The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed charges Thursday against Matthew Doyle, a natural gas futures broker, for allegedly causing fake natural gas futures orders to be traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex), resulting in million of dollars in losses to his employer, Natural Futures LLC (NFL).

In its complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the CFTC said that during the week of April 18, 2005 Doyle prepared or caused to be prepared order tickets for hundreds of natural gas futures contracts containing false customer account identification. None of NFL’s customers placed any of these orders. Nevertheless, the order tickets were executed by broker John Proctor, co-owner of NFL, on the Nymex floor.

Doyle allegedly attempted to assign losing trades to NFL’s customers, but when that scheme failed he assigned them to Proctor’s own account. If any of the trades were profitable, Doyle did not intend to assign them to customer accounts, the CFTC said. An agency spokesman said it was “beyond the scope of the complaint” to describe exactly what Doyle intended to do with the proceeds from any profitable trades.

“Since these losing trades were placed into Proctor’s account, Proctor suffered millions of dollars in losses as a result of this scheme,” the CFTC said.

The CFTC complaint seeks a trading and registration ban on Doyle, repayment of funds plus interest to his defrauded employer, the imposition of a civil monetary penalty of $130,000 or triple the monetary gain to the defendant for each violation of the Commodity Exchange Act, and other remedial relief.

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