Agents from the INTERPOL San José office of the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ) detained a 46-year-old United States citizen on a public street in Pavas, San José, on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 4, acting on an active international arrest warrant. The OIJ identified the man only by the surname Dunning and said he was sought by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation as a suspect in fraud and money laundering.
The agency said judicial investigators conducted a series of inquiries to establish that the man was inside Costa Rican territory before moving to detain him. He was placed at the disposal of the competent judicial authority to begin extradition proceedings and will remain subject to whatever precautionary measures that authority imposes while the United States formalizes its request. The OIJ released no further detail about the FBI investigation behind the warrant.
Separately, U.S. federal court records describe a fraud case with the same surname, age profile and Costa Rican connection. In August 2023, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a civil enforcement action in the Northern District of Texas against Walter Dunning Larrick III, a Corpus Christi resident, and his company, Cambridge Financial Advisors LLC. The complaint stated that Larrick was believed to be living in Costa Rica at the time of filing. Costa Rican and U.S. authorities have not publicly confirmed that the man detained in Pavas is the defendant in that case.
According to the CFTC complaint, Larrick and Cambridge collected at least $3,644,817.52 from approximately 70 investors between November 2020 and January 2023, on the stated premise of trading futures and options contracts in natural gas, oil and gold. Of that sum, the complaint alleges $2,831,748 was wired to bank accounts in Costa Rica, and that none of those accounts ever returned funds to Cambridge’s U.S. accounts.
Investigators traced roughly $116,615 in cash withdrawals and another $34,805 spent on food and entertainment, Uber rides, airline travel, Airbnb rentals, hotels and video games, the filing states. A further $388,942 went to payments to earlier investors in what the CFTC characterized as a Ponzi-like structure — money that also represents the only funds, about 10 percent of the total collected, ever returned to participants.
The solicitation ran largely by telephone. The complaint alleges that some calls, including unsolicited cold calls, were placed by people working for call centers operated by unidentified co-conspirators in Costa Rica. Callers represented that Cambridge had been in business for more than 20 years, that client money would stay in a U.S. bank account, and that the firm used a hedging strategy guaranteeing profits regardless of which way commodity prices moved.
Marketing materials cited by the CFTC claimed Cambridge had posted positive revenue on roughly 85 percent of trading days in 2019. Larrick registered Cambridge Financial Advisors LLC with the Texas Secretary of State on September 10, 2020. The company was never registered with the CFTC in any capacity.
Investors who deposited money received login credentials for an online portal showing account statements with dates, strike prices, contract expirations and commissions. The complaint states those statements were fabricated and reflected trading that never occurred. One participant who deposited $60,000 was shown earnings of $569,508; another who deposited $141,000 was shown a figure of $1,619,096.
When participants asked to withdraw, the complaint alleges, they were urged to reinvest in new “blocks” of contracts, given excuses, or simply not called back. On at least one occasion, someone contacted a prospective investor while posing as a representative of the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide what was described as independent verification that Cambridge was not committing fraud. Around the summer of 2022, Cambridge stopped communicating altogether, its phone lines were disconnected, and the website and customer portal went dark.
The CFTC action is civil and carries no criminal penalty on its own. The agency is seeking restitution for investors, disgorgement of unlawfully obtained funds, civil monetary penalties and permanent trading and registration bans. Any criminal exposure would come through the separate federal matter underlying the FBI’s warrant, details of which have not been made public.
Costa Rica has surfaced repeatedly in U.S. investment fraud enforcement. In September 2021, the CFTC charged Texas resident Rudy Avila and six companies — three of them registered in Costa Rica — over two schemes totaling roughly $6 million; a federal judge entered judgment of more than $10.5 million against them in August 2024, and Avila received a 210-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to wire fraud.
In a separate case, U.S. citizen David Butler was detained in Costa Rica in April 2022, extradited that July, and later pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy in a binary options scheme. Older residents will recall the 2002 collapse of the Villalobos brothers’ operation, which drew in thousands of foreign depositors.
In the Cambridge filing, the CFTC credited Costa Rica’s securities regulator, the Superintendencia General de Valores (SUGEVAL), for its assistance — the same agency it thanked in the Avila case. That cooperation has become a routine feature of these prosecutions, even as the country’s banking system and history as an offshore financial services hub continue to make it a recurring destination for money taken from American investors.
