Judge Orders Home to be Forfeited
BOSTON - A Quincy man was sentenced to more than four years in prison today in U.S. District Court in Boston in connection with his scheme in to defraud $3.1 million from sixty-five individuals.
Marcellus Lopes Lee, 47, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani to 57 months in prison and three years of supervised release. Judge Talwani also ordered Lee to pay restitution in the amount of $3,159,632, and ordered that his Quincy home, which he purchased with fraud proceeds, be forfeited. In August 2015, Lee pleaded guilty to 16 counts of wire fraud and six counts of money laundering.
Lee owned and operated Taurus Global Markets, Ltd. (TGM), an entity which Lee held out as a company that engaged in foreign currency trading (forex) on behalf of investors. Lee defrauded investors by convincing them to wire funds to TGM’s Belize bank account for the purpose of trading in the highly-risky forex market. Lee, however, did not trade the investor money and instead used it for his personal expenses. Although TGM’s website represented that it had staff, management, and a computer network “distributed all across the world," TGM, in fact, had no employees and Lee operated it by himself, primarily from his residence in Quincy. Lee also sent investors what purported to be account documents reflecting that their money was invested in the forex market. Eventually, most investors were told that most or all of their money had been lost in forex trading when, in reality, Lee had simply spent it.
United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz; Harold H. Shaw, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Field Division; and William P. Offord, Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation in Boston, made the announcement today. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark J. Balthazard of Ortiz’s Economic Crimes Unit.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the United States Attorneys
