Forest Hills Stockbroker Headed To Prison For $500K Scheme: AG

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — A former Wall Street stockbroker is heading to prison on charges that he stole nearly $500,000 from investors in his bogus foreign currency trading scheme, New York Attorney General Letitia James said Thursday.

Forest Hills resident Jason Ari Amada pleaded guilty in September to felony charges that he defrauded investors of hundreds of thousands of dollars over three years by touting himself as an experienced foreign currency trader, according to the state attorney general's office.

In reality, he hadn't been a licensed broker since 2012, and the investment management firms he claimed to run were just shell companies that weren't even registered to trade foreign currencies.

"If those who work on Main Street have to play by the rules, so must those on Wall Street," James said in a statement. "Instead of investing his clients' savings in profitable funds, Jason Amada played fast and loose, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of his investors' money."

The former stockbroker used his investors' money "like it was a part of his personal piggybank," defrauding eight investors of roughly $489,000, James added.

Prosecutors said Amada diverted investors' money to his own bank accounts or simply cashed their investment checks, spending about $100,000 on everything from travel and dining to buying cryptocurrency and online gambling.

Meanwhile, he used high-risk trading strategies that quickly depleted the rest of the money investors had entrusted to him, then concealed the losses by giving them fake account statements that showed swelling profits.

He was sentenced to three to six years in prison for the scheme, prosecutors said Thursday.