SEC Says Millennium Bank Was Indeed a Ponzi Scheme
Well, it was about time. The SEC released a press release yesterday stating that they have frozen the assets of the offshore Millennium Bank and its parent, United Trust of Switzerland S.A.
If you don’t recall, Millennium Bank offered certificates of deposit paying insanely high rate north of 8% APY for the last several years. I stopped short of calling it a scam, but pointed out that common sense would state that such increased return could not exist without significant added risk. From the press release:
Washington, D.C., March 26, 2009 — The Securities and Exchange Commission has obtained an emergency court order halting a $68 million Ponzi scheme involving the sale of fictitious high-yield certificates of deposit (CDs) by Caribbean-based Millennium Bank.
The SEC alleges that the scheme targeted U.S. investors and misled them into believing they were putting their money in supposedly safe and secure CDs that purportedly offered returns that were up to 321 percent higher than legitimate bank-issued CDs.
The bank was supposedly based in the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), which had access to high-yielding, safe investments. In reality, the SEC managed to trace the money sent by gullible investors from the offshore back to a US bank account in Napa Valley, CA, where the defendants “misappropriated a vast majority of the investor funds to enrich themselves and pay personal expenses, while making relatively small Ponzi payments to investors.”
According to the SEC’s complaint, the $68 million was raised from more than 375 investors since July 2004. I wonder how much is left. Another case of greed blinding people…
Please don’t confuse this bank with the legitimate and FDIC-insured Millennium Bank of Illinois.
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