Doug Cornelius on compliance for private equity real estate
With the Securities and Exchange Commission back up and running, we are seeing new enforcement actions coming out. A real estate fraud caught my attention. The SEC charged Phillip Michael Carter, Bobby Eugene Guess and Richard Tilford with raising almost $45 million from over 270 investors by selling short-term, high-yield promissory notes issued by shell … Read more »
Crypto Currency can be a Commodity A federal judge in Massachusetts agreed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s view that virtual currencies are commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act and subject to federal regulation. See CFTC v. My Big Coin Pay, Inc., (D. Mass. Sept. 26, 2018). The CFTC sued a virtual currency company and several … Read more »
Worried about the security of your cyptocurrency? How about having the Blockchain Exchange Commission protect you. It won’t. According to a complaint filed by Securities and Exchange Commission, Reginald Ringgold is a founding member of this very prestigious-sounding, regulatory-sounding Blockchain Exchange Commission. According to it’s LinkedIn page: The mission of the [Blockchain Exchange Commission] is to protect … Read more »
It looks like the testimony will not be subtle at the Senate Banking Committee today entitled: Exploring the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Ecosystem. Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director Of Research at Coin Center, spends his time trying to explain blockchain by calling it decentralized computing. I’m going to guess that his presentation falls on ears that have … Read more »
Steven Peikin, Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement gave an encyclopedic description of the Remedies and Relief in SEC Enforcement Actions at PLI’s White Collar Crime symposium. The speech was meant to address the effectiveness of enforcement actions. He wanted to point out that the number of enforcement actions or the total amount of … Read more »
Say you run a trading platform and lots of your traders lose money. Why not just take their money for yourself instead of them losing it to the market? For one, that’s stealing. But apparently that didn’t stop Jeffrey Goldman, Naris Chamroonrat, Christopher Eikenberry, Ran Armon, Adam Plummer, and Yaniv Avnon from doing just that. They set up … Read more »
Getting a free meal is one of the few perks of staying late at the office for many financial services firms. The firm is willing to pay some set amount if the employee stays after some deadline. Most figure that the person is going to be more productive if he or she is not starving. … Read more »
Study 2,690 cases of occupational fraud over 18 months and you may see some trends. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners conducted a survey of its 41,000+ certified fraud examiners to collect data on the single biggest fraud case they investigated from January 2016 to October 2017. The study identified six behavioral red flags that … Read more »
Often there is little new to discover and learn from in securities fraud charges. The fraudster may or may not have started with good intentions. Regardless, the fraudster takes the investors’ money and spends it on things it was not supposed to be spent on. But I could not help but take a closer look … Read more »
Initial coin offerings have been a new wave of financing.. and scams. One offering that you should look at for some lessons about coin offerings is the soon to be released Howey Coin. HoweyCoins are the cryptocurrency for the travel industry. According to the white paper, HoweyCoins partner agreements lock in an average initial discount … Read more »