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Names, details, convictions of modern gold fixers

AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭

Amazing how many fines and how much jail time gets allocated to the people who don't exist that never do anything.

Cedric Chanu
James Vorley
David Liew (details for these three below)

Some of the other monsters are..

Navinder Sarao erased $1 trillion in the 2010 flash crash. Anyone remember having money to weather the storm, then having it all taken away? Anyone get $35 silver and suddenly was $15? This bastard right here.

Michael Coscia spent 3 years in prison for spoofing. "In a move that will have commodities traders on high alert, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction of Michael Coscia, who was sentenced to three years in prison after a federal jury found the former trader guilty of spoofing and commodities fraud." [2017]

Andre Flotron only paid $100k in fines.

Jitesh Thakkar. Jitesh Thakkar and Edge Financial Technologies, Inc. – a company Mr. Thakkar founded and for which he served as president – agreed to terms with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Division of Enforcement to settle the CFTC’s enforcement action against them. However, none of the terms have been publicized. The conspiracy that doesn't exist runs deep.

WHAT IS WORSE, their day job for wages is more important than all of your wealth and all your coin collections and stacks. They laugh at you and launch disinformation campaigns to gaslight you and confuse you. The goal is to exhaust, overload and muddy the waters until you have nothing.

The lightest of scraping reveals phone numbers, social media profiles, family photos, landline numbers, business addresses, wives maiden names, business associates, work histories, resumes, CV, everything. Vacation homes. Their operational security tells me how much they never cared about being busted.

This was on bloombergquint.com today.

(Bloomberg) -- Prosecutors behind a sweeping U.S. crackdown on market “spoofing” scored a big win Friday when former Deutsche Bank AG traders Cedric Chanu and James Vorley were convicted of fraud for manipulating gold and silver prices. A federal jury in Chicago, after three days of deliberations, concluded Chanu and Vorley made bogus trade orders between 2008 and 2013 to illegally influence precious metals markets.

The star witness at the trial was their former Deutsche Bank coworker, David Liew, who told the jury he learned from Chanu and Vorley how to use spoof trades to manipulate prices. Liew faces his own criminal charges and agreed to work with the government.

Transcripts of messages the two traders sent show they knew what they were doing was wrong, Young said. In one instance, Vorley wrote: “This spoofing is annoying me. It’s illegal for a start."

Since anti-spoofing laws passed under the Dodd-Frank financial reforms a decade ago, the U.S. has prosecuted about a dozen criminal cases, including Navinder Sarao, the British day trader linked to the 2010 “flash crash” that erased $1 trillion in market value.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission also has stepped up civil complaints and reached many settlements, including a $30 million deal with Deutsche Bank in 2018. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is poised to pay close to $1 billion to resolve market manipulation investigations by U.S. authorities into its trading of metals futures and Treasury securities, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

In 2015, Michael Coscia was convicted in Chicago and sentenced to three years in prison. In 2018, Andre Flotron was acquitted after a federal judge in Connecticut threw out most of the charges on the grounds that the case should have been brought in Chicago, where the trading occurred. Last year, the case against Chicago programmer Jitesh Thakkar, the first non-trader prosecuted under anti-spoofing laws.

Comments

  • AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭

    On February 14, 2018, Jitesh Thakkar, the founder and principal of Edge Financial Technologies Inc., was charged in an indictment filed in the Northern District of Illinois with one count of conspiracy to commit spoofing and two counts of spoofing. Thakkar appeared for his arraignment on the indictment on February 22, 2018.

    The indictment alleges that between October 2011 and April 2015, Thakkar and his co-conspirators engaged in a conspiracy to engage in spoofing—that is, bidding and offering with the intent, at the time the bid or offer was entered, to cancel the bid or offer before execution—through the placement of thousands of orders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (“CME”).

    >

    Over a 10-week period from August until October 2011, just weeks after the 'spoofing' provision of Dodd-Frank was fully enacted in July of that year, Michael Coscia (Panther Energy Trading) implemented a new trading strategy. His firm started using a computer algorithm that placed contract orders in the commodities futures markets, limited the time that orders were left in the market, and used a protocol to cancel them in certain market conditions. All of that is perfectly legal. However, Coscia's trading strategy was different because it called for placing a large order of future contracts on the buy-side, while placing a small order on the sell-side ... or he would reverse it and place a large sell-side order, and a smaller buy-side. Once the smaller order was filled, the larger orders were cancelled. The intention was to increase trading volume and, therefore, more chances for making money for Coscia's Panther.

    >

    On January 30, 2018, Andre Flotron, 53, a Swiss national currently residing in Wayne, New Jersey, was charged in a superseding indictment with conspiracy to commit spoofing, three counts of commodities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud when he was a UBS AG precious metals trader at UBS’s trading desks in Stamford, Connecticut and Zurich, Switzerland

    >

    Navinder Singh Sarao was arrested in 2015, accused of helping cause a $1 trillion market crash.
    Sarao was accused by the US government of manipulating markets by posting then canceling huge volumes of orders to trick other participants about supply and demand - a brand new offence known as 'spoofing.'
    In this extract from his new book, "Flash Crash," author Liam Vaughan recounts how Sarao made his first million pounds taking the other side of trades with another notorious financial figure, Jérôme Kerviel.

    >

    Jérôme Kerviel is a French trader who was convicted and imprisoned in the 2008 Société Générale trading loss for breach of trust, forgery and unauthorized use of the bank's computers, resulting in losses valued at €4.9 billion.

  • AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭

    SocGen states that Kerviel was assigned to arbitrage discrepancies between equity derivatives and cash equity prices,[15] and "began creating the fictitious trades in late 2006 and early 2007, but that these transactions were relatively small. The fake trading increased in frequency, and in size".[16] Bank officials claim that throughout 2007, he had been trading profitably in anticipation of falling market prices; however, they have accused him of exceeding his authority to engage in unauthorized trades totaling as much as €49.9 billion, a figure far higher than the bank's total market capitalization. Kerviel tried to conceal the activity by creating losing trades intentionally so as to offset his early gains.[17] According to the BBC, Kerviel generated €1.4 billion in hidden profits at the beginning of 2008.[18] His employers say they uncovered unauthorized trading traced to Kerviel on 19 January 2008. SocGen then closed out these positions over three days of trading beginning 21 January 2008, a period after which the market experienced a large drop in equity indices, and losses attributed are estimated at €4.9 billion ($7 billion). SocGen claimed Kerviel "had taken massive fraudulent directional positions in 2007 and 2008 far beyond his limited authority" and that the trades involved European stock index futures.

    >

    Navinder Singh Sarao was arrested in 2015, accused of helping cause a $1 trillion market crash. Sarao was accused by the US government of manipulating markets by posting then canceling huge volumes of orders to trick other participants about supply and demand - a brand new offence known as 'spoofing.'

    >

    Navinder Sarao was convicted and sentenced to serve 1 year house arrest.

  • AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 27, 2020 3:24PM

    Andre Flotron, 54, was cleared by a federal jury in New Haven, Connecticut, of a single count of conspiracy to engage in commodities fraud. It was the first acquittal in a spoofing-related case since the U.S. outlawed the practice in 2010. He could have faced as long as 25 years in prison if convicted.

    >

    Flotron wasn't even a US citizen at the time he was operating in our borders stealing your money.

  • AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 27, 2020 4:47PM

    All of this information above is available with sources on wikipedia, or simple Bing and Google searches. It was not hard to find. Some of that info is sourced from the Dept of Justice.

    Anyone notice that half of the world's gold was traded in a single day last week?

    I did.

    >

    It's clear at this point anyone defending these people must be part of a disinformation program. And if not, then the victims of it. However, they actively contribute to the propaganda and are just as guilty, in my eyes, and are not to be trusted.

    I can't imagine ignoring the reality of facts in front of me and moving the goalposts to support people who robbed each and every one of us here.

  • AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 27, 2020 3:33PM

    Anyone remember the argument that fixing the market must be so complicated that nobody could pull it off themselves?

    https://nypost.com/2020/06/27/how-a-gamer-caused-a-trillion-dollar-stock-market-crash/

    Navinder Sarao was a gamer that stole all your money and knew next to nothing about the things here that we love and cherish.

    He felt we didn't deserve any of them and that he did, so he tried to take it all. Sarao believed he deserved them more than you and all your hard work could ever hope to produce.

    All the drug addicts and criminals you deal with in your pawn shop and putting your life and property and risk on the line. Sarao thought you weren't important enough to matter, so he stole it.

  • AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 27, 2020 4:41PM

    Here is some information to protect yourself from disinformation. Disinformation is how certain groups silence others and push their narratives. A large number of corporations engage in programs similar to these in day to day marketing.

    These campaigns paint dissenters as unreliable narrators or invite people to question their credibility; e.g., "conspiracy theory" types or questioning your credentials or person (however qualified or experienced you may be).

    None of your qualifications or experience will ever be good enough and trolls will move the goalposts until they wear you out. Frustrating someone into giving up is the most effective way to silence your target.

    Disinformation campaigns project, distract, and confuse their targets. Many people are filled with self doubt and lack confidence ("I don't want to be a bother") so even the most basic of tactics work incredibly well.

    This is a war of optics. They know your responses or defenses will never be good enough and nobody will care if they are funny enough or aggressive enough. For most people, seeing someone cut down once is good enough to question everything else moving forward.

    Sometimes, trolls will make coordinated attacks to wear the person down until they shut up. They do this because it works.

    Disinformation is how people get away with lying, stealing, crimes, gold fixing, etc.

    https://theconversation.com/disinformation-campaigns-are-murky-blends-of-truth-lies-and-sincere-beliefs-lessons-from-the-pandemic-140677

    This link contains information from psychologists, intelligence officials, and people directly involved in these campaigns that don't exist.

    It's important to note here that tricking seniors into buying incredibly high and selling incredibly low is a type of disinformation campaign and something people here complain about all the time.

  • MsMorrisineMsMorrisine Posts: 33,090 ✭✭✭✭✭

    PSA: Do NOT let gold fixing campaigns wear you down. We are winning and have been for some time.

    This discussion has been closed.

    Current maintainer of Stone's Master List of Favorite Websites // My BST transactions
  • PerryHallPerryHall Posts: 46,138 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @MsMorrisine said:
    PSA: Do NOT let gold fixing campaigns wear you down. We are winning and have been for some time.

    This discussion has been closed.

    I just re-opened it. :D

    Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
    "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
    "Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire

  • blitzdudeblitzdude Posts: 5,899 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Looks like the Bulgarians have been fixing the price to me. Rgds!

    The whole worlds off its rocker, buy Gold™.

  • derrybderryb Posts: 36,824 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Meet The Mastermind Behind JPMorgan's Gold And Silver Manipulation "Crime Ring"

    If this were a drug or terror ring people would be in prison.

    "Interest rates, the price of money, are the most important market. And, perversely, they’re the market that’s most manipulated by the Fed." - Doug Casey

  • PerryHallPerryHall Posts: 46,138 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Am I the only one that caught themselves checking the list to see if there were any forum members on it? :o;)

    Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
    "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
    "Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire

  • tincuptincup Posts: 5,142 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @PerryHall said:
    Am I the only one that caught themselves checking the list to see if there were any forum members on it? :o;)

    lol... it's about time for them to pop in and mention tin foil hats again!

    As many suspected... it looks like it was (and still is?) blatant, widespread, and going on for a long time.

    ----- kj
  • jmski52jmski52 Posts: 22,858 ✭✭✭✭✭

    One should note that the regulators have to be complicit and were all given free passes for a very long time, being unaccountable themselves for the most part.

    Q: Are You Printing Money? Bernanke: Not Literally

    I knew it would happen.
  • derrybderryb Posts: 36,824 ✭✭✭✭✭

    easy to suspect that enforcement actions of any type against banks are strictly fund raisers or political tools.

    "Interest rates, the price of money, are the most important market. And, perversely, they’re the market that’s most manipulated by the Fed." - Doug Casey

  • TwoSides2aCoinTwoSides2aCoin Posts: 44,294 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Buy low. Hold tight.

    Or as a famous leader once said: " Stand back. Stand by ".

  • derrybderryb Posts: 36,824 ✭✭✭✭✭

    More effective weapon in fighting PM price manipulation by the the bullion banks?

    The SEC Is Making Deutsche's CEO Personally Responsible For Bank's Crimes

    Is JPM's Jamie Dimon feeling a slight pucker?

    "Interest rates, the price of money, are the most important market. And, perversely, they’re the market that’s most manipulated by the Fed." - Doug Casey

  • jmski52jmski52 Posts: 22,858 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Is JPM's Jamie Dimon feeling a slight pucker?

    In my fantasy world, there's a vibrant and free market in precious metals bullion.

    Q: Are You Printing Money? Bernanke: Not Literally

    I knew it would happen.
  • AzurescensAzurescens Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited April 17, 2021 10:07PM

    @derryb said:
    More effective weapon in fighting PM price manipulation by the the bullion banks?

    The SEC Is Making Deutsche's CEO Personally Responsible For Bank's Crimes

    Is JPM's Jamie Dimon feeling a slight pucker?

    Let's hope the SEC does something with GG at the helm.

    I've been tagging banks and finance people on social media, appealing to their "good nature". I remind them that we all make mistakes and a prosecutor could see how easily they were manipulated by their criminal bosses. It's not their personal fault that their evil overlords got carried away and swept them up in their fraud.. or ruined their good name. And it's nothing to be ashamed of, it's not a sign of weakness or a flaw.

    There is respect, honor, and courage in being a whistleblower. Why go to jail over an unpaid internship for people who mistreat you?

    I remember working for scary powerful big money, how helpless it can feel. I remind them that sometimes it only takes 1 person to do the right thing.

    Curiously, everyone has blocked me, except the three people I thought would block me first. They still let me post this sort of stuff daily with whistleblower phone numbers and links, and I remind them sometimes bad things happen to good people.

    I know that, if they were whistleblowers, or on our side, they wouldn't be able to respond or interact with my posts. I tell them this is a sign of how bad things have gotten, and how insidious it is, for these criminals to control them so much they control social media interactions on their personal time.

    So I think, for now, not being blocked is a way they can let me know they see it. And I know they read all their tweets, I watch them respond to people. I fear this is as good as it gets.. for now.

    Indeed, a lot of people would probably have done the same things they did to end up in these positions. And I tell them that, and that I understand, and I'm sure many others do too.

    I don't think this war will be won any other way.

  • derrybderryb Posts: 36,824 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited April 18, 2021 10:04AM

    @Azurescens said:

    @derryb said:
    More effective weapon in fighting PM price manipulation by the the bullion banks?

    The SEC Is Making Deutsche's CEO Personally Responsible For Bank's Crimes

    Is JPM's Jamie Dimon feeling a slight pucker?

    Let's hope the SEC does something with GG at the helm.

    Not in your wildest dreams. He turned a blind eye to metals manipulation the entire time he was at the CTFC only to have the DoJ do his job when they eventually fined numerous bullion banks for spoofing. GG is a Wall St. team player. How do you think he made it to the SEC? Financial regulators are a body limb of Wall St. Any action taken is not without Wall Street's approval.

    Wall St. is in control of who becomes its regulators. In many cases these head regulators come from the very ranks of those they will regulate.

    "Interest rates, the price of money, are the most important market. And, perversely, they’re the market that’s most manipulated by the Fed." - Doug Casey

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