What is Cattle Fraud or Market Fraud?

1. One unpleasant, but recurrent, risk in investment in the livestock business is fraud. Cattle fraud and deceit, or fraud affecting other livestock, produced some of the most famous crimes and infamous trials in the history of the American West.
2. Cattle rustling is the simple theft of animals owned by another. In its modern form, cattle rustling tends to look like Madoff Ponzi Scheme more often than it resembles direct, tangible theft by backing a truck up to a cattle loading chute and stealing animals bearing someone else’s brand or other ownership indicia.
3. Domina Law Group represented the majority of victims in the nation’s largest cattle rustling, or cattle fraud scheme, and the largest livestock scheme victimizing animal owners in American history.
4. George L. Young stole more than $170 million from investors in cattle in an elaborate Ponzi Scheme. Young’s cattle theft, much like the Bernard Madoff’s schemes surfacing a few years later, involved Young’s fraudulent sale of the same group of cattle, perhaps a dozen times, on average, until he was 177,000 head of cattle short of the number represented to be on feed and under his management for his investors.
5. When the fraud broke, more than half the victims turned to David Domina to protect their rights.
6. The result was a massive loss to the investors, but Domina Law Group's efforts reduced the loss and permitted investors to recover back “at least three times what it looked like would have occurred, without the aggressive efforts on behalf of our clients. We never had a chance to get all the money back because the cattle did not exist, so the value did not exist. There was no question of fighting someone else to get our share. The fight was over fractions, and under the circumstances, our folks did quite well,” Dave Domina explained.