CFTC v. Jared J. Davis (rigged binary options execution, 2023)

Settled

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 2023, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission resolved its action against Jared J. Davis, alleging conduct this library classifies as rigged binary options execution. The consent order finds Davis fraudulently solicited approximately $10 million and orders him to pay $561,971 in restitution to victims. Davis separately pleaded guilty in a parallel criminal case and was sentenced to 30 months.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

$562k

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$562k

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 on April 28, 2023, as release 8698-23, that a consent order had been entered a day earlier in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio against Jared J. Davis, closing out the CFTC's September 2019 case against him (release 8018-19).

The order's findings track the earlier complaint: over roughly four years to mid-2016, Davis is found to have taken in about $10 million from customers here and overseas for off-exchange binary bets on commodities, currencies, individual stocks and stock indices, sold through online marketing and call centers under the Option Mint, Option King and Option Queen names. Two findings anchor this library's tag. The order finds Davis never disclosed that he personally profited on the other side of each customer's position, and — separately — that he had the platforms' software adjusted on a recurring basis so that customers were more likely to lose than the displayed odds implied. It is that second finding, an operator directing his own settlement engine rather than a real market, that this technique is built to describe.

The order orders Davis to pay $561,971 to the scheme's victims and bars him for life from CFTC registration and from trading on any registered entity. No separate civil penalty appears in this order; the $561,971 is restitution, and this library's schema has no field distinct from disgorgement for money returned to victims, so it is recorded there with that distinction noted.

A separate criminal case in the same district produced guilty pleas: eleven wire-fraud counts against his company, Erie Marketing, LLC, and three tax-evasion counts against Davis personally, on largely overlapping conduct. The sentence handed down was 30 months' incarceration, three years of supervised release, a $300,000 fine, and additional restitution owed to the IRS and to victims beyond what the CFTC recovered. A parallel SEC action against Davis had reached only a partial settlement as of this release, with disgorgement and penalties left for the court to set later.

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
2. 2023-04-27 Consent order entered for permanent injunction and restitution

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 8698-23
• CFTC release 8018-19 (original complaint announcement)

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. submit a correction.