The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) has fined and permanently banned a man from the markets for defrauding investors in a trading scheme that went awry.

A BCSC hearing panel ordered that William Wade Furman pay a $350,000 fine, disgorge the $420,847 he took from investors and be permanently banned from trading and registration.

The sanctions follow the panel’s ruling in April that Furman, who had never been registered, took more than $450,000 from investors with promises of using their funds to generate trading profits.

Instead, regulators found that he diverted about half their money for personal use, and lost most of the other half through unsuccessful trading. About $40,000 was returned to investors as purported trading profits.

The panel noted that he also provided investors with false account statements indicating that he was generating returns, which “bore no relationship to the fact that Furman lost almost all of the funds invested in his day trading.”

In handing down the sanctions, the panel said that Furman’s “fraudulent misconduct was significant” and that it “resulted in substantial harm to investors and substantial enrichment to the respondent.”

“As a consequence of the length and breadth of the dishonesty engaged in by the respondent, we consider him to be a significant future risk to our capital markets. We consider permanent market prohibitions to be necessary in the circumstances,” it concluded.