CFTC v. Onsa, New Century Investment Management (ponzi schemes, 2014)

Judgment entered

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In March 2014 the CFTC announced a final judgment in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania imposing a $5.7 million civil penalty on Ward Onsa and New Century Investment Management LLC for running a commodity pool as a Ponzi scheme.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$5.7m

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$5.7m

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 March 20, 2014 judgment followed a December 2011 default order that found at least 12 participants invested more than $2.2 million in a pool, that the money was misappropriated and used to pay earlier participants with later participants' funds, and that imposed permanent trading and registration bans. Onsa was separately sentenced to 78 months in a criminal case.

The record previously carried the word "Defendants" inside the defendant name.

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. 2014-03-31 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.