Rene Alan Chalmers will spend 51 months in prison for funds misappropriation and misrepresentation of returns
The New Zealand Herald is reporting on a substantial forex Ponzi scheme that was uncovered by the local Serious Fraud Office following complaints from investors with a self-made forex trader. Rene Alan Chalmers has defrauded his investors including family and friends of $1.5 million, promising them that he would use the funds to trade on the foreign exchange market.
Instead he misappropriated more than $837,000 from his investors, bought a couple of properties and traded with a minuscule amount of funds on the foreign exchange market, where he was largely unsuccessful. During the process he issued false statements to his clients of behalf of the company he registered – Chalmers Cameron Investments Ltd.
The firm operated from 2007 on, as Mr Chalmers lived in the UAE where he worked as a teaching adviser. The lawyer in charge of his defense claimed that his client was out of his depth as he was working his day job and traded currencies at night. Not a big excuse – many traders work for more than twelve hours a day, and most of them certainly don’t misappropriate their investors’’ funds.
Chalmers admitted that he was “incompetent” in forex trading. He misreported his holdings pretty systemically issuing 518 false statements to 64 investors. In August 2011 he stated investments in the fund were worth $3.64 million when they were in fact totaling $140,000. By March 2012 the amount has grown to $6.2 million while the real amount was $290,000.
Chalmers admitted to 14 charges which were brought forward by New Zealand’s Serious Fraud Office. He is already serving his sentence. We sincerely urge our readers to do everything possible to avoid dodgy schemers in the forex industry. One way to stay safe in the vast world of foreign exchange is to do business only with brokerages from our LeapRate approved list.
For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.