Danny M. Salinas and Mai T. Nguyen, a married couple both aged 69 and residing in Huntington Beach, California, worked between 2017 and April 2019 as salespeople for The Church for the Healthy Self, also known as CHS Trust, a Texas corporation that operated as a purported church out of a strip mall in Westminster, California. The entity presented itself as a religious organization, but it was not a genuine church in any recognizable sense. It was the vehicle for a securities operation, and Salinas and Nguyen were among the people who sold its investment products to the public. Neither Salinas nor Nguyen was registered with the SEC in any capacity, and the securities they sold were not registered. In August 2026, following the entry of federal judgments against them arising from their conduct, the SEC barred both from association with any broker or dealer and from participating in any penny stock offering. Religious and community framing has cloaked other investment frauds, including the Orthodox Jewish community Ponzi of Leor Moshe of Capital Funding ASAP and the faith-marketed RAD Diversified scheme.
The bars against Salinas and Nguyen, issued under Section 15(b) of the Securities Exchange Act, followed the broader enforcement action against The Church for the Healthy Self and the individuals who ran and promoted it. The SEC’s orders against the couple find that they acted as unregistered salespersons for the CHS operation during the period the fraud was being carried out. Related orders were entered against other CHS salespeople, including Vean P. Nguyen, reflecting a network of individuals who sold the purported church’s securities to investors from the Westminster storefront.
A Church That Was Not a Church, Operating From a Strip Mall Storefront
The central deception of the CHS operation was its religious framing. By styling itself The Church for the Healthy Self and operating as a purported church, the entity cloaked a securities-selling operation in the language and structure of a religious organization. Religious framing can serve multiple purposes in a fraudulent operation: it can lend an air of trustworthiness and moral legitimacy, it can be used to build affinity with investors who share or respect the claimed faith, and in some schemes it is used to claim exemptions or special treatment that ordinary businesses cannot. The physical reality of the operation, a storefront in a Westminster strip mall, stood in contrast to the spiritual identity it projected. The SEC’s finding that CHS was a purported church, rather than an actual one, is the foundation of the case: the religious identity was a wrapper around the sale of unregistered securities.
Salinas and Nguyen’s role was as the sales force. As salespeople for CHS between 2017 and April 2019, they were the human interface between the operation and its investors, the people who actually presented and sold the investment products. The requirement that securities salespeople be registered exists precisely so that the individuals selling investments to the public meet baseline standards of qualification, supervision, and conduct, and so that regulators can hold them accountable. Salinas and Nguyen were not registered, meaning they operated outside that framework of oversight while selling securities that were themselves unregistered. A married couple in their late sixties selling a purported church’s investment products from a strip mall is the picture of the kind of unregistered, unsupervised securities sales the registration rules are designed to prevent.
A Network of Salespeople and a Broader CHS Enforcement Action
The action against Salinas and Nguyen is one component of a larger enforcement effort surrounding The Church for the Healthy Self. The SEC entered parallel orders against other CHS salespeople, including Vean P. Nguyen, also of Huntington Beach, who like Salinas and Mai Nguyen worked as a salesperson for the purported church during the same 2017 to April 2019 period. The pattern of multiple unregistered salespeople operating from the same Westminster location, selling the same unregistered securities under the banner of the same purported church, reflects an operation that relied on a distributed sales force to reach investors. Each salesperson who sold CHS securities without registration extended the reach of the operation, and each became subject to the SEC’s registration and antifraud provisions. The affinity fraud framework that religious-themed operations often exploit is a recurring subject of SEC investor warnings, because trust rooted in shared faith or community can lower the ordinary caution investors would otherwise apply.
Bars That Close Off the Securities Industry to Both Spouses
The remedial sanctions imposed on Salinas and Nguyen bar each of them from association with any broker, dealer, investment adviser, municipal securities dealer, municipal advisor, transfer agent, or nationally recognized statistical rating organization, and from participating in any penny stock offering. For a married couple who sold securities together for the same operation, the parallel bars formalize the end of any role either could play in the securities industry going forward. The bars are the standard follow-on consequence once a federal judgment establishes the underlying misconduct, and they carry a path to potential reentry only through the applicable reapplication process, which can be conditioned on satisfying any outstanding financial obligations from the underlying case. The Church for the Healthy Self operation, run from a strip mall under a religious banner, produced a set of enforcement actions that reached not only the entity but the individual salespeople who carried its products to investors.
Conclusion
Danny Salinas and Mai Nguyen spent two years selling the investment products of The Church for the Healthy Self, an operation that called itself a church but ran out of a Westminster strip mall and sold unregistered securities through unregistered salespeople. The married couple, both 69, were part of a sales network that also included Vean Nguyen and others, all working the same storefront under the same religious banner. In August 2026 the SEC barred both spouses from the securities industry and from penny stock offerings. The church was not a church. The securities were not registered. The salespeople were not registered. The banner was the disguise.
