SEC v. Palladino and Viking Financial Group (ponzi schemes, 2015)

Judgment entered

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In August 2015 the SEC reported that Steven Palladino, already convicted in state court of operating a Ponzi scheme, was sentenced to two more years in federal prison for 25 counts of criminal contempt for violating the SEC's asset freeze.

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 release concerns the SEC's April 2013 emergency action against Palladino and his firm Viking Financial Group. Between September 2013 and March 2014 the SEC filed four contempt motions over violations of the freeze. Palladino pleaded guilty on May 14, 2015 to all 25 contempt counts and received a two-year sentence to follow his 10-to-12-year state sentence.

The record had the status unknown and a defendant name ending "et al."; the sentence is for contempt, not for the scheme itself.

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. 2015-08-13 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.