A federal court in the Eastern District of Louisiana has ordered New Orleans forex figure Michael B. DePetrillo, along with his companies Meteor LLC and NOLA FX Capital Management LLC, to pay a $9,211,492 civil monetary penalty, closing out a civil fraud case tied to a currency-trading investment pool that prosecutors say never delivered the profits it promised. The order also bars the defendants for life from trading in markets regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or registering with the agency.
The civil penalty was secured through a default judgment, which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said resolves its case against DePetrillo and his companies, according to Finance Magnates. Court filings reviewed via CourtListener describe the matter as an alleged scheme in which DePetrillo and his companies misrepresented to individuals that their money would be pooled and invested, and instead allegedly misappropriated the funds. The defendants were served with the complaint on October 29, 2024, but had not appeared in the case by the time of a February 19, 2025 order, per that same court record.
According to the Finance Magnates report, DePetrillo and his companies told investors their money would be pooled in the NOLA FX Fund and used to trade leveraged currency contracts. The fund instead presented false account statements portraying a profitable forex operation, the report states, while new investors' contributions reportedly helped pay out earlier participants in the scheme. The report also states the Justice Department found DePetrillo collected approximately $9.2 million from around 55 investors over seven years, and that a court finding determined the defendants misappropriated more than $3 million of participant funds, which were used for payouts to earlier investors, DePetrillo's personal expenses, and trading in his own accounts.
A Separate CFTC Account Describes a Smaller Alleged Pool
Not every account of the case lines up on the dollar figures. A separate CFTC enforcement filing, as reported by TradingView's republication of Finance Magnates, alleged that the defendants defrauded at least 40 individuals out of approximately $7.6 million through an unregistered commodity pool operation that ran from July 2017 until the time of the complaint. That account says the defendants sent false account statements to pool participants showing purported profits and trading activity that in fact did not exist, and that misappropriated funds were used to make payments to existing pool participants. The dossier does not reconcile these figures with the $9.2 million and $3 million amounts described above; both versions are presented here as reported.
On the criminal side, DePetrillo pleaded guilty on February 18, 2025 to violating the Commodity Exchange Act, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He was later sentenced to nine years in prison for that violation, the department said in a separate release announcing the sentencing. The Finance Magnates report additionally states that DePetrillo was ordered to pay $6,748,412 in restitution to victims as part of that July 2025 outcome.
Part of a Wave of Big-Dollar CFTC Fraud Cases
The DePetrillo case lands amid a string of far larger CFTC enforcement actions this year. The agency sued Goliath Ventures in August 2026 over alleged cryptocurrency trading fraud, with a CFTC release stating that Goliath Ventures and related defendants collected at least $397 million from roughly 1,600 customers and issued account statements reflecting nonexistent profits. In September 2026, the CFTC brought a case against Cash FX Group, alleging the group collected more than $950 million for a purported forex trading pool while conducting little actual trading and instead using new deposits to pay earlier participants.
Those two cases remain allegations in pending CFTC lawsuits and have not been resolved the way the NOLA FX matter has. Even so, they point to a pattern the TradingView-republished Finance Magnates report also notes elsewhere in its roundup of CFTC activity, including a $22 million fine against Nasdaq Futures over its Designated Market Maker program and the agency's August 2024 announcement of a $12.7 billion penalty settlement with FTX and Alameda following the exchange's collapse.
For now, the NOLA FX case stands as a closed chapter: a federal court has ordered DePetrillo and his companies to pay more than $9 million, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has said the default judgment resolves its civil case, and DePetrillo is already serving a nine-year prison term tied to his guilty plea.
