As I have illustrated on this thread there is no shortage of colorful con artists in the forex business. Yet there is one criminal mastermind in particular who always seems to skate away from his on ice thuggery with more dexterity than one of the Hanson Brothers. His name is Robert Gray. And when he wields the high stick more than just a few teeth go flying into the blood splattered night...
So who is this guy? How has he been able to cut such a swath through the forex industry for all these years? And how was he able to con, not just ordinary traders, but top U.S. Regulatory Agencies themselves? Well, he was able to do it using that old American adage that "Practice makes Perfect."
The Rob Gray story starts back in the go go 80's on that notorious stretch of highway running from Boca Raton to Miami known to the Feds as "Maggot Mile." It was December 11, 1986, when our goodfella to be got started in the futures industry by applying to be an associate member of the NFA with the firm Multivest Options Inc and International Precious Metals Corp Inc in Fort Lauderdale.
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But Gray's career with these two firms would be short lived and by the summer of 1987 he was no longer licensed by the NFA and had apparently left these brokerages. Multivest itself would eventually be closed down for gross fraud within a few years.
Let's role the tape and see how Gray got his start as a forex huckster:
Multivest Options Inc was one of the many futures industry orifices oozing with criminality during the decade of greed. The firm all by itself had over 120 Reparations Cases with the CFTC.
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In 1988 the NFA settled a case with Multivest in which numerous salesmen were cited for fraud and high pressure sales tactics.
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And then in 1990 the CFTC shut them down for good stating:
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"from June 1987 through October 1989, MultiVest, while soliciting almost 15,000 customers to invest in commodity options, misrepresented the likelihood of profit in trading commodity options, MultiVest's success rate, the risks in trading commodity options, the expertise and experience of MultiVest's sales people, and the extent and quality of MultiVest's market research. MultiVest was also charged with failing to supervise the handling of commodity options accounts by its salespeople."
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So this is the firm that gave birth to Robert Gray, a fraudulent futures firm that sold bogus options to the gullible Senior Citizens of Seizure World, USA.
The trail goes cold in the 1990's although rumor has it he gravitated over to the stock market (I can't imagine Gray missed out on the greatest con off them all, the Internet Stock Bubble...) But his grand debut in the forex world appears to be in 2000 at FXCM of all places. According to a hilarious story I picked up at the New York Traders Expo a couple months ago Gray was the head of sales at FXCM and in a feat of treachery worthy of an Italian Opera he bolted the company with all FXCM's clients on a floppy disk and went to work at FX Solutions! Well done Rob, Lord Vader from MultiVest trained you well...
But it appears FX Solutions was not all the grateful as he lasted all of three months in their employ according to the NFA's Registration Records.
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Where to next for this Son of the Sith? Well, how about Director of Global Forex Operations for GFS Forex & Futures. Good Lord, how on earth did Robert Gray land this gig? Doesn't ANYONE do background checks anymore? Apparently not. Check out this article from 2003 which discusses the growing popularity of mini trading in FX:
The road to mini-success. (Online Trading). | Software Services & Applications (301) from AllBusiness.com
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GFS Securities & Futures got on board a few months ago in March. "It was very much a client-driven decision," says Robert Gray, director of global forex operations for GFS. "The regulatory environment that the markets exist in now is really fueling forex in general."
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Ok for Robert Gray of all people to speak glowingly about the "regulatory environment" for forex is to redefine the meaning of "Chutzpah." Call it "Grayzpah." And how about this for Grayzpah. In this lawsuit filed by the State of Colorado in 2004 Robert Gray is listed as a "Compliance Officer" with GFS. What on earth does Robert Gray know about compliance?That's the equivalent of having Michael Jackson as your babysitter.
http://www.dora.state.co.us/securiti...int%20rpt.pdf.
Another interesting note from this lawsuit is the admission that GFS cleared all its trades through Interbank FX. Which brings us to Part II of Dirty Rotten Scoundrel, stay tuned...