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SEC: Miami firm cheated black investors©Associated PressDecember 10, 2002 MIAMI -- An investment firm and its top executive have been sued by securities regulators for allegedly running a Ponzi scheme targeted at blacks, defrauding investors out of at least $31-million. A.B. Financing and Investments Inc. and Anthony Blissett, its president and chief executive, told investors they could generate guaranteed 30 percent, tax-free annual returns, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday. Since at least 1998, the company targeted inexperienced black investors, telling them they would make high returns because these were investments previously offered only to whites and select blacks, said Robert Levenson, an SEC attorney in Miami. A.B. Financing then invested the money in real estate and securities, which lost millions, and used the money from new investors to make interest payments to existing investors, the SEC said. Levenson said Blissett, an African-American, is accused of what regulators call "affinity fraud," or a scam in which a member of a religious, ethnic or professional group exploits trust and friendship to target members of that group. Investments made by the company's securities trading alone lost nearly $2.5-million through the end of 2001, the SEC said. A.B. Financing told investors it had $36-million in assets, but its 2001 tax filings show a negative net worth of more than $27-million, the SEC said. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro-Beneges froze A.B. Financing and Blissett's assets and ordered them to reimburse investors. Levenson said about 2,000 people in Florida and the Caribbean invested money in the scheme. Investors were asked to invest at least $10,000, he said. The SEC is also pursuing unspecified fines against the company, Levenson said. A phone message seeking comment from A.B. Financing was not immediately returned Monday. -- Information from Bloomberg News was used in this report.
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