U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Breon Peace, speaks during a news conference in Brooklyn, New York, U.S., October 22, 2024.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Former New York City police officer Jason Rodriguez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud related to his role as the chief operating officer of a foreign exchange investment fund, prosecutors said in a release Thursday.
Rodriguez, 38, was indicted in a Brooklyn federal court in February after he lied to investors and lost most of the $4.8 million put into his forex investment fund, Technical Trading Team. To date, approximately $3.5 million of those funds have not been paid back to the investors, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
“The defendant deceived retail investors into investing with his company based on false promises that he would invest their money in accordance with clear guardrails and that he had left the NYPD because of his success as a trader,” Breon Pace, United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said. “In reality, there were no guardrails, he resigned from the NYPD in disgrace, and he lost most of the money, inflicting substantial harm on his victims.”
Rodriguez falsely reassured investors that if the company lost money, he could pay them back through a “loss reserve account,” and that he wouldn’t risk more than 1% of assets under management on a single trade.
“[Rodriguez] also misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars which he used to pay for luxury car rentals, travel, and other expenses,” Peace said in February following the indictment.
Rodriguez served as an NYPD officer for approximately seven years before he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor crime and resigned. He then established the TTT fund in 2020 along with CEO Edwin Carrion.
Previous court records show that Carrion pleaded guilty to the scheme in January. He has yet to be sentenced in the case.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2023 filed a civil lawsuit against TTT, Rodriguez and Carrion in Brooklyn federal court, accusing them of making “false and misleading statements regarding their investment track record and the safety of investing the TTT pool to participants and potential participants.”
The complaint also alleges that after losing over $3 million, Rodriguez and Carrion assured investors that they could win back the losses using artificial intelligence-based trading algorithms.
The suit was stayed in March by District Judge Ramon E. Reyes, Jr.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.