CFTC charges Agridime and its co-founders with a fraudulent cattle scheme

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced it filed a civil enforcement action in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas against Agridime LLC, a Texas corporation, and its co-founders, Joshua Link of Gilbert, Arizona and Jed Wood of Ft. Worth, Texas.

The complaint alleges the defendants engaged in a scheme to defraud thousands of customers in at least 14 states by soliciting, accepting, and using customers’ funds to pay undisclosed commissions and used later customers' funds to pay profits to earlier customers, in the manner of a Ponzi scheme, rather than for the purposes Agridime represented those funds would be used. Agridime claimed the funds would be used in connection with contracts of sale of a commodity in interstate commerce (i.e., the customer’s purchase of cattle). As alleged in the CFTC’s complaint, upon information and belief, from approximately 2021 until December 2023, the defendants received more than $161 million from over 2,000 customers.

In its continuing litigation against the defendants, the CFTC seeks restitution to defrauded customers, civil monetary penalties, trading bans, and a permanent injunction against further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations.

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