13 - Fraud Is Many Things (for Humans and Robots)

Summary

US laws and regulations prohibit people from lying, deceiving, or otherwise tricking prospective and actual customers in connection with buying or selling futures and other derivatives. For example, the law considers it fraud for a person to solicit money from customers to invest in a hedge fund (i.e., commodity pool) that purportedly will trade stock index futures and then (as actually happened in one 2009 CFTC civil enforcement case) use customer money to instead buy, among other things, a collection of 1,348 rare, stuffed teddy bears for more than $3 million. This prohibition should not be surprising, as just about every financial regulatory regime outlaws fraud. This chapter has to cover more territory than some of the other parts of this book because one of the central purposes behind the regulation of financial markets is the prevention of fraud, which can take many forms.