Open E Cry gets CFTC fine for inadequate supervision

Open E Cry a registered futures commission merchant, was fined $250,000 for failing to diligently supervise the handling of its customer accounts, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said.

"The CFTC order finds that for a period of months prior to June 2010, OEC failed to detect and correct a flaw in software it offered its customers for trading futures contracts that miscalculated the customers' intraday profits and losses from trading the Russian ruble futures contract," the CFTC said.

"As a result of the flaw, the order finds that the software that OEC offered its customers calculated profits and losses resulting from trades in the ruble contract at only 10 percent of actual amounts," the Commission said, adding that OEC was unaware of the flaw.

Also, according to the order, over a period of several hours in June 2010, a Russian national, Marat Yunusov,exploited the ruble calculation error and OEC's supervision failures.

"Yunusov engaged in a fraudulent prearranged trading scheme using his OEC account in which he traded more than 20,000 ruble contracts through 372 individual trades, as well as an additional 70,000 E-micro British pound futures contracts with an account that he controlled at another FCM," the CFTC said.

Yunusov's ruble trading lost about $9 million in his OEC account, which roughly matched the ruble profits in the account he controlled at the other FCM. But due to the OEC flaw, its systems put the loss at only $900,000 rather than $9 million.