If you are willing to share: How did you end up getting tricked and how can other people avoid the same.

It was a pretty good scam. The scammer had a company that sold fractional profit shares in oil wells. Without getting too deep in the weeds, he sold the equivalent of more than 100%. He invested the proceeds of new investment in paying out old investors and buying new oil wells.

Eventually he ran out of new investor money and the scheme unraveled.

I don’t know how I would have caught it. The regulatory oversight in oil well finances is poor.

The guy was on the lam for a few months, then sentenced to 10 years in Federal prison. He then escaped and hasn’t been found.

Thank you. :)

> He then escaped

Is this...common?

Matt Cox talked his way out of imminent arrest, went on the run for 3 years, and was only discovered after his girlfriend slipped up and told something to the wrong person.

So yeah it happens

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cox

So...the SEC didn't try to make you whole...it recovered about a third of the money you lost to the Ponzi scheme through a disgorgement order.

The SEC can order disgorgement of profits from an investment scam (which are then returned to victims to the extent such profits are recoverable), but making victims whole for their losses is a very different thing.

No, the SEC put the org in receivership and then appointed a receiver to find where the money went.

i'm not expert, but that's the court appointing the receiver, and a receiver takes over a company but looks out for creditor's interests.

The point of the receivership was to recover the money for creditors, not investors. Investors are quite literally the last people who get a recovery from a receivership.

I'm not going to keep arguing with a non-lawyer about something I've been involved with as a lawyer, so this will be my last comment on the matter.

While you are correct in the general sense, court-ordered receiverships due to SEC enforcement action are very much about recovering investor money in a fraud situation.

https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-bulletins/ib_receiv...