Guilty Plea For Great Falls Man Who Promised Big Returns For Investors

ALEXANDRIA, VA — A Great Falls man, who promised that anyone who traded stock using his software and automated trading bots could earn thousands of dollars daily, pleaded guilty on July 23 to wire fraud, according to court records. A Florida man was also sentenced Thursday for his part in the wire fraud conspiracy.

Rick Tariq Rahim, 56, admitted to defrauding investors who wished to copy his alleged trading activities, which he posted on the Discord communication app. Customers paid Rahim a subscription fee in order to access his software and trading bots, which he marketed as BotsforWealth, TradeAutomation.com, ProChartSignals.com, OptionCopier.com, CopyAndWin.com, SnipeAlgo.com, and QQQtrade.com, according to court documents.

Rahim also offered a lifetime subscription that gave customers access to his private Discord channel, as well as some of his other products and access to "in-office" trading days. He also admitted to personally trading stocks for at least two investors, promising that "We'll hit home runs and make $500k+ per day very very often," according to court records. However, Rahim actually lost more than $300,000 of his clients’ money in an eight-months period.

Using video-centric social media tools, such as TikTok, YouTube and Discord, Rahim falsely claimed that he “beat the stock market every day” and that subscribers could expect extreme profit margins, court records say.

In order to induce customers to subscribe to his services, Rahim boasted that he'd amassed millions of dollars through trading stocks and that he regularly beat the market, according to court documents. In support of these claims, he bragged online about his large home, pool, and luxury cars, including his Lamborghini.

Not only did Rahim not share information about how much money he'd actually lost through trading, he posted $500,000 in losses from February 2021 through December 2022, according to evidence in the case. In fact, he did not invest millions in the market as he claimed. Instead, Rahim created at least 20 fake Discord user profiles expressing excitement about his posts. Over the course of the scheme, Rahim earned at least $1,397,000 from subscriptions.

After the judge accepted the guilty plea, Rahim was ordered to stop giving financial investment advice to anyone for a fee.

Rahim also pleaded guilty on March 15 to not paying the IRS the taxes he withheld from hds employees' paychecks, court records say. He also failed to file any personal income tax returns since 2012, even though he earned at least $34 million in gross income. This resulted in the IRS not being paid at least $1,844,489.

Rahim is due back in court on Dec. 20 for sentencing for both the wire fraud conspiracy and tax fraud convictions. He'll face a potential maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison for the wire fraud scheme and another five years for tax fraud.

On Thursday, 33-year-old Ian Taylor Higgins of Florida pleaded guilty for his role in the wire fraud conspiracy. Owner of the FXPrimary trading platform, Higgins acted as a brokerage house, managing deposits of investors' cryptocurrency for TradeAutomation, one of Rahim's bots. He admitted in court that despite what Rahim had promised investors had little chance of turning a profit. He also admitted that the investments were at a much greater risk than Rahim had advertised.

For his part in the scheme, Higgins earned more than $4 million, which he used to buy a home in Florida for more than $2 million, two Teslas for $70,000, and Rolexes for $44,500, as well as other luxury items, according to court records. In addition to a prison sentence of three years, Higgins will be ordered to pay restitution.