SEC v. Jenni Yoon Jeong Lee and Evergreen Property Developments LLC (ponzi schemes, 2025)

Judgment entered

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In April 2025 the SEC sued Jenni Yoon Jeong Lee and Evergreen Property Developments LLC in the Western District of Washington over an alleged Ponzi scheme. After no defense was entered, the court granted the SEC's motion for default judgment on September 8, 2025, and the case was closed in February 2026; we could not open the judgment text, so its terms and amounts are not recorded.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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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 Securities and Exchange Commission announced this matter on April 30, 2025 as release LR-26298. The complaint alleges that Lee, posing as an investment adviser, solicited about $2.7 million from more than 33 elderly Korean-American investors and used all of it for Ponzi-like payments to earlier clients or personal expenses including gambling. A conduct-based injunction is sought.

This library tags the matter as a Ponzi scheme because the document describes returns to earlier investors paid from later investors' money, as alleged or found. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's: agencies charge statutory provisions, not technique names.

Outcome. The docket in SEC v. Lee (W.D. Wash. 2:25-cv-00793) shows the SEC's motion for default judgment filed on September 5, 2025, an order granting it on September 8, 2025, two default judgments entered the same day (consistent with one for each defendant, though the entries do not name them), and a minute order closing the case on February 25, 2026. The text of the judgments was not available to us, so the injunctions, disgorgement, interest and any penalty are not stated or stored here. A default judgment follows from the defendants not responding, not from a trial.

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. 2025-04-30 Litigation release published
2. 2025-09-08 Default judgments entered on the SEC's motion

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
• Docket, SEC v. Lee (W.D. Wash. 2:25-cv-00793), via CourtListener

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.