Ex-NYPD cop who boasted of financial genius gets 3 years for defrauding investors

A disgraced former NYPD cop was hit with a three-year prison sentence Wednesday for his role in a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

Jason Rodriguez, 38, left the NYPD because of a drunken driving conviction, but he leveraged his professional shame into a story to tell investors — lying to them that he quit the force because he was making so much money in the global currency market.

That lie served as the cornerstone of his pitch to investors in his foreign exchange, or “forex,” business.

He founded a firm named Technical Trading Team, or TTT, using money from new investors to pay interest to his early marks in the scheme, prosecutors said. In a PowerPoint presentation, he boasted how his “zealous ambition for trading took precedence, resulting in the end of his law enforcement career,” according to court filings.

Rodriguez and a co-conspirator, Edwin Carrion, swayed more than 20 people to invest more than $4 million, making big promises, like annual returns of 18% to 24%, and swearing he wouldn’t risk more than 1% of his fund’s assets on any single trade, wouldn’t hold positions open overnight and would maintain a “loss reserve account” to protect investments, prosecutors said.

All of those promises and assurances turned out to be bogus.

On Wednesday, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Ramon Reyes sentenced Rodriguez to three years, following his November 2024 guilty plea to wire fraud conspiracy. Rodriguez must also pay $750,000 in forfeiture and another $2.3 million in restitution.

“Today, the defendant received just punishment for defrauding over 20 individual investors out of millions of dollars of hard-earned money. The defendant violated the trust his clients placed in him by falsely promising them a safe investment opportunity,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said Wednesday.

Prosecutors were asking for six-and-a-half to eight years.

“Worse yet, a majority of the individuals who Rodriguez recruited were close friends of his — including his girlfriend of many years. Simply put, Rodriguez abused the trust of those closest to him,” prosecutors wrote in a July 31 letter to the judge.

Rodriguez’s lawyer, Benjamin Yaster of the Federal Defenders, maintained that he didn’t start the business as a scam and didn’t intend it to fail, but should have admitted defeat rather than resorted to fraud.

“He should never have crossed that moral and legal line to save his floundering company,” Yaster wrote in his sentencing recommendation. “Jason realizes this now. And he knows that his conviction in this case was the result of pride and hubris.”

Carrion pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and has not been sentenced yet.