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Who is Eddy Alexandre? The Justice Department claims he is a crook who swindled some 59 million dollars from the Haitian community, but nearly 10,000 people from the Haitian community signed a petition claiming he has never lied to them.
By: Jacqueline Desrosiers:
Truenewsblog: On May 12, 2022, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested the CEO of EminiFX, a New York Company whose CEO was a legend in the Haitian American community.
EDDY ALEXANDRE, 50, was charged with one count of commodities fraud and one count of wire fraud. His bail has been set at 3-million-dollar. He is in custody, awaiting to meet the conditions of his release to home incarceration. His next court appearance at the Federal Court in New York City is scheduled for May 24, 2022. In addition to the criminal indictment, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has filed a civil lawsuit against EDDY ALEXANDRE and EMINIFX, seeking to seize all assets relating to the alleged crime.
Who is EDDY ALEXANDRE, and why did the Haitian community put so much trust in this man? The U.S. government claimed that he lied to his investors, but people interviewed by this newspaper said that ALEXANDRE never lied to them. So who is telling the truth?
EDDY ALEXANDRE was born in Cap-Haitian, Haiti, in 1972. He is one of three children. He has one brother and a sister (LYDIE ALEXANDRE, who worked with him in his office in New York City). EDDY immigrated to the United States from Haiti in 1996. His father, MATTIEU ALEXANDRE, was a Seventh Day Adventist preacher who grew up in Grand Riviere Du Nord, in the Northern part of Haiti. His father taught him to work hard, and Eddy did. He was a good student.
In 1992 he received his degree in computer science from the Adventist University of Diquini in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 1996, at the age of 24, Alexandre immigrated to Florida to join his father, who was serving as the first pastor of the Bethel Adventist Church of West Palm Beach. Contrary to other reports, EDDY ALEXANDRE was not born in New York and did not attend Harvard University. EDDY ALEXANDRE is a Haitian immigrant who could be deported to Haiti if he is found guilty of defrauding investors.
Though ALEXANDRE boasted of being a successful man, he struggled financially for many years. In 2018, ALEXANDRE was drowning in debts with only a few thousand dollars to his name and hundreds of thousands in liabilities. He decided that the only way out was to file for Bankruptcy. He did file for Bankruptcy twice, but the case was dismissed each time. ALEXANDRE was desperate. He had to find a way to make more money.
In September 2021, less than a year ago, ALEXANDRE registered EminiFX in the State of New York. Prior to opening Eminifx, Alexandre had a small investment club of 89 people, mainly good friends and associates from the religious community and family members. According to some of these people, the investment club had done well, so well that Alexandre thought that if he could do it with 89 people, why not thousands of people. With his father as a Seventh Day Adventist church preacher, Alexandre knew his way around the church and understood the importance of access to hundreds of people. So Alexandre embarked on a crusade to make the Seventh Day Adventist community richer.
At first, he recruited several people, many of them very credible, well-known people in the religious community as well as the Haitian community at large. These recruiters included media personalities, pastors, community organizers, and physicians. These people had political connections that served themselves and Alexandre well. Many individuals helped bring many investors to the Ponzi scheme and raised millions of dollars for Eminifx. This group of people turned out to be very effective and very helpful to Alexandre. Within less than a year, the small investment group of 89 people grew to 62,000 investors who decided to invest their entire life savings with the hope of making it big.
At first, everything seemed to be going well. Then, Alexandre launched a website (Eminifx.com), rented an office in Manhattan, and got down to business. He held weekly meetings for his investors via Zoom and organized a lavish gala to welcome the investors. One of our investigators participated in one of his meetings. In the meeting, Alexandre promised investors that their money would be invested in Cryptocurrency and the Foreign Exchange. In addition, he promised them weekly profits of between 5 % and 9.97 %.
Every investor supposedly had an online crypto account through which they could observe their money growing daily. But could those accounts be fraudulent? Did these accounts exist? We spoke to several people in the Haitian community who assured us that they had been able to withdraw money from their crypto accounts and that the procedure took approximately three days.
From physicians to pastors to bus drivers, taxi drivers, musicians, and nurses, Haitian Americans went to their banks, withdrew thousands of dollars, and handed it over to Alexandre. Why did they do that? Was it trust? Lack of sophistication? Greed? Or something else? The case of Jean Mateo could shed light on why it was so easy for Alexandre to raise 59 million dollars in less than seven months.
Jean Mateo is a school bus driver in Brooklyn, New York, who earns less than 75,000 thousand dollars a year. His wife Martha works as a nurse aide in a nursing home in Brooklyn. Three months ago, his co-worker, Jean Francois Mathurin, told him about this great opportunity. Mathurin explained to Mateo that he had invested $10,000 with Eminifx, and for the past three months, he had been collecting 5 % each week. At first, Mateo did not believe it, but when Mathurin took him to his house and explained how the investment works, he agreed to invest and promised to discuss it with his wife.
In their small two-bedroom apartment in East Flatbush in Brooklyn, Mateo, and his wife laid in bed for several nights discussing how they could retire much early if this “investment thing works out.” Finally, Mateo and his wife decided to clean out their bank account at Bank America. They withdrew their entire life savings ($22,500) and turned it all over to Eddy Alexandre.
The Mateos reasoned that if Mathurin was making that much money, they were sure they could make as much. However, the Mateos did not know, and Mathurin did not explain that Alexandre was paying Mathurin to recruit investors just like the Mateos. After the Mateos invested $22,500 with Alexandre, Jean Mateo recruited his mother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey, his brother, who lives in Florida, and his cousin, who lives in Michigan. The family invested over $100,000 with Eddy Alexandre.
ALEXANDRE received the Mateos’ money in early March 2022, the same month that the FBI began its investigation of him and his company. According to our sources, the FBI started to investigate Alexandre a few days after Bank of America filed a complaint with the FBI about account irregularities. Apparently, Alexandre had transferred 14.7 million dollars to his account at Bank of America and was trying to withdraw the money or wire it to another bank. However, Bank of America refused to release the 14 million dollars because most of it came from investors who sent in their money by wire and Zelle directly to Alexandre’s personal bank account.
During the month of April and up to the day of Alexandre’s arrest, the Mateo family received their weekly profits of 5%. However, the family was encouraged to re-invest the money. They did as they were told, and when the news came down that the beloved CEO of EminiFx was arrested, few could believe it. The Mateos experienced stomach pain for three days, wondering what had happened to their life savings.
The Haitian community is very emotional, at times irrational, and perhaps lack of sophistication prevented many from asking the proper questions. Though most people did not know what cryptocurrency was and how foreign exchanges work, they were quite happy to invest, especially if they would receive the promised 5 to 9.97 % each week.
This explains why in the face of a federal indictment describing the crime committed, some people are still willing to come forward to defend ALEXANDRE and sign a petition informing the government and the public at large that he did pay them as promised. Forget about the fact that their money was never invested in anything, much less crypto or the foreign exchange.
According to the indictment, Alexandre invested only 9 million dollars in Futures and lost about $6.2 million of that investment. That was the only money invested, and he lost most of it. But people still refuse to believe that this was a Ponzi scheme.
A few days after the criminal indictment, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency, filed a 26-page complaint against Alexandre and Eminifx. In the complaint, the agency asked a federal judge to issue an order directing Alexandre, Eminifx, and any third-party transferee to disgorge all money received from the scam, including salaries and commissions paid to recruiters. On May 13, 2022, Judge Valerie Caproni entered an order appointing David Castleman as the Temporary Receiver, whose job is to locate and seize all assets for the benefit of the victims.
According to the FBI, more arrests are planned. The FBI is now looking at others who ALEXANDRE paid to recruit people to the Ponzi scheme. It is difficult to know at this time if others were part of the criminal activity. However, it is entirely possible that others may be charged with conspiracy to commit fraud, a criminal violation that carries a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison.
