SEC v. Joseph Paul Zada (ponzi schemes, 2015)

Judgment entered

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In September 2015 the SEC announced that a Florida jury convicted Joseph Zada of 15 counts of mail fraud over a Ponzi scheme he ran from 1998 to 2009; a Michigan federal court had already ordered him and Zada Enterprises to pay $121,657,741 in disgorgement, interest and penalties together, affirmed by the Sixth Circuit.

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 SEC had sued Zada in 2010 under the registration and antifraud provisions; the court entered final judgments in January 2014 and the Sixth Circuit affirmed in May 2015. The criminal jury verdict came on September 3, 2015, with sentencing set for November.

The $121.7 million is a combined figure that the release does not split, so it is no longer recorded as disgorgement alone. The record also showed the matter as appealed, though the appeal had been decided.

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. 2015-09-11 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.

Related actions

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

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.