[1] Around 2014, Charles C. Liu and Xin Wang, a married couple and U.S. citizens in California, sought out investments from several Chinese companies while claiming that they were going to use the money to build a cancer treatment center, through which they would later establish a means for investors to obtain an EB-5 visa.

While they had secured the land, there had been no development work on it during the 18 months after they had gotten the investments, and the SEC found that $11.8 million of the funds had been transferred back to Chinese companies owned by Liu and that another large portion had been used for personal expenses by the couple.

[2] The SEC had begun its investigation in February 2016 and filed official charges against the couple in June 2016 under the Securities Act of 1933, which that prohibits fraud, specifically misstatements as to use of investment funds under 15 U.S.C. § 77l.

The Supreme Court accepted the petition in November 2019, which legal analysts believed was to resolve the open-ended question left by Kokesh.

[7] Sotomayor affirmed in her decision that "Congress prohibited the SEC from seeking an equitable remedy in excess of a defendant’s net profits from wrongdoing," under 15 U.S.C. § 78u(d)(5).