for a "money pass": 1,248 pre-arranged, non-competitive single stock futures trades on OneChicago that moved $390,000 from a Canadian law firm's account to Tech Power. Marcus also received five-year trading, solicitation and registration bans.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$250k

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$250k

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 this matter on July 7, 2016 as release 7403-16. The consent order was entered on June 30, 2016 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The respondents are Matthew J. Marcus and Tech Power Inc. (1 individual, 1 entity), who pay the $250,000 penalty jointly. The complaint was filed on April 14, 2015.

The order finds that over seven consecutive trading days in January and February 2014 Marcus moved money from an account in the name of MetroWest Law Corporation, a Canadian firm under the custodianship of the Law Society of British Columbia, to Tech Power through 1,248 pre-arranged trades in eight illiquid single stock futures on OneChicago. He traded the two accounts almost exclusively against each other using nearly simultaneous matching orders, and most trades lost money for MetroWest and gained it for Tech Power, a transfer of $390,000. He did so with the login details of the account's owner, John D. Briner, a disbarred lawyer.

Earlier versions of this record tagged it as custodianship shell hijacking, apparently because of the word "custodianship" in the law society's role. The matter involves no seized public-company shell; it concerns pre-arranged non-competitive trading, so the tag has been changed to matched orders. The CFTC's case against Briner and MetroWest continued.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above.

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.

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

Timeline

1. 2016-07-07 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.