The U.S. Department of Justice has begun a criminal investigation into the foreign exchange trading website Secureinvestment.com, which vanished last May 1 with as much as $1 billion from investors around the world, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The Financial and Capital Market Commission in Latvia is also probing the involvement of Latvian banks used by Secure Investment, says agency spokeswoman Elina Avotina. An investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York has interviewed Secure investors in the U.S. and Canada. Secure had claimed on its website that it traded more than $4.8 billion daily for at least 100,000 investors in 140 countries. The site said that its customers averaged net gains of 1 percent each trading day for five years. By using banks around the world and small related company names for accounts, Secure Investment obscured the paper trail of investor funds it took in. Some of those banks were in Latvia, in the Baltic region of northern Europe.
