A former NYPD officer from Bellerose was sentenced in Brooklyn federal court to three years in prison for defrauding millions of dollars from investors.
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A former NYPD officer from Bellerose was sentenced in Brooklyn federal court on Sept. 10 to three years in prison for defrauding over 20 investors out of more than $4 million in a foreign exchange (forex) trading fund.
Jason Rodriguez, 38, pleaded guilty last November to conspiracy to commit wire fraud related to his role as the chief operating officer of Technical Trading Team LLC, based on a slew of misrepresentations.
According to court filings and the defendant’s admissions, Rodriguez and his co-conspirator Edwin Carrion founded the Technical Trading Team (TTT) in the spring of 2020. Rodriguez had sole trading authority over the vast majority of the nearly $5 million raised from over 20 individual investors. Rodriguez and Carrion promised investors annual investment returns ranging from 18% to 24% and convinced them to invest based on a number of material misrepresentations. Rodriguez and Carrion promised investors that they were making a safe investment; in reality, Rodriguez disregarded numerous safeguards that he promised investors were in place to protect their investments.
For example, though Rodriguez and Carrion promised investors that the Technical Trading Team would never expose more than 1% of the Technical Trading Team investors’ funds to market risk at any given time, only to ignore that safeguard as well. Rodriguez also promised investors that TTT would not hold trading positions open overnight, which Rodriguez ignored on multiple occasions, including once holding a trade open from February 2021 until April 2022, resulting in a catastrophic loss of more than $150,000, representing approximately 12.61% of TTT’s assets. Once it became clear to Rodriguez that TTT could not pay its investors their promised returns using trade profits, Rodriguez turned TTT into a Ponzi scheme and began using money from new investors to pay older investors their interest payments and principal redemptions.
“Today, the defendant received just punishment for defrauding over 20 individual investors out of millions of dollars on hard-earned money,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella said.
In addition to the term of imprisonment, U.S. District Judge Ramon Reyes ordered Rodriguez to pay a forfeiture money judgment of $748,394 and to pay restitution of $2,305,256.
“The defendant violated the trust his clients placed in him by falsely promising them a safe investment opportunity,” Nocella said. “Our Office and our law enforcement partners will continue to pursue justice for victims of financial crime who fall prey to individuals like Rodriguez who advance their greedy desires at the expense of others.”
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