Following the Money Off-Shore

The Fortuna Alliance case demonstrates that fraud promoters not only market their investments internationally, but transfer their assets across borders as well. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington froze Fortuna's assets, then found three of the individual defendants to be in contempt of its orders because they failed to repatriate Fortuna funds they had transferred to Antigua. The FTC's effort to enforce the Court's asset freeze was accomplished with help from the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions.

In FTC v. Online Communications, et al., another 1996 case, one of the defendants had transferred profits from the allegedly fraudulent, underlying enterprise to the Bahamas prior to the Court's entry of an order freezing the defendant's assets. The U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Foreign Litigation brought action in the Bahamas and obtained an injunction freezing the defendant's assets in the Bahamas.(15) The defendant agreed to settle the case and repatriate over $300,000 to the U.S. This was the first time the U.S. government obtained an asset freeze issued by a foreign court and returned the frozen funds for distribution to American telemarketing fraud victims.