Co-defendants include Tin Quoc Tran, of Texas; Francisco Story, of Utah; Fredirick Safranko, of Ontario, Canada; Michael Sims, of either Florida or Georgia; and SAEG Capital General Management LP, of Utah.
Brisco now lives in Hawaii, according to court documents. He attended Brookville High School before briefly attending Wittenberg University during the 2015-2016 school year, the university confirmed, where he played on the Wittenberg Tigers basketball team for one season, according to a bio on the team’s website.
Brisco’s attorney said he denies his role in the alleged schemes.
“Mr. Brisco and Yas do not accept and plan to vigorously defend against the allegations against them, but support the CFTC’s efforts to hold accountable those responsible for this matter,” Brandon Winchester, senior counsel for Schiffer Hicks Johnson PLLC, the firm representing Brisco, said in an email.
His attorneys responded to the allegations in court filings as well, writing Brisco and his companies deny operating, committing or knowingly participating in any fraudulent scheme.
In a preliminary finding in February, the federal court ruled in favor of the CFTC’s complaint, granting a statutory restraining order against the defendants, freezing their assets and giving the CFTC immediate access to their books and records.
In its complaint, the commission claims the defendants were involved in three interconnected commodity pool scams that fraudulently solicited and misappropriated millions of dollars from pool participants.
Brisco was involved in making “misrepresentations and omissions” about historical trading profits, how pool participant funds would be maintained and traded, and who would do the trading, the complaint claims.
To conceal the schemes, Brisco is accused in the filing of providing false account statements to pool participants, while taking direction from Sims to falsify wire transactions in the attempt to disguise deposits as payments for services.
To further conceal the schemes from regulators, the court filing claims Story and Safranko, in their roles as directors and officers of SAEG Capital General Management LP, “knowingly submitted falsified bank statements to the National Futures Association” during an examination of the management firm’s dealings.
The schemes’ commodity pools were also not operated in accordance with commission regulations, which require pools to operate as a legal entity that’s separate from a pool’s operator, to receive funds in the name of the pool, and prohibit the commingling of commodity pool property with property of another person, the filing claims.
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