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Thomas Eide admitted that CB Surety and its co-conspirators used sham companies and thousands of small-dollar transactions to help high-risk merchants keep access to banking. The trick was mathematically simple—but the shell-company infrastructure behind it was much larger and more complicated.
A vending machine is normally a business asset, not a security. But when buyers supply the money while a promoter selects locations, manages critical operations and markets the deal as passive income, securities law can enter the picture. A new lawsuit against DFY Vending tests that surprisingly blurry boundary.
A New Mexico court ordered FastBucks to pay borrowers $32.25 million in restitution. A decade later, only about $964,000 in gross recovered funds is available. The missing piece is the difference between winning a judgment and actually collecting it—and two 2023 settlements appear to explain the current fund almost to the dollar.