Updates to our Terms of Use

We are updating our Terms of Use. Please carefully review the updated Terms before proceeding to our website.

Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Adviser, and $40 Million,|Disappear, SEC Says

ATLANTA (CN) - The SEC said Monday it got an emergency order freezing the assets of an investment adviser "who has apparently gone into hiding after orchestrating a $40 million investment fraud."

The SEC sued Aubrey Lee Price, 46, and his companies, PFG LLC, PFGBI LLC, Montgomery Asset Management fka PFG Asset Management, in Federal Court.

In a statement announcing the emergency order, the SEC said that before Price disappeared, he "sent a letter to some individuals dated June 2012 and titled 'Confidential Confession For Regulators - PFG, LLC and PFGBI, LLC Summary.' In the 22-page letter, Price admits that he 'falsified statements with false returns' in order to conceal between $20 million and $23 million in investor losses."

Price moved from Manatee County, Fla. to Lowndes County, Ga., before he took it on the lam, the SEC said.

He claimed he would invest clients' money in traditional, liquid securities, but he blew a lot of it on "illiquid investments in South America real estate and a troubled South Georgia bank," the SEC said in its statement. It added: "In order to conceal mounting losses of investor funds, Price created bogus account statements with false account balances and returns that were provided to investors and bank regulators."

"Price raised nearly $40 million from investors and made woeful financial transactions that he hid from them," the associate director of the SEC Atlanta Regional Office said in the statement. "Now both the money and Price are missing."

Categories / Uncategorized

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Loading...