Four years, 400,000 accounts and a promise of 15% a week — that's how the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission describes the operation it says ran under the name Cash FX Group. On Friday, the agency filed a civil complaint in federal court in Florida against the company, its founder Huascar Jose Lopez Castillo, an affiliated marketing outfit called The Conversion Pros and its head Ronald Pope, plus a third defendant, Justin Halladay.
According to the CFTC, Cash FX ran as a multilevel-marketing structure between June 2019 and December 2023, pulling in more than $950 million from participants worldwide. Recruiters told new members their money would be handled by "expert traders" and proprietary algorithms — and later, by an artificial intelligence system supposedly generating around 10% a week. Pope's own pitch went further, promising returns as high as 15%.
The catch, the complaint alleges, is that the AI system never actually existed. The CFTC points to a livestream from November 2021 in which Cash FX's own marketing director admitted the promised AI "hadn't launched yet." Regulators say there was barely any real trading behind the scheme at all — new deposits were simply used to pay off earlier investors, the textbook mechanics of a Ponzi scheme, while a share of the money was allegedly diverted for personal use.
The crypto angle isn't in the product itself — Cash FX pitched forex contracts, not tokens — but in how the money moved. Investigators say a portion of payments ran through cryptocurrency wallets, letting funds cross borders outside the traditional banking system. That made the case harder to build: tracing it meant following transactions across wallets, exchanges, and the points where crypto was converted back into cash.
Confirmed investor losses stand at $406 million. The CFTC is asking the court for restitution, disgorgement of profits, civil penalties and a permanent ban on the defendants trading or registering in the industry again. None of them have responded in court yet, and the allegations remain unproven. It's not the agency's first case of this kind this year — in July it sued Argent Capital Management and Trevor Vernon over a similar, far smaller $14 million commodity-pool fraud.
What stands out is what "AI" was doing in the pitch: not running any trades, but closing the sale. In a scheme built on recruiting rather than results, the promise of an intelligent system was just a word investors weren't equipped to check.
