On the same day Robert Adams stood before more than 100 retirement-planning Americans in a live webinar and promised he would not collect a single fee until their losses were recovered, a wire transfer for $12,137.50 landed in his bank account — cut directly from those same customers’ funds.
A “Crown Jewel” That Lost Everything
How SimTradePro Built Its Trap
Robert L. Adams incorporated SimTradePro in Oregon on May 1, 2015, and used it to run at least six investment pools for leveraged foreign currency and metals trading. He recruited customers through a full media arsenal: a dedicated website, live and recorded YouTube webinars, in-person events across the United States, spreadsheets posted publicly, emails, and phone calls. The pitch was simple, seductive, and completely false: combine your ordinary funds into a large pool, let the experts trade, and watch 65 percent annual returns roll in.
The customers Adams targeted were overwhelmingly ordinary Americans with little to no experience in leveraged forex or metals trading. Many were explicitly planning for retirement. Adams even recommended a specific self-directed IRA custodian so customers could funnel their retirement savings directly into his pools. The six pools — Victory Investment 2, Winning Investments, Tier Three, Safe Investments, Platform Jan 2018, and Platform 218 — each contained between four and more than forty participants, and together held over $2.3 million (enough to pay the average American worker’s salary for over 46 combined years) in customer funds at their peak.
None of the strategies Adams sold ever produced a profit. When Steady Capture failed, he sold Test Test. When Test Test failed, he renamed it Flash Forward and pushed it harder. When Flash Forward collapsed, he invented Argo. At every pivot, he assured customers this new strategy was the one that would recover everything. In January 2019, he closed all trading accounts and returned approximately 13 percent of what customers had deposited.
Three Failures, Zero Accountability — Until Now
The CFTC filed its complaint on September 30, 2024, and the court entered its final judgment on November 25, 2025. The order is permanent: Adams and SimTradePro are banned for life from trading commodity interests, soliciting customer funds, applying for any CFTC registration, or acting in any capacity at a registered firm. Adams also separately pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud on March 20, 2025, agreeing to pay criminal restitution of no less than $2,341,412.25 (enough to buy a median-priced home in the United States and still have over $400,000 left over).
The civil restitution order stands at $2,072,986 (enough to cover rent for over 560 families for a full year, based on the U.S. median monthly rent). Any dollar paid through the criminal proceeding counts as a credit against this civil obligation — but customers are explicitly permitted by the order to seek proof of a higher amount owed than what the court identified.
The Money That Disappeared: SimTradePro Strategy Timeline
The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Can’t Measure
They Came With Retirement Dreams. They Left With 13 Cents on the Dollar.
The court record is precise about the numbers. It says almost nothing about what it felt like to be one of the more than 100 people who handed their savings to Robert Adams. But the facts in the document tell that story anyway. These were not sophisticated investors looking to gamble. The court explicitly found that “few, if any, customers had experience investing in leveraged forex or leveraged metals.” Adams knew this. He built his entire pitch around it.
Many of his customers were specifically planning for retirement. Adams recommended a self-directed IRA custodian so these people could route tax-advantaged retirement savings — money they likely spent decades building — directly into his pools. When those pools failed, customers did not just lose money. They lost time. They lost compound interest. They lost the economic cushion between a dignified retirement and financial precarity in their 60s and 70s. No restitution order gives that time back.
The betrayal was not a single moment. Adams ran the scheme across more than a year, and throughout that entire period, he maintained the performance of a trustworthy partner. He held “required attendance” meetings. He sent follow-up emails with all-caps reassurances. He ran webinars where he looked customers in the eye — digitally — and told them his financial interest was perfectly aligned with theirs. He made his customers feel seen and informed. Every act of care and transparency was a tool of the fraud.
The Gaslighting Didn’t Stop When the Money Was Gone
When the pools finally collapsed, Adams sent an April 29, 2019 email announcing SimTradePro’s closure. In it, he told customers he had “covered all the overhead expenses for the pools” — a statement that omitted the fact that he had collected $185,000 (enough to cover a year of college tuition for roughly 10 students at a public university) in secret fees drawn directly from customer accounts while the pools were losing money. He never disclosed those fees. He let customers believe he had been sacrificing alongside them until the very last communication.
The psychological dimension of this fraud matters. Adams used the language of partnership, shared sacrifice, and mutual accountability to keep customers invested through three consecutive strategy failures. Each time a strategy collapsed, he asked customers to vote on the next one — manufacturing the feeling of democratic participation and informed consent. But the simulated trading results he showed during those votes came with none of the legally required disclosures about the limitations of hypothetical data. Customers voted yes on fantasies dressed up as spreadsheets.
There is one customer the document names only as “WI Participant A.” This person emailed Adams directly on March 4, 2018, and asked a pointed, reasonable question: “Would there be fees if we aren’t making money?” Adams replied the same day: “There are NEVER any fees if it doesn’t make money.” Four days later, the Irish broker began charging fees on every single trade — profitable or not. WI Participant A trusted Adams enough to ask. Adams looked that trust directly in the face and lied.
WI Participant A also wrote to Adams in July 2018 asking why customers were not given the option to simply wait for gold prices to recover. Adams told them it was the broker’s decision, that the broker had mandatory sell mandates, and that it simply was not up to him. The court found this was false. Adams and his associate had personally decided to dump the gold positions before the July 12 webinars — so the losses would look final and customers would be more likely to vote for the next strategy. He manufactured a sense of helplessness in his customers to cover his own decisions. That is a specific, premeditated act of cruelty dressed up as customer service.
Straight From the Document: The Words That Convicted Him
“Become a member of SimTradePro Pay a ONE TIME ONLY fee of $3,000, and ‘to support the work of the broker, trader, and SimTradePro, there is a [high water] fee charged ON THE NET GAINS ONLY of each quarter’ while adding, ‘Are there any other fees? NOPE. None.'” — Robert Adams, January 11, 2018 kick-off webinar for pools SI and TT. The court found this statement was false. A secret introducing broker fee arrangement was already being structured. (Consent Order, ¶47)
“There are NEVER any fees if it [Test Test] doesn’t make money, (the exception being the bank fees which we have no control over). This is why I like the High Water Fees system. I don’t make any either so it’s just as important to me as it is to our members.” — Robert Adams, email to WI Participant A, March 4, 2018. Four days later, the Irish broker began withdrawing fees on every trade — profitable or not. (Consent Order, ¶51)
“Until there’s new profits there is no fee at all, there is no fee at all. So there will be no fees withdrawn, no charges taken out, nothing until the funds are at least to new account highs.” [Associate A]; Adams added: “if I’m not doing the job than I don’t deserve to get paid. So it’s the same thing here . . . So if those things [high water fees] aren’t successful right now I’m paying for everything out of my own pocket.” — April 26, 2018 webinar. That same day, the Irish broker wired $24,275.60 to Associate A, who then wired $12,137.50 to Adams’ bank account — the first of eight such payments. (Consent Order, ¶¶53–54)
“OK. We have been suffering long enough on this stupid gold account. If we get close to 1266, let’s dump it and move on. We need a finish by Thursday [July 12, 2018] so THEY [customers] can move on.” [Adams to Associate A]; Associate A responded: “Yes sir, that is the goal . . . Yes, we need to get out [of gold].” Adams followed: “We have until Thursday evening [when the webinars to pitch Argo occurred], so WHEN we get near that 1266+, let er rip.” — Internal email exchange, July 10, 2018, two days before Adams told customers in a webinar that the broker — not him — had forced the gold trades to close. (Consent Order, ¶74)
“YES, I DO BELIEVE WE CAN RECOVER THE FUNDS. I have a stake in this, too. The 5% high water fees needed to support the groups for the upcoming year is coming out of my personal pocket.” — Adams, email to all customers, July 18, 2018. This was sent the day after he received a $9,884 wire transfer from Associate A as his third cut of secret IB fees. (Consent Order, ¶¶58–59)
The Secret Fee Pipeline: $185,000 Stolen in Plain Sight
While Adams told customers there were “NOPE. None.” additional fees, he and Associate A were quietly splitting at least $185,000 (enough to fully fund the education of six students through a four-year public university degree) in introducing broker fees extracted from customer trades. These fees came out of customer funds on every round-trip trade — across more than 35,000 total transactions — whether the pools were profitable or not. The money flowed from customer accounts to the Irish broker, to Associate A’s U.S. bank account, and then by the next day, half was wired to Adams.
IB Fee Payments to Adams: 8 Wires While Customers Lost Everything
The $185,000 (roughly the cost of buying a brand-new Ford F-150 truck for four different families) in IB fees was not a rounding error in a large fund. It represented a significant income stream for Adams precisely because his trading was so consistently unprofitable that he never once qualified for the “high water” fees he told customers were his only compensation. The secret fees were not a side hustle. They were how he paid his bills while destroying theirs.
Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When the System Fails
Economic Inequality: Retirement Security as a Target
Adams did not randomly select his victims. The court record makes explicit that many of his customers were planning for retirement and that he recommended a specific self-directed IRA custodian to help them direct those funds into his pools. Self-directed IRAs exist as a mechanism for working-class Americans to access investment categories beyond standard stocks and bonds. Adams used this legal structure as a funnel. He was not exploiting wealthy speculators. He targeted people trying to build financial security outside of a system that was already failing them.
When leveraged forex and metals pools collapse, ordinary Americans face a specific kind of economic damage that compounds across time. A retiree who loses $20,000 at age 58 does not simply lose $20,000. They lose the years of compounding interest that money would have generated. They lose the psychological buffer that savings provide against unexpected medical costs. They lose the freedom to leave a job or care for a family member. The $2.3 million (enough to fund the full retirement accounts of dozens of middle-income workers) that flowed through SimTradePro’s pools represented not just present wealth but future security, and that future cannot be bought back with a restitution check.
The fraud also targeted geographic and informational inequality. Adams recruited nationally through YouTube, webinars, and in-person events “around the United States.” Many of his customers had “little to no experience” in leveraged instruments — and Adams knew it. He used the complexity and opacity of forex and metals markets as a cover for the scheme, counting on the fact that his customers lacked the technical knowledge to identify red flags in simulated trading results or evaluate the legitimacy of an Irish offshore broker. Financial illiteracy is not a personal failure; it is a structural condition that predatory operators systematically exploit.
Public Health: The Stress Economy of Financial Fraud
The source document does not contain clinical health outcome data, and this article will not manufacture it. What the record does establish is the sustained duration of psychological manipulation Adams inflicted on his customers. From February 2018 through January 2019 — a period of nearly twelve months — customers experienced a choreographed sequence of hope, loss, reassurance, and deeper loss. They attended “required attendance” meetings. They voted on trading strategies based on manipulated information. They received emails telling them their investments were being personally funded by Adams while he pocketed secret fees.
Financial trauma research consistently documents that prolonged financial uncertainty and betrayal by a trusted financial advisor produces measurable psychological harm: anxiety, depression, disrupted sleep, strained relationships, and in elderly populations, accelerated cognitive decline. The customers in these pools were not passive bystanders to market risk. They were actively deceived, kept engaged through false reassurances, and denied the information they needed to exit. The harm was not accidental volatility. Adams manufactured the conditions for prolonged psychological distress as an operational feature of keeping customers invested.
The “Cost of a Life” Metric
The amount Adams secretly extracted in introducing broker fees from customer accounts — while telling customers in writing that he was “paying for everything out of my own pocket.”
Equivalent to: the full annual salary of approximately 3 median-wage American workers. Withdrawn trade-by-trade, invisibly, across more than 35,000 transactions — while every strategy was losing money.
The percentage of customer funds that were permanently lost. Customers received back approximately 13 cents of every dollar deposited.
On a $2.3 million base: approximately $2,001,000 (enough to fund 54 years of the average American’s housing costs) was gone forever when Adams closed the pools in January 2019.
The CFTC’s press release on this corporate misconduct can be found here: https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9148-25
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