2017
Jeffrey Ray Filla of Richmond on July 6 was sentenced to 10 years deferred adjudication and ordered to pay $807,054 in restitution to investors in his commodities trading program.
Filla pleaded guilty to misapplication of fiduciary property in Fort Bend County District Court. He was indicted in March in Fort Bend County on securities fraud and other charges stemming from his sale of investments in Prophecy Fund LP, a commodities trading program whose collapse he tried to conceal with false financial statements and misrepresentations to investors.
According to the indictment, Filla failed to disclose that he moved a significant portion of the funds investors placed in Prophecy accounts into an unrelated business. He transferred some of the money in Prophecy accounts to Auto Direct LLC, an automobile sales lot in Rosenberg. Filla was the sole managing member of Auto Direct.
Filla solicited members of a church he attended in Sugar Land to invest in Prophecy.
Filla provided investors with falsified financial statements that were supposedly from an auditing firm; made distributions to one investor with funds from another investor, Ponzi style; and failed to forward investor funds to trading firms Filla said he used in operating Prophecy.