SEC v. Homero Joshua Garza, GAW Miners, LLC, and ZenMiner, LLC (ponzi schemes, 2017)

Judgment entered

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In June 2017 the SEC announced a Connecticut final default judgment against GAW Miners, LLC and ZenMiner, LLC, which must pay $10,384,099 in disgorgement and interest jointly and severally and a $1 million penalty each, in a bitcoin mining Ponzi scheme case.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$2m

Disgorgement

$10.4m

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$12.4m

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 June 2, 2017 judgment follows a May 29 liability ruling and enjoins both companies from registration and antifraud violations. The companies have stopped operating. The SEC's case against Garza, their principal, continued, so the judgment does not resolve him.

The record held the disgorgement but not the two $1 million penalties and carried a defendant name ending in a comma. This is the follow-up to the December 2015 filing record.

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. 2017-06-05 Litigation 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.

• SEC litigation 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.

Same matter

The library links these 3 records because they appear to concern one matter: the same lead defendant, an overlapping technique tag and close filing dates, or a shared court docket or a release that cites the other. Records are listed by date filed.

This grouping is the library's, made by matching names, techniques, dates and citations when the site is built. It is not the regulator's or a court's determination that the records are one case, and it errs towards missing a link rather than making a false one.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.