MIAMI — Filings by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department accuse a Fort Lauderdale man of getting $6.5 million of the $42 million defrauded from investors via a Ponzi scheme run through a North Lauderdale woman’s company.
The twin filings against Pavel Ruiz, 29, hit Miami federal court this week, the criminal charge being conspiracy to commit wire fraud. This comes a year after the SEC charged North Lauderdale’s Johanna Garcia, who first registered MJ Capital Funding and MJ Taxes & More with the state of Florida, according to public records.
The SEC’s filing against Ruiz said, “The MJ Companies and their owner, chief executive offer, and president, Johanna M. Garcia, operated the MJ Companies as a Ponzi scheme, which, from at least June 2020 until August 2021, raised more than $196 million from more than 15,400 investors nationwide through an unregistered fraudulent securities offering.”
As for Ruiz, the filing said, he “played a significant role in perpetrating the Ponzi scheme. At all relevant times, he was involved in high-level decision-making for MJ Capital, served as an MJ Capital “board member” responsible for “Treasury/Accounting,” and had access to MJ Capital’s bank accounts.”
The scheme, as described in the various filings, says MJ Capital sold itself to investors as a business making merchant cash advances (MCA) to businesses that needed cash quickly.
The SEC filing against Garcia describes an MJ Capital May 12,…
