An Indian-origin man in the US has been charged with stealing more than $250,000 in a Ponzi scheme in which his friends and co-workers invested.
Niket Shah of New Jersey was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which also ordered a preliminary injunction and asset freeze against him.
According to the SEC’s complaint, unsealed on March 22 in federal court in Brooklyn, Shah used Spark Trading Group to defraud more than 15 investors into contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to two funds that he marketed.
He obtained investments for the funds by lying about his success as a trader, Spark Trading’s returns, and how he intended to use investors’ money, including altering financial statements to make the funds appear profitable when they were actually losing money.
Lately, defrauding and scamming has been in news in India after the state-run bank Punjab National Bank, admitted that the amount of fraudulent transactions could be Rs 1,300 crore more than the current estimate of about Rs 11,400 crore in the PNB fraud case.
The probe is on into the Rs 11,400 crore scam, already one of the biggest in the Indian banking sector.
As the inquiry into the biggest bank scam in India widens, more shady details continue to come out. The fear of being caught had apparently caught hold of diamond merchant Nirav Modi and his maternal uncle and partner, Mehul Choksi, in November 2017.
This was when new staff members joined the PNB’s Brady House branch, and raised objections over the issuance of Letters of Undertakings (LoU) and Letters of Credit (LoC) to the duo’s firms.
