A Bermuda-based company has been named as being involved in a Ponzi scheme scandal in the United States which has lost more than $3 million of investors' money.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a statement saying that Canadian Andrew Duncan and his Bermuda company Aurum Society Inc defrauded US and Canadian investors through a commodity scam.

And now an emergency restraining order has been issued by the federal court to freeze the assets of Mr. Duncan and the company in the US, according to the Washington DC-based agency.

Bermuda hit the headlines two years ago when another Ponzi scheme linked to Bermuda called Manhattan Investment Fund was uncovered.

The hedge fund run by Michael Berger out of the British Virgin Islands, but audited and administered in Bermuda, cost investors $400 million.

Officials with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said a civil enforcement action had been taken against Mr. Duncan of Toronto and his Bermuda-based company.

The regulator alleged a commodity pool was fraudulently soliciting funds from investors from at least February 1998 through to the present.

The report said the money was solicited from unwitting customers for commodities trading but instead was misused with some of the cash used to pay back old investors.The books and records of the defendants have also been preserved, the report said.

The CFTC alleged that Mr. Duncan claimed to be a professional commodities trader and had produced profits of 2,270 percent from May 1999 to January 2000.

But, according to the CFTC, the pool has had a net loss since it started trading in January 1999.

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