SEC v. Wayne L. Palmer (ponzi schemes, 2016)

Judgment entered

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In June 2016 an SEC administrative law judge, by default, barred Wayne Palmer from the securities industry and from penny stock offerings, following a Utah federal court judgment that he ran National Note of Utah as a Ponzi scheme raising over $140 million. The court had ordered Palmer to pay a $1,050,000 penalty.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$1.1m

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$1.1m

Alleged gain

—

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 follow-on proceeding rests on the district court's findings that Palmer raised more than $140 million from over 600 investors between 2004 and 2014, paid about $88.5 million of it back as interest, and operated National Note as a Ponzi scheme while acting as an unregistered broker. The administrative decision imposes bars; the money comes from the court judgment.

The record showed $51.9 million of disgorgement, $13.2 million of interest and a $900,000 penalty, which are the court's orders against the company National Note. Palmer's own were more than $1.4 million of disgorgement, nearly $360,000 of interest and the $1,050,000 penalty, so the penalty is corrected and the two inexact figures are left blank.

This library tags the matter as ponzi schemes because the SEC or the court describes new investors' money being used to pay earlier investors. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's: agencies charge statutory provisions, not technique names.

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.

• Ponzi schemes — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2016-06-13 Initial decision

Primary documents

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

• Initial decision (ID-1025)
• Order instituting proceedings
• Finality order

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.

Related actions

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

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.