CFTC v. Jared J. Davis (rigged binary options execution, 2019)

Alleged — pending

These are allegations. CFTC has filed an action; nothing in it has been proven, and the respondents have not been found liable. Everything described on this page is what the regulator alleges, not what a court has found. See our editorial policy.

Machine-extracted, pending human review. The structured fields on this page were parsed automatically from the regulator's own release, linked below. Read the primary document before relying on any figure here, and tell us if something is wrong.

In 2019, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed an action against Jared J. Davis, alleging conduct this library classifies as rigged binary options execution. The complaint alleges Davis solicited and accepted at least $10 million from customers to trade off-exchange binary options through platforms including Option Mint, Option King and Option Queen. A parallel criminal matter is referenced in the release.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

$10m

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced this matter on September 17, 2019 as release 8018-19, bringing a civil case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio against Jared J. Davis over a binary-options operation he is alleged to have built and run for roughly four years spanning 2012 to 2016. Marketed online and through call centers under the brand names Option Mint, Option King and Option Queen, the operation is alleged to have taken in a minimum of $10 million from customers based in the U.S. and abroad, sold as off-exchange bets on commodity and currency prices.

This library tags the matter as rigged binary options execution, based on the conduct the regulator describes. Two specific omissions drive that tag. First, the complaint alleges Davis never told customers he stood on the other side of every position, meaning their loss was his gain by design. Second — the allegation that matters most for this technique — the complaint alleges the platforms' own software settings were repeatedly adjusted at Davis's direction specifically to raise the chance a customer would lose. Put together, what the complaint describes is not a mispriced product but an outcome the house wrote for itself: a book entry rather than a wager settled against any real market.

The status of this record is filed. This is an allegation the CFTC intends to prove, not an established fact, and the language above reflects that.

Alongside the CFTC's case, the release notes a 22-count federal indictment against Davis in the same Ohio district and a separate SEC civil action.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Rigged binary options execution — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2019-09-17 CFTC civil enforcement action filed

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• CFTC release 8018-19

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Same matter

The library links these 2 records because they appear to concern one matter: the same lead defendant, an overlapping technique tag and close filing dates, or a shared court docket or a release that cites the other. Records are listed by date filed.

This grouping is the library's, made by matching names, techniques, dates and citations when the site is built. It is not the regulator's or a court's determination that the records are one case, and it errs towards missing a link rather than making a false one.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 29, 2026. If this matter has since resolved, been withdrawn or been dismissed, we want to know: submit a correction.