SEC Sues Helios Venture Fund for $9M Ponzi Scheme

The Setup: A 28-Year-Old Gambler Playing Investor

Imer Gomez is, by his own description, a professional gambler. He has no documented experience managing other people’s money, no registration with any state securities regulator, and no credentialed background in finance. Starting in August 2021, none of that stopped him from presenting himself to the Hispanic community of San Antonio as a seasoned securities trader capable of generating monthly double-digit returns for clients.

Gomez operated first under the name K&G Investment Solutions, LLC, a company that held no bank accounts of its own and appears never to have been registered as an LLC with any state. When clients signed investment agreements, Gomez directed their deposits into bank accounts held personally in his own name. He was the only person with control over the money from the moment it arrived.

By sometime in 2022, Gomez rebranded under a new name: Helios Venture Fund, LLC. The word “Fund” implied an investment pool. The word “Venture” implied strategy and growth. Neither implication was true. The SEC’s complaint states plainly that Helios was never an investment fund; it was a vehicle Gomez controlled as its sole member to continue soliciting clients and collecting deposits.

Three Packages, Three Lies

Gomez offered clients a tiered menu of investment management packages. The pitch was professional and structured enough to appear credible. Clients could choose between an “Aggressive Day Trading” plan, a “Weekly/Monthly Swing” plan, and a “Long Term Growth” plan, each carrying its own fee and its own promised return level. The fees were real. The trading never happened.

Clients paid up to $350 per week for the aggressive package. They wired money, sent checks, used bank transfers, PayPal, Zelle, and credit cards. Every dollar landed in a Gomez-controlled account. The SEC confirms that no client funds were ever transferred to any trading platform at any point during the entire two-year scheme.

That pitch, “generational wealth for the Hispanic community,” is the cruelest line in this entire document. Gomez specifically targeted a community that has historically been excluded from wealth-building systems, used the language of solidarity and uplift, and then stole savings that were meant to be passed down to children and grandchildren. The SEC notes Gomez “primarily offered these investment advisory services to Hispanic clients.”

Where the $9 Million Actually Went

The Advisory Agreements told clients their deposits would be routed into individually managed accounts and then deployed into exchange-traded funds and individual stocks. Gomez controlled every account the money touched. The SEC’s complaint confirms that no client funds were ever transferred from the accounts Gomez controlled to any trading platform. Every dollar stayed under Gomez’s control and was spent on everything except trading.

The SEC describes the uses as follows: Ponzi payments to earlier clients, personal expenses for Gomez’s own lifestyle, payments to non-client third parties including other business ventures Gomez operated, salaries to employees, and commissions or bonuses paid to clients who referred new victims. Cash withdrawals also drained the accounts. The operation was structured to keep new money flowing in long enough to pay off earlier investors and maintain the illusion of legitimacy.

The Claxton Transfer: Family Money From Stolen Funds

Eric Claxton is the father of Gomez’s former girlfriend. Starting in March 2022, Claxton deposited $100,000 with Helios, then received that money back by June 2022. What followed was something different: Gomez began routing additional client money to the Claxtons directly. From June 2022 to March 2023, Eric Claxton received approximately $196,000 (enough to fully fund four years of in-state college tuition for a student) sourced from commingled client deposits.

From June 2023 to August 2023, Eric and Heather Claxton jointly received another approximately $370,000 (more than most Americans earn in a decade of full-time work) from client funds. The Claxtons used those funds to purchase real estate. The SEC’s complaint states neither Eric nor Heather Claxton has repaid any of the amounts supposedly loaned, and neither provided any services or value in exchange for receiving the money.

The total sent to the Claxtons reached approximately $666,000 (more than enough to buy a median-priced home outright in most American cities). Some of these transfers were characterized as “loans” on paper. The SEC seeks full disgorgement from both Eric and Heather Claxton on the grounds that they were unjustly enriched by stolen funds.

The Cover-Up: Fake Statements, Fake Insurance, Fake Bailout

Fabricated Account Statements Designed to Silence Questions

Per the Advisory Agreements Gomez had clients sign, K&G and Helios committed to providing weekly performance statements showing each account’s real activity. What clients actually received were one-line emails listing account balances that constantly went up. There were no transaction details, no stock names, no trade confirmations. Just a number, always growing. The SEC confirms these statements were entirely false, and that the account values Gomez reported were invented and artificially increased over time.

Those fake statements did exactly what Gomez needed them to do. They persuaded existing clients to stay in. They persuaded some clients to add more money to their accounts. They prevented anyone from pulling out and discovering the accounts did not exist. This is a core technique of every Ponzi operation: the fake statement is the scheme’s immune system, protecting it from discovery by replacing reality with a comforting number.

The Insurance Lie Was Written Into the Contract

Gomez did not just verbally claim client funds were insured. He embedded the insurance claim directly into the written Advisory Agreements that clients signed. The documents stated accounts were “insured for up to 75% of Client’s Portfolio” in the event of a catastrophic market loss. This was a written, contractual representation. It was entirely fabricated. No insurance policy ever existed.

In June 2023, one client grew suspicious and demanded proof of the insurance coverage. Gomez told that client he was “not legally permitted” to provide such documentation. That response, delivered to a client exercising basic due diligence, kept the scheme running for three more months and kept additional client money flowing in.

The “Sudden Liquidation” Letter: Blame the Market for Your Own Theft

On September 19, 2023, Gomez sent clients a letter on Helios letterhead, signed in his role as president, claiming the company had been “impacted by a sudden and unrecoverable liquidation.” He cited a “strict Non-Disclosure Agreement” as the reason he could not explain what happened. The SEC’s review of Defendants’ bank records tells a simpler story: Gomez had simply run out of new client money to use for Ponzi payments. There was no liquidation event. There was no market catastrophe. The account was empty because Gomez spent it.

That same letter promised clients that Helios had “secured a guaranteed bailout loan” from an unnamed lender, that the lender’s commitment was “steadfast,” that disbursements would “commence immediately,” and that every client would receive their initial capital back by February 1, 2024. The SEC found that while Gomez did meet with a potential lender, he never secured any loan. He also never provided the lender with the documentation required to conduct basic financial due diligence. February 1, 2024 came and went. No client received their money back.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Numbers Cannot Capture

The SEC complaint measures this fraud in dollars. Nine million. Six hundred sixty-six thousand. These figures are real and they matter. But the actual damage Gomez caused to the people he targeted sits in a category the court documents do not have a line item for: the specific, targeted betrayal of a community that was told its savings were finally going to work for it.

Gomez explicitly framed his pitch around generational wealth for Hispanic families. That language is not accidental. Generational wealth is the phrase that describes something the Hispanic community in America has been systematically denied through redlining, discriminatory lending, wage suppression, and exclusion from investment markets. Gomez used that specific aspiration, the desire to finally build something that outlasts a single lifetime, as the hook that convinced people to hand over their savings. He weaponized the memory of every institution that had already said no to these families, and offered himself as the alternative. He was the con.

The clients who sent their money via Zelle and PayPal and personal checks were not naive. They were doing exactly what financial literacy advocates tell working people to do: invest, build a portfolio, plan for the future. Gomez handed them signed contracts with professional language about discretionary management and exchange-traded funds. He sent them weekly account statements showing steady growth. Every piece of the apparatus was designed to look like the real financial system, because the real financial system is the one thing working-class families have been told to trust even when it repeatedly fails them.

When the scheme collapsed in September 2023, Gomez sent a letter that blamed an unnamed market force. He called it a “liquidation.” He invoked a non-disclosure agreement. He promised a bailout loan. Every word of that letter extended the psychological torment of his victims by weeks and months, keeping them in a state of suspended hope instead of allowing them to begin grieving and organizing toward recovery. The February 2024 repayment deadline Gomez invented passed in silence. The complaint, filed in July 2025, confirms clients never received their money back. That is nearly two years of waiting after the collapse, and the money is still gone.

The $666,000 (more than enough to buy a home outright in most American cities) that flowed to Eric and Heather Claxton adds a particular dimension of betrayal. Those funds were used to purchase real estate, a physical asset that continues to appreciate in value while the people whose savings funded the purchase have nothing. The Claxtons have repaid none of it. The contrast between what those funds built for one family and what their absence destroyed for the dozens of clients who contributed them is a precise illustration of how wealth transfer works in a system built on extraction.

Legal Receipts: The Document Speaks for Itself

These are direct quotes and factual statements from the SEC’s complaint. Nothing is paraphrased. Nothing is invented. Read these in sequence and watch a fraud build and then collapse in real time.

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Gets Hurt Beyond the Victims

Economic Inequality: A Community’s Savings Used to Buy Someone Else’s Property

The clients Gomez targeted were, by the design of his pitch, working people in San Antonio’s Hispanic community who were trying to participate in wealth-building for the first time or to grow modest savings into something meaningful. The promise of double-digit monthly returns is not something that appeals to people who already have wealth managed by professionals. It appeals to people who have been shut out of traditional financial systems and are hungry for any pathway in. Gomez read that hunger correctly and exploited it with precision.

The economic harm here compounds over time in ways the $9 million figure does not fully capture. Money invested and grown over years builds not just a balance, but security, options, and the ability to absorb future shocks. The families who lost savings in this scheme lost all of that. They also lost time. Two years of waiting for a bailout that never came is two years of not making other financial decisions, not paying down debt, not building emergency funds. The psychological and material damage of that waiting period is real and uncompensated.

The Claxton real estate purchases represent the most direct manifestation of economic inequality embedded in this scheme. Client savings, contributed by people trying to build equity and generational stability for themselves, were converted into physical real estate owned by people connected to the fraudster. Wealth transferred upward, one family’s savings became another family’s property portfolio, which is a precise description of how inequality functions at scale in America even when it is not a criminal scheme.

Public Health: The Documented Harm of Financial Trauma

The source material does not document physical illness among victims, but the public health implications of large-scale financial fraud on working-class communities are documented extensively in the broader research literature. Financial stress is a direct driver of anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and physical health deterioration. For older clients who deposited retirement-adjacent savings, the loss of that money is a permanent, irreversible health threat: without adequate retirement savings, people work longer in physically demanding jobs, forgo medical care due to cost, and face heightened mortality risk in old age.

The extended timeline of this fraud, from August 2021 to the SEC filing in July 2025, means victims spent as many as four years in varying states of false hope, growing suspicion, and eventual confirmed loss. The September 2023 “bailout” letter that promised repayment by February 2024 created a specific psychological trap: clients who might have moved to organize legal action or pursue alternative recovery were instead kept passive by the promise of imminent restitution. That extended state of powerlessness is a documented harm in its own right, separate from the dollar loss.

The Targeting of a Marginalized Community as a Structural Issue

Affinity fraud, the practice of targeting members of a shared community using language of solidarity and shared identity, is one of the most damaging forms of financial crime precisely because it corrodes the social trust that communities depend on for collective survival. When Gomez told clients he wanted to “help the Hispanic community build generational wealth,” he was borrowing the moral authority of genuine community advocates and spending it on personal gain.

The downstream effect of affinity fraud on communities extends beyond the individual victims. Word-of-mouth referrals were a documented part of Gomez’s client acquisition strategy; the SEC notes the scheme spread “directly and indirectly via word of mouth from existing clients.” This means trusted social relationships within the community, friendships, family connections, neighborhood networks, were the actual delivery mechanism for the fraud. When the scheme collapsed, those relationships carried the weight of the loss. The person who referred a friend or family member to Helios now has to live with that referral. That kind of damage to social fabric does not appear in any SEC disgorgement calculation.