Crime & Safety
A Great Falls man who pleaded guilty to defrauding investors and not paying taxes was sentenced in federal court on Friday, reports say.
Michael O'Connell, Patch Staff
ALEXANDRIA, VA — A 56-year-old Great Falls man was sentenced in federal court on Friday, after being convicted of causing nearly $4.5 million in losses to the Internal Revenue Service, as well as significant losses for investors.
Rick Tariq Rahim was sentenced to 78 months in prison for tax crimes and the wire fraud scheme he admitted to running.
On Aug. 30, 2024, Rahim pleaded guilty 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.
Related: Guilty Plea For Great Falls Man Who Promised Big Returns For Investors
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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, 2024 to not paying the IRS the taxes he withheld from his 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.
In addition to his prison sentence, Rahim agreed to forfeit more than $1.3 million and must pay restitution to the IRS and to his investment fraud victims, according to court documents.
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