Ex-NYPD Cop Gets 36 Months In $4M Forex Scam That Duped 20 Investors: Feds

LONG ISLAND, NY — A former New York City Police Department officer was sentenced to 36 months in prison for his role in a fraudulent investment scheme in which over 20 people were duped of more than $4 million in a foreign exchange trading fund, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Jason Rodriguez, of Bellerose, along with his co-conspirator Edwin Carrion, induced over 20 people to invest in their forex trading fund, Technical Trading Team LLC, based on a slew of misrepresentations, federal prosecutors said.

In addition to the term of imprisonment, Rodriguez was also ordered to pay a forfeiture money judgment of $748,394.00 and to pay restitution of $2,305,256, according to prosecutors.

He pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy in November 2024.

His attorney's information was not immediately available.

Rodriguez's attorney, Benjamin Yaster of the Federal Defenders, maintained that the business was not started as a scam and his client didn’t intend it to fail, but should not have resorted to fraud to escape admitting defeat, the Daily News reported.

“He should never have crossed that moral and legal line to save his floundering company,” he said. “Jason realizes this now. And he knows that his conviction in this case was the result of pride and hubris.”

Joseph Nocella, Jr., United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Rodriguez "received just punishment for defrauding over 20 individual investors out of millions of dollars of hard-earned money."

"The defendant violated the trust his clients placed in him by falsely promising them a safe investment opportunity,” he said. "Our Office and our law enforcement partners will continue to pursue justice for victims of financial crime who fall prey to individuals like Rodriguez, who advance
their greedy desires at the expense of others.”

Rodriguez and Carrion founded the team in the spring of 2020, and Rodriguez served as the company’s Chief Operating Officer with the sole trading authority over the vast majority of the
nearly $5 million raised by the team, prosecutors said.

Rodriguez and Carrion promised investors annual investment returns ranging from 18 to 24 percent,
and convinced investors to invest based on a number of material misrepresentations, prosecutors said, adding that Rodriguez and Carrion promised investors that they were making a safe investment, when in reality, Rodriguez disregarded numerous safeguards that he promised investors were in place to protect their investments.

Though Rodriguez and Carrion promised investors that the team had a “loss reserve account” comprised of funds that would not be traded and could be used to repay investors in the event of market losses, no such “loss reserve account” ever existed, according to prosecutors.

Rodriguez also promised investors that the team would never expose more than 1 percent of the team investors’ funds to market risk at any given time, only to ignore that safeguard as well, prosecutors said.

Rodriguez promised investors that the team would not hold trading positions open overnight, which Rodriguez ignored on multiple occasions, including once holding a trade open from February 2021 until April 2022, resulting in a catastrophic loss of over $150,000, representing around 12.61 percent of the team’s assets, according to prosecutors.

Once it became clear to Rodriguez that the team could not pay its investors their promised returns using trading profits, Rodriguez turned the team into a Ponzi scheme and began using money from new investors to pay older investors their interest payments and principal redemptions, prosecutors said.