The Only ROFX Defendant Who Appeared Paid $467,000

Timothy F. Stubbs, a Georgia certified public accountant, agreed to pay $467,000 to settle CFTC charges in the ROFX forex fraud. Nine co-defendants who never answered the Miami case were ordered to pay more than $225 million in restitution and fines they have not paid.

Stubbs was the only defendant who filed an answer, and the only one with a U.S. license, a Bank of America account, and assets a federal judge could freeze.

The CPA Who Answered the Complaint Paid $467,000

On May 8, 2024, Judge Darrin P. Gayles of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida signed a second consent order against Stubbs, an Atlanta CPA. That order, announced by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on May 14, 2024, requires him to pay $153,000 in restitution and a $314,000 civil monetary penalty.

Those two sums are the $467,000. A first consent order on December 19, 2023, had already barred him for life from CFTC registration and from trading on CFTC-regulated markets, and had found that he took part in the scheme through Grovee LLC, a Delaware company he controlled as sole member.

He had been the last person left in the civil file. On October 3, 2022, the clerk entered defaults against the other nine defendants for failing to appear. Stubbs answered on October 11, 2022, then fought a freeze. Gayles granted the CFTC’s September 22, 2023 injunction order, which became the 2023 freeze on Stubbs’s assets.

Stubbs told the court he had been duped by Nataliya Los into opening Grovee’s Bank of America account ending in 9293 and did not know ROFX customer money was moving through it. Gayles called that account of events almost entirely a self-serving affidavit plus text messages that did not clearly clear him. The judge found that Stubbs’s name and addresses showed up on several of the companies well before that account existed, and that as a CPA he had either known what Grovee was doing or refused to look.

As Stubbs is a CPA, it is reasonable to conclude that he either knew about the Fraudulent Enterprise or stuck his head in the sand to manufacture plausible deniability.

Judge Darrin P. Gayles, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, September 22, 2023

Ian McGinley, then the CFTC’s director of enforcement, said after the freeze that the agency would keep going after people in fraudulent schemes “regardless of their denials or attempts to hide their involvement.” Stubbs later consented rather than try the case.

ROFX Sold a Robot That Never Traded

From January 2018 through September 2021, a website at ROFX.net told customers it would trade leveraged foreign currency for them with an automated robot. The CFTC’s January 27, 2022 complaint, described in a January 28, 2022 commission release, said there was no such robot, no real trading accounts, and no ROFX offices in Miami, London, or Hong Kong even though the site advertised those cities.

Customers opened accounts by sending a name and a driver’s license. They then got a so-called payment invoice and were told to wire money or send a cashier’s check to one of five U.S. limited liability companies doing business as ROFX. Bank memos on those wires read like “ROFX account deposit” and “investment trading account.” The commission said over 1,100 customers opened accounts that way.

WHAT ROFX TOLD CUSTOMERS

• The robot: The site called itself the “best automated forex trading robot in the world,” a system it said was built in 2009.
• The guarantee: It said it was the only system that “guarantee[d] coverage of losses,” with a reserve fund for “negative results of trading.”
• The daily pitch: It promised “guaranteed profits that average about.38% every day and in many cases about 10% in a single month.”
• The 2017 figure: It told investors they “made 100.86% profit in 2017 alone.”
• The no-loss line: Copy on the site said developers “assure that you will make no losses” and billed a stop-loss as a “no loss forex robot.”

Gayles found that none of it was real. Customer money was never used to trade forex. Later deposits were used, in part, to pay earlier customers who demanded withdrawals, which is the classic shape of a Ponzi loop sitting on top of an offshore drain.

By the time the complaint was filed, a no-loss robot with a public website and a guaranteed reserve was already a familiar forex lure. The CFTC’s file did not need a new kind of lie. It needed the bank accounts behind the old one.

Where the Customer Wires Went

The five companies shared managers, members, and a website, and they existed, the court found, to collect and move money. None of them, and none of the five people who controlled them, had ever registered with the CFTC. Acting as a futures commission merchant without that registration was one of the charges.

Gayles’s freeze order broke out how much each company had taken in during the scheme. The figures are the court’s, and they are stated as approximates because that is how the order wrote them.

WHERE THE LLC ACCOUNTS TOOK THE MONEY

Stubbs signed Grovee’s operating agreement as sole member on October 15, 2020. He got the company an IRS employer number, opened Bank of America account 9293, and had monthly statements sent to his Atlanta home. He was the only person allowed to take deposits into that account. About $153,000 came in, some of it marked “ROFX Deposit.” He closed the account on January 20, 2021.

His name did not leave with it. On February 6, 2021, Tedi McLendon opened another Bank of America account for Grovee, numbered 5659, using Stubbs’s mailing address. More than $1 million in customer funds went into that second account. Days before it opened, Stubbs mailed a cell phone to McLendon’s New York address. He told the court he had not authorized her to use his address. Gayles still tied him to Grovee, and to more than Grovee.

A Mississippi residence tied to Stubbs was used as a mailing address for Notus and Shopostar, and for Jase Davis of Brandon, Mississippi, and Borys Konovalenko of Ukraine. The record also showed Stubbs helping Davis open two Easy Com bank accounts later used to take customer funds, including by preparing Davis and driving him to in-person bank meetings in Atlanta. Easy Com, on the court’s figures, took in more than $15 million.

The original complaint said the companies then wired the money to non-trading firms in Poland, Thailand, and other places, and to the individuals themselves.

Nine Defendants Owe $225 Million After Walking Away

On April 22, 2024, Gayles entered a default final judgment against Davis, Konovalenko, Anna Shymko of Duluth, Georgia, Alla Skala of Grand Island, New York, and/or Fort Erie, Canada, and the five companies. They are jointly and severally liable, which means the CFTC can try to collect the whole bill from any one of them.

The judgment used a later tally than the 2022 complaint. The complaint had alleged at least $58 million. The default order counted $57,515,344.31 accepted from customers. It set restitution at $56,362,279.21 in net losses and a civil penalty of $169,086,837.63, a combined bill the commission described as more than $225 million. The nine are also banned for life from CFTC registration and from trading on CFTC-regulated markets.

WHAT THE MIAMI COURT ORDERED

The gap is the story the docket actually tells. Stubbs, the licensed professional who sat for an answer, paid a sanction tied to the Grovee account he signed. The people who never came to court were handed a nine-figure judgment against empty chairs. A default of that size is a legal fact. It is not the same thing as cash in a victim account.

A Ukrainian Defendant Tried to Undo the Default

Konovalenko is the one defendant whose absence later turned into a second fight. On January 19, 2023, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida indicted him in United States v. Borys Konovalenko, 23-cr-20022-RAR, on conspiracy to commit commodities fraud and wire fraud over the same enterprise. The civil order that followed in 2026 noted he was detained in Spain at the end of 2023.

Investors had already sued. On September 29, 2021, four months before the CFTC filed, several customers brought a class action, Birmingham v. Rofx.net, case 21-cv-23472-RS, in the same district. In that case Konovalenko mailed the court a letter saying the only address that would reach him was a private mailbox in Houston, and that any other address was invalid.

The CFTC served him at that mailbox. He still did not answer. On April 22, 2025, exactly one year after the default judgment, he asked Gayles to set it aside. He said he had a defense, that service was bad, and that he had a confidential arrangement in the criminal case. The judge found he had known about the civil case since 2023, had lawyers, and had simply ignored it.

On March 25, 2026, Gayles denied the motion to vacate default. He reused the line he had written about the CPA, this time about Konovalenko: it was reasonable to conclude that he either knew about the fraudulent enterprise or stuck his head in the sand to manufacture plausible deniability.

THE ROFX CASE CLOCK

1. September 29, 2021: Investors file the Birmingham class action against ROFX.net and a long list of people and firms.
2. January 27, 2022: The CFTC files its civil case in Miami against five people and five companies.
3. October 3, 2022: The clerk enters defaults against every defendant except Stubbs.
4. January 19, 2023: Konovalenko is indicted on conspiracy charges tied to the same scheme.
5. September 22, 2023: Gayles freezes Stubbs’s assets and bars further fraud.
6. December 19, 2023: Stubbs consents to a permanent injunction; the dollar amounts wait.
7. April 22, 2024: Default judgment hits the nine who never appeared.
8. May 8, 2024: Stubbs’s restitution and fine are fixed at $153,000 and $314,000.
9. March 25, 2026: Gayles refuses to reopen Konovalenko’s default.

The civil docket against the companies and the four other people is, at that point, closed. The criminal case against Konovalenko is a separate file, and this article does not treat an indictment as a conviction.

What Customers Can Recover From the Orders

Stubbs’s restitution is narrow. The December 2023 consent order says he must pay customers who deposited funds into Grovee’s Bank of America account ending in 9293, the account that took in $153,000. It is not a promise to make the whole 1,100-customer pool whole.

The $56,362,279.21 restitution against the nine is the net-loss number for the rest of the take, after the court backed out about $1 million already returned to some customers and the Grovee 9293 flow that Stubbs was left to cover. Collection is another matter. The CFTC’s own notice on this case, and on others like it, is that a restitution order may not bring money back because the people who took it may not have funds or assets left.

That is the shape the ROFX file left in Miami. The accountant who opened a bank account, signed an operating agreement, and drove a co-defendant to Atlanta paid $467,000 and accepted a trading ban. The operators who never filed an answer were billed more than $225 million. Customers still hold a judgment against people the court could not get into the room, and a smaller, specific claim against the CPA who did walk in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was ROFX registered with the CFTC as a forex dealer?

No. The court found that ROFX was not a legally formed U.S. business at all, had no employees and no offices in the cities it advertised, and that the five LLCs and five people behind the site had never registered with the CFTC in any capacity, including as a futures commission merchant, which is the category for firms that take customer funds and orders for this kind of retail forex.

What did a customer have to show to open a ROFX account?

The website asked for a name and a driver’s license and did not ask about net worth, investment experience, or whether the person was an eligible contract participant with more than $5 million in assets, the test U.S. law uses to wall off some off-exchange forex from the retail public; after the account was created, customers were told they could fund it in U.S. dollars, euros, or bitcoin.

Does the restitution order mean victims will be paid in full?

No. The CFTC states in its public notices on this case that orders to repay customers may not result in the recovery of money lost, because the wrongdoers may not have enough funds or assets, and the $56,362,279.21 default bill is joint and several among nine parties who failed to appear, which is a collection problem as much as it is a court number.

What bans did the court put on Timothy Stubbs?

The December 19, 2023 consent order permanently bars Stubbs from cheating or defrauding people in commodity transactions, from failing to register as a futures commission merchant, and from trading on or subject to the rules of any registered entity as that term is defined in the Commodity Exchange Act, which is a lifetime lockout from CFTC-regulated markets as well as from registering with the commission.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on civil court orders and a CFTC enforcement action. It is for information only and is not legal, investment, or tax advice, and it is not a guide to filing a claim or collecting a judgment. Readers who think they sent money to ROFX or to one of the named companies should consult a licensed attorney who handles commodity-fraud or investor-recovery work, and should not treat the dollar figures in these orders as money already in hand. The amounts, bans, and case statuses described here reflect the court orders and commission notices cited, and later collection efforts or criminal proceedings can change what any person actually pays.