Federal Prosecutors in New York along with the SEC have brought both civil and criminal charges against Paul Regan accusing him of masterminding a massive Ponzi scheme in which he is alleged to have swindled 330 investors out of more than 63 million dollars.  Regan sold phony investments in precious metals in Columbia and by Obamacare insurance polices that he told investors were guaranteed to bring annual profits of as much as 14% annually and were fully insured.  Prosecutors say that none of this was true.   They say that Regan used profits from later investors to pay early investors which is the mark of a Ponzi scheme, paid insurance agents that he hired to sell the phony investments although the insurance agents were not licensed to sell investments and kept the rest of the money to fund his own upscale lifestyle.

TIPS

The lesson here is a simple one. No one should ever invest in anything they do not fully understand nor invest with anyone without doing research on the person offering the investment. In this case it would have been a simple matter to determine that investing in Affordable Care Act policies was impossible and anyone who looked into Regan’s history would have found that he had been barred for life by FINRA and had been fined by Oregon state securities regulators for forging documents including the signature of a client’s dead wife and stealing approximately $140,000 from an elderly client suffering from dementia in 2005 as well as pleading guilty in 2017 to fraud charges in Florida related to the sale of promissory notes that promised guaranteed returns.

FINRA’s Central Registration Depository will tell you if the broker you are considering investing with is licensed and if there have been disciplinary procedures against him or her. You can also check with your own state’s securities regulation office for similar information. Many investment advisers will not be required to register with the SEC but are required to register with your individual state securities regulators. You can find your state’s agency by going to the website of the North American Securities Administrators

For more information about this case, check out my column in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveweisman/2025/09/11/prosecutors-bring-charges-over-massive-ponzi-scheme/

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