$194 Million Penny Stock Scheme Across Three Continents

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged 16 defendants, located in the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, Bulgaria, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Monaco, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, for participating in multi-year fraudulent penny stock schemes that generated more than $194 million in illicit proceeds.

The SEC’s complaints, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, charge all of the defendants with violating the antifraud and registration provisions of the federal securities laws. The charges, contained in three separate complaints, allege that several defendants played a variety of roles to accumulate the majority of shares in penny stocks via difficult to unveil, offshore nominee companies. It is also alleged that some of the defendants frequently used encrypted text and phone applications to avoid detection by regulators, and arranged to buy and sell penny stocks from multiple offshore accounts, in furtherance of the fraud.

According to the complaints, once some of the defendants had amassed a significant majority of the shares of the stocks, certain defendants secretly funded promotional campaigns to promote the stocks to unsuspecting investors in the United States and elsewhere. As alleged, when those campaigns triggered increases in the demand for and price of the stocks, some of the defendants sold the stocks via trading platforms in Asia, Europe and the Caribbean for significant profits.

The SEC is seeking permanent injunctions, disgorgement of allegedly ill-gotten gains plus interest, and civil penalties against all the defendants; penny stock bars against all the individual defendants; conduct-based injunctions against 11 of the 15 individual defendants; and officer and director bars against eight of the individual defendants.

Complaint 1 is located here.

Complaint 2 is located here.

Complaint 3 is located here.