Joseph A. Meyer, Jr., and his Statim Holdings, Inc. offered investors in its Arjun private fund that investors would not lose money. The catch is that you can’t redeem from the fund for ten years or you forfeit 1/2 of your capital. Of course the real catch is that Meyer a fraud. (At least according … Read more »
Category: Fraud
Real Estate Cash Cow
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 »
Cryptocurrency Problems Roundup
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 »
Blockchain Exchange Commission
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 »
“Crypto is the Mother of All Scams”
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 »
All You Wanted to Know About SEC Remedies
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 »
If Your Clients Are Going to Lose Money Anyway, Why Not Just Steal It?
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 »
Broken Windows at Wells Fargo
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 »
2018 Global Study on Occupational Fraud and Abuse by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
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 »
The One With the Whale Whisperer
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 »