A former college basketball player who attended Allatoona High in Cobb County has been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud, officials said Friday.
Kevin Perry, who now lives in Cartersville, was sentenced to three years and five months behind bars followed by three years of supervised release, according to acting U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine. Perry was also ordered to pay nearly $439,000 in restitution.
Perry, 23, pleaded guilty to scamming investors through his company, Lucrative Pips, when he was a teenager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported. He founded the company in 2016, which is when he joined the College of Coastal Georgia basketball team as a freshman.
The Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC) said in a civil complaint that Perry defrauded 30 investors out of at least $400,000. In addition, Lucrative Pips had never been properly registered with the CFTC. Perry eventually pleaded guilty to fraud in the amount of $430,000.
According to Erskine, Perry claimed to be earning “substantial profits” by investing in the foreign currency market. The foreign exchange, or forex, is the world’s largest financial market, with a staggering daily trading average of about $6.6 trillion, according to the Bank of International Settlements.
The eye-popping figures and speed of the market are attractive to potential scammers, who often promise huge returns on investments with no downside, according to the CFTC. In an online fraud advisory, the CFTC said it “has witnessed a sharp rise in forex trading scams in recent years.”
Perry never generated the historical returns he represented to investors, according to Erskine’s statement. Instead, he was using investor money to enrich himself or to pay off other investors, with the goal of enticing others to invest with him, Erskine said.
After the civil complaint was filed, Perry continued to pitch new customers, including an undercover FBI agent posing as a potential investor. He promised the agent that a $10,000 investment would return a $19,000 to $25,000 profit.
“Perry carelessly continued his fraudulent investments even after a civil complaint was filed against him, thinking he was untouchable,” Chris Hacker, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta, said.
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