CFTC v. Mark N. Pyatt (ponzi schemes, 2020)

Judgment entered

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In December 2020 the CFTC announced a consent order against North Carolina man Mark Pyatt requiring $255,850 in restitution and permanent trading and registration bans for a futures and forex pool fraud; the case against his company Winston Reed Investments continued.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

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 finds that from 2017 to 2019 Pyatt took $276,850 from pool participants, misappropriated most of it for business expenses and personal use, and made Ponzi-like payments to other participants while trading only a small part.

It imposes restitution and no penalty; the record had entered the $255,000 headline as a penalty.

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. 2020-12-22 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
• CFTC order or complaint

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.