What did the public court documents about Apex actually say?
There are two separate legal proceedings involving Apex Trader Funding. Most community coverage conflates them. Here is what each set of documents actually established, what the leaked Zoom recording showed, and how the legal pressure shaped the March 2026 restructure.
Why there is confusion about the Apex lawsuits
The prop trading community tends to discuss the Apex legal proceedings as a single story: Apex got sued over payout denials and was forced to change its rules. The reality is more specific and, in some ways, more revealing than that summary suggests.
There are two distinct legal proceedings that generated most of the community discussion between late 2024 and early 2025. The first is a federal civil complaint filed in the Western District of Texas in December 2024: Riot v. Apex Trader Funding Inc. Case No. 1:24-cv-01557. This case is about software intellectual property, not about payout denials. The second is a gag order action Apex and Daytraders.com brought against YouTube content creator Kelly Ann Marlin, who had shared a whistleblower recording from a private Apex Zoom call. That recording, not the Riot lawsuit, is the more direct piece of evidence about how Apex treated profitable traders.
Understanding the distinction matters. The Riot complaint is publicly available in full on CourtListener and PACER. The whistleblower recording is not. It was subject to a court-ordered gag order and has been taken down from public platforms. What is documented is the existence of the recording, the nature of its contents as described in court filings and community accounts, and the fact that Apex sought legal action to suppress it.
Riot v. Apex Trader Funding: what the complaint actually says
The Riot complaint was filed December 18, 2024 by Leo Riot, acting as Trustee of Quasar Spendthrift Trust (QST), against Apex Trader Funding Inc., CEO Darrell Roland Martin, and three other named executives. The cause of action is copyright infringement and theft of trade secrets, filed under 17 U.S.C. Section 501 and 18 U.S.C. Section 1836.
What QST built for Apex
According to the complaint, QST developed proprietary software called the "Funding Program Automation Engine," described as the system powering Apex's evaluation and funded account operations. QST and Apex signed a Software License Agreement on July 12, 2024, under which Apex agreed to pay QST 33% of Apex's net profits on the fifth day of each month. The agreement was signed by Darrell Roland Martin as Apex CEO.
The financial figures in the complaint
The complaint contains specific net profit figures that Apex reportedly provided to QST under the payment terms of the agreement.
| Month | Apex reported net profit | QST owed (33%) | Payment made |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 2024 (partial) | $13,116,555 | $4,328,463 | None |
| August 2024 | $17,093,970 | $5,641,010 | None |
| September 2024 | $9,221,778 | $3,043,186 | None |
| October 2024 (partial) | $15,718,500 | $5,187,105 | None |
QST alleges Apex made none of these payments. On September 27, 2024, QST issued a demand letter. Apex did not respond. On October 28, 2024, QST terminated the agreement and revoked Apex's software license. Apex allegedly continued using the software after termination, which forms the basis of the copyright infringement claims.
What the complaint does and does not establish
The Riot complaint does not allege that Apex denied trader payouts as part of a fraud scheme. It does not contain internal communications about the treatment of funded traders. What it establishes is the following: Apex licensed third-party software to run its core operations, the agreement required sharing a third of net profits, Apex did not pay those profits, and when the license was terminated Apex allegedly continued using the software without authorisation.
The financial figures are significant context because they reveal the revenue scale Apex was operating at in mid-2024. A firm reporting $17M in net profit in a single month is generating substantial revenue from evaluation fees. Those figures do not prove that funded traders were being underpaid, but they do inform the community's question of whether Apex had the financial capacity to pay compliant traders.
These figures come from an adversarial filing
The net profit figures cited above were reported by Apex to QST under a contractual obligation. They have not been independently audited or verified by a court. Apex disputed the claims in this case. The figures appear in a complaint filed by an adversarial party and should be read in that context. They are reported here because they entered the public record and are directly relevant to the community debate about Apex's financial capacity.
Apex's response: counterclaim and motion to dismiss
Apex did not only defend. On January 21, 2025, Apex filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim and a separate motion to dismiss the unjust enrichment claim. On the same date, Apex filed an answer to the amended complaint that included a counterclaim against Leo Riot and a third-party complaint against Daytraders.com and MKNET LLC. The counterclaim signals that Apex disputed not only the plaintiff's characterisation of events but sought affirmative claims of its own.
A partial TRO was granted on December 27, 2024 by Judge Robert Pitman. The case continued into early 2025 with extensions granted for both parties to respond to the various motions.
The Zoom recording and the Kelly Ann Marlin gag order
The second legal action is less documented in public filings but more directly relevant to the question of how Apex treated profitable traders. Kelly Ann Marlin, a YouTube content creator and prop trading reporter, published a video containing footage from what was described as a private Zoom call involving Apex leadership. According to multiple community accounts and her own public statements, the recording showed Apex executives discussing deliberate tactics used to interfere with profitable traders.
Apex and Daytraders.com sought and obtained a Temporary Restraining Order against Marlin, effectively gagging further publication of the recording. Apex subsequently filed a motion for sanctions and indicated plans to bring direct claims against her. Rather than stay silent, Marlin formally intervened in the Riot v. Apex case and is listed on the court docket as a named Intervenor, represented by Brophy and Bland, PLLC. Her intervention means the gag order dispute is not a separate proceeding but part of the same primary case.
The recording itself is no longer publicly accessible due to the court order. What is documented in the public record is its existence, the nature of the allegations about its contents as described in court filings and Marlin's own public statements, Apex's use of the TRO to suppress it, and Marlin's formal legal participation in the case as an Intervenor. The specific contents of the recording have not been independently verified by TraderPayout because it is no longer available for direct review.
The May 2025 terminations: the documented event
Separate from the legal proceedings, the May 2025 account review wave is extensively documented in community posts, Trustpilot reviews, and Apex's own statements. In May 2025, Apex terminated a large number of Performance Accounts, citing DCA violations, consistency rule breaches, and in some cases the windfall behavior rule.
The scale of the terminations was significant enough to generate organised community responses, including public petitions and coordinated Trustpilot reviews. Some traders who disputed their terminations reported that no specific rule violation was cited in their denial notices. Others acknowledged rule violations they were unaware of. The pattern was not uniform, which contributed to the perception that the process was arbitrary.
What is publicly documented from this period: Apex confirmed the account reviews took place. Apex cited rule violations as the basis. The community challenge was substantial and sustained. The March 2026 restructure specifically removed the windfall behavior rule and several other rules that had generated the most contested terminations. The 4.0 changes did not retroactively address the May 2025 accounts, but they were structured in a way that directly responded to the specific complaints from that period.
Current case status and what changed as a result
As of May 2026, the case is significantly more active than early docket summaries suggest. Court records show the case had over 220 docket entries through at least September 2025. On September 3, 2025, Judge Alan D. Albright denied the individual defendants' motion to dismiss the second amended complaint, meaning the core claims survived Apex's attempt to have them thrown out at that stage. On the same date, Anthony Todd Johnson was terminated as a party by stipulation. Apex filed a second amended counterclaim on February 25, 2025, expanding its claims against Daytraders.com, MKNET LLC, and Leo Riot.
Kelly Ann Marlin formally intervened in the case and is listed as a named Intervenor on the docket. The case is not a simple two-party dispute. It involves multiple plaintiffs, defendants, third-party complaints, counterclaims, and an intervenor, all in the same docket. No final judgment or settlement order is publicly available as of May 2026. The full public docket is accessible on CourtListener under Case No. 1:24-cv-01557.
What is documented as having changed: the March 2026 4.0 restructure eliminated the windfall behavior rule, removed five other contested restrictions, replaced manual payout review with a fully automated system, and removed human override capability from the approval process. Apex's own public statements described the 4.0 model as a direct response to community concerns about payout fairness.
Whether those changes were driven primarily by legal pressure from the Riot case, community pressure from the May 2025 controversy, competitive pressure from rivals with cleaner payout reputations, or some combination of all three is not established in any document. What is established is the timeline: legal filings in December 2024, community crisis through early 2025, structural rule changes in March 2026.
For traders evaluating Apex today, the legal history is relevant context, not a current operational risk. The cases involved in this period do not allege that Apex is currently denying compliant payouts. The 4.0 automated system is the current state of the payout process. The documented history is a reason to understand how the current system was built and why, not a reason to assume it operates the same way the legacy system did.
If you are evaluating Apex under the current 4.0 model, the full ruleset and account options are on the Apex site.
Review current Apex evaluation options →What traders also ask.
This article reports from publicly available court documents and documented community records. It does not constitute legal advice. Statements attributed to court filings are sourced from public dockets. Case No. 1:24-cv-01557 is available in full on CourtListener.