The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged six D.C.-area residents with defrauding 130 investors in a $27 million Ponzi scheme.
The complaint says Garfield Taylor, of Bethesda, and five others lured inexperienced investors into the scheme by promising them low-risk investments and promising returns of up to 20 percent.
But instead Taylor and his relatives and business partners instead “engaged in very high-risk, speculative options trading and suffered massive losses,” the SEC said in a statement.
The alleged scheme lasted from 2005 to 2010, when it collapsed.
