CFTC v. Robert Andres (ponzi schemes, 2014)

Judgment entered

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In 2014 the CFTC announced a Utah federal court default judgment against Robert Andres, Winsome Investment Trust, Robert Holloway and US Ventures for commodity pool fraud, with a $32,370,000 civil monetary penalty and $12 million of restitution, and permanent trading and registration bans.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$32.4m

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$32.4m

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 2005 to 2008 Andres and Winsome took at least $50.2 million from at least 243 people, took most of it, paying some participants purported profits much as a Ponzi scheme does, and sending money to Andres's wife and buying unrelated businesses, while Holloway's futures trading lost about $10.7 million and he spent participants' money on personal items.

The penalty is joint across the four defendants; the record listed only Andres.

This library tags the matter as ponzi schemes because the SEC or the court describes new investors' money being used to pay earlier investors. 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. 2014-06-19 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.