James R. Velissaris was found to have engaged in a fraudulent scheme violating the Commodity Exchange Act, according to a U.S. District Court order issued April 2, 2026, in the Southern District of New York. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought the enforcement action, which culminated in a summary judgment against Velissaris.
The court imposed a $2.2 million civil monetary penalty on Velissaris and permanently barred him from trading in CFTC-regulated markets, entering into transactions involving commodity interests, and registering with the Commission. The judgment acknowledges the severity of Velissaris’s misconduct, spanning several years and causing significant financial harm to investors.
This civil order follows a related criminal case where Velissaris received a 15-year prison sentence, was ordered to pay $125,969,962 in criminal restitution, and forfeited $22 million. The CFTC initially filed its enforcement action on February 17, 2022, alleging that Velissaris orchestrated a fraud while managing assets for Infinity Q Capital Management LLC, a CFTC-registered commodity pool operator.
Between 2018 and 2021, Velissaris fraudulently inflated the value of swaps held by two commodity pools managed by Infinity Q. He falsely claimed the funds utilized an independent third-party system for valuation, asserting no substantive input from Infinity Q. In reality, Velissaris manually altered the system to artificially increase the reported value of the funds’ over-the-counter derivative positions. These manipulations boosted the funds’ net asset values, creating a misleading impression of success.
Infinity Q leveraged these inflated valuations to charge excessive fees, attract further investment from existing participants, and solicit new investors. The scheme ultimately resulted in customers overpaying more than $125 million in fees, with approximately $22 million diverted for Velissaris’s personal gain.
Source: CFTC.gov
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