Stock fraud

More On Internet Stock Manipulations; SEC v. Lebed (2000), revisited

Capital Markets, Investors, Issuers, Law , , ,


I was reminded recently of the story of Jonathan Lebed, a 14 year old kid from New Jersey who was investigated by the SEC for stock manipulation using the internet back in 2000.  This case was a big deal at the time, garnishing a segment on 60 Minutes and some interesting discussions in the financial and legal press.

Even though he was underage, with the help of his parents, Lebed had managed to open an account at one or two of the discount brokerage firms. He was apparently trading his accounts in low price stocks when the SEC came knocking on his parents’ door. 

It seems that in the course of trading Lebed liked to post positive comments about what he was buying on various websites, bulletin boards and chat rooms where people who might be interested in purchasing these stocks would see them.  This was in 2000 when the chat rooms were not sophisticated and the web reached a fraction of the people it reaches today. 

Lebed would buy a low priced stock and then say something nice about the company in a message that he posted in a chat room. Using multiple e-mail addresses he might get that same, positive message posted in 200 chat rooms.  Some of the people who saw his posts would re-post them again. 

Lebed knew that his simple postings would create significant interest in these shares and that the price would move up.  He commented that posting the messages with key words in all capital letters would actually get even better responses. 

Bringing a lot of attention to a more obscure, low priced stock can, indeed, lift the price. The SEC called it an intentional market manipulation.  Lebed said that he was only doing what the research analysts at the big firms did, publish their opinions about companies whose share price they wanted to go up. 

Lebed did all this out in the open. Several of his classmates and school teachers followed his leads and invested with him. They were willing to take a chance of doubling their money if the share price of one of these companies went from $.30 to $.60. 

Many of these investing neophytes did understand the positive effect that Lebed’s postings and his quasi investor relations campaigns had on these stocks.  They wanted to buy before he posted and get out as the buyers reacting to his posts pushed up the price.  

Lebed was not the only person or group at that time that was using the internet to enhance the price of shares of small public companies.  But he demonstrated that in the year 2000 the power of the internet to sell investments directly to investors was underrated.  In the almost 20 years since, the use of the internet to sell almost anything, including investments, has become much more powerful and pervasive. 

In the regulated financial markets the dissemination of information is encouraged, but it is also controlled.  Regulations require that information be accurate and complete. Public companies are required to report specific information about their business, to present that information in a specific manner and to release that information on a regulated schedule. 

For a licensed stock broker or investment advisor every e-mail, tweet, posting, comment and utterance about any investment is subject to the scrutiny of his/her employer and by regulators. The SEC depends on the market professionals and market participants to play by the rules. There are significant penalties for non-compliance. 

But Lebed was not a market professional. He was an outlier. He was an independent investor, not a licensed participant in the marketplace.  In the end the SEC let Lebed keep most of the money that he made from his trading as long as he promised to stop.  

At the time, no one really questioned the SEC’s jurisdiction over Lebed or what he was doing. Lebed was a US citizen, operating out of New Jersey. His posts were about US companies whose shares traded in the US markets. Many of his posts were made through a US based internet company (Yahoo Finance). 

In the ensuing 20 years, social media and on line platforms, publications and unregulated “experts” have demonstrated that they can easily sell investments directly on line to millions of investors.  Moreover they have demonstrated that they can disseminate information about public companies and new issues without regard to the truth of the information.  And they can do so without regard for regulations or national borders.

In the “direct to investors” investment world, social media “followers” has replaced “assets under management” as a measure of how many investors’ dollars a person can bring to an investment or new offering.  And you can buy people who have a lot of followers.

If I wanted to hype a stock, either a new issue or one that is already trading, I can make a financial arrangement with any number of independent “experts” who have a lot of social media “followers”.  Some may write articles for financial publications, some write books and blogs and many can be found going from conference to conference and podcast to podcast. 

Any financial “expert” can purchase the right to give the keynote speech at a conference and purchase any number of other speaking slots and sponsorships as well.   Anyone can buy interviews on financial websites, blogs and podcasts or pay for the right to create and distribute positive content on these sites.   

If you look at the numbers you can get an idea of how this works.  I can hire a financial “expert” to tout any stock that I wish. The “expert” will send his/her followers a series of e-mails, appear at a series of conferences and write a series of articles about that company. An expert with 1 million followers might reach 2 million other investors who see re-prints and references to it.

If only 10,000 investors of those followers invest an average of $1000 a new issuer can raise $10,000,000. That much new money coming into a thin trading market can often raise the trading price of the shares of a smaller company.  

There is no limit to the number of experts I can hire or the size of the e-mail lists I purchase for their use to augment their own list of followers.  If I hire multiple experts to hype the same stock, other experts who have not been paid may mention the company independently.  And before you say that this type of scheme using paid experts to hype the stock may be questionable under US law, who said that US law applied?   

If you solicit investors in the US for a new issue the offering is subject to US law.  That would require full and fair disclosure to investors in the US and provide for government penalties for non-disclosure.  But what if you donot make the necessary disclosures and you only solicit investors in other countries? 

The capital markets are regulated country to country.  Each country has its own rules which apply to financial transactions involving its citizens and issuers.  Each has rules governing transactions executed on the exchanges domiciled in their country. The laws of the country where the issuer is domiciled, the exchange is located and where the investors reside may all apply to a single transaction.  An overriding question with the direct to investor market is which country has jurisdiction and over what actions and activities.

If an article about a company’s share price or prospects from a European website gets republished or re-distributed in the US is the author subject to US law? What if the author knew the information in the article was false; do US investors have any recourse?  Does it matter if the author got a royalty for the re-print?

Would the answer be different if the false information originated with just one shareholder who bought a large block of shares cheap and now wants to pump up the price?  Does it matter if that person is in a country other than where the shares trade or the articles originate? 

I recall that when the Lebed case was discussed a lot of people thought that the internet would change and globalize the capital markets. It clearly has.  

I think that there is still a lot of discussion that needs to be had and a lot of questions that need to be asked and answered.  In the meantime, it should be obvious that the current international regulatory scheme does not overlap as well as it could.   

The current and expanding global reach of social media create opportunities and but also highlights problems.  The flow of capital and information continue to globalize. At the same time I am certain that it would is a lot easier today for a 14 year old to manage a single successful, global stock manipulation.    

Cannabis Stocks and the Old Pump and Dump

Capital Markets, Investors, Issuers, Law , , , , ,

People seem to hate me when I state the simple truth that cannabis  is illegal everywhere in the US. The Obama Administration decided to focus its drug enforcement budget on the cartels and large suppliers and not on small retail dealers.  Deciding not to bust small dealers did not make cannabis legal anywhere in the US.  Just because the federal government will not spend money to send 20 officers to kick down the door of a small dealer, they will still charge you with “intent to sell” if they find a few pounds of cannabis in the trunk of your car.

The former US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions was fairly clear that he wanted to keep cannabis illegal. What the incoming Attorney General will do is anyone’s guess.  The one clear truth is that action by states purporting to make cannabis legal within their borders does not actually make it legal anywhere under federal law.

Notwithstanding,many people seem to believe that there is a “legal” market for cannabis and a lot of people are finding ways to cash in believing that the federal government will continue to look the other way. That has encouraged the flow of a lot of new money into the “new” cannabis marketplace. As these cannabis companies are new, small and somewhat precarious given they often cannot get a bank account,some companies have sought funding in the microcap stock market where small companies can go public.  

Few investors come in contact with “microcap” or “penny stocks”.   Many of the very large brokerage firms will not touch very low priced shares and certainly will not recommend them.  Fewer investors are the victims of the “pump and dump” schemes that plague this portion of the marketplace. Even fewer investors actually understand how a pump and dump works or how to spot one.

The  blueprint for these pump and dump scams is often the same. These scams will often start with a “shell” corporation, a public company with few assets and minimal operations.  In a typical scenario a public “shell” corporation would acquire a private, ongoing business in exchange for stock.  There would be a press release, often several over the first few months that would begin to tell the story that the promoters wanted to tell, especially how this company was going to grow and grow.

The story would be told to thousands of investors through the stockbrokers who would be on the phones, cold calling people around the US with this week’s“tip”.  They would stay at it until enough people bought the stock to make the share price go up. There would often be subsequent acquisitions, subsequent press releases and subsequent hype.  All of the hype caused more people to buy the stock and the price to go further up.  As the price moved up, the insiders who bought for very little when the company  was still a shell could dump their shares.

This can be very lucrative for the people who bought the shares in the shell for pennies a share. It can also be lucrative for the brokers because getting the stock price up and then selling it to unsuspecting members of the public can mean a lot of transactions and a lot of commissions and mark-ups.  It is not unusual for even a small pump and dump scheme to net the promoters and brokers $10-$20 million or more. Consequently, people who pump and dump the shares of one company (often a team of promoters and stockbrokers)  frequently do it repeatedly.

Organized crime settled into the stock brokerage industry in a big way by backing or owning a number of small brokerage firms in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the firms were the quintessential boiler rooms like the ones depicted by Hollywood in The Wolf of Wall Street or BoilerRoom. By the early 1990s these boiler rooms proliferated in lower Manhattan, Long Island, New Jersey and Florida.  By 2000, the SEC was telling Congress that several of these firms were owned by or worked with the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families.  

A significant amount of regulatory scrutiny and regulatory actions followed,but that did not stop the billions of dollars of profit that was skimmed off by the miscreants.  The SEC closed down a few of those firms, barred a few people from the securities business and put a few of the people in jail.  But the beat goes on. 

Boiler  rooms are still active today and still working out of Manhattan, Long Island, New Jersey and Florida. They are still cold calling unsuspecting retail investors around the country. They are still using press releases and more recently “independent” fake investment newsletters to pump up what are essentially shell companies. 

In the 1990s the companies were “exciting” because they were going to capitalize in some way on the internet, a new and exciting technology that a lot of people believed could make a lot of money. People were happy to invest in every “internet” company that came along.Today, the pump and dumps have found cannabis stocks as a perfect substitute.   Which brings us to Aphria (NYSE:APHA). 

Aphria is a Canadian cannabis company that is trying to rapidly stake out its territory in new foreign cannabis markets. It traded over the counter in the US until November when it up listed to the NYSE.   The stock price has moved up as the company made a series of acquisitions and announcements in the last year. 

Last week it was the subject of a fairly scathing report by a research company and short seller that questioned whether the company had grossly overvalued some of those acquisitions.  Aphria has retorted that the company’s acquisitions were fine and properly valued and essentially that short sellers cannot be trusted.

Personally I thought that the research report was well written and seemed to have been well researched. There were photos of the headquarters and operations of some of the acquired companies that left a lot to be desired. There were copies of documents that supported the idea that insiders may be guilty of undisclosed self dealing. I thought that the valuations are clearly questionable and that alone was a big red flag. 

What got my interest and what troubled me the most was the discussion of who was involved with Aphria.The report goes out of its way to set out the facts and affiliations surrounding Andrew DeFrancesco who was apparently a founding investor and strategic advisor to Aphria. The report ties Mr. DeFrancesco to  several pump and dump schemes and affiliations with several pump and dump schemers.

These schemers include Paul Honig, John Stetson and John O’Rourke. The SEC brought an action against these three in September specifically charging them with operating pump and dump schemes in the shares of three companies.  I suspect there were other companies whose shares were manipulated by this group as well.  The report points out that in at least one company DeFrancesco’s wife was an early holder of cheap stock.

The report also ties DeFrancesco with a gentleman named Robert Genovese. In 2017,the SEC charged Genovese with operating a separate pump and dump scheme.  So if Aphria’s founding investor has connections with 2 separate pump and dump operators,, and has set himself up to benefit handsomely if Aphria’s stock price should be pumped up, what inferenc e would you make? 

The research report was published by a company called Hindenburg Investment Research. I have no affiliation with them whatsoever and I have never traded shares of Aphria either long or short.  Not surprisingly, a lot of market “experts” refuse to accept any information put into the market by any short seller.  That would be a mistake.

In addition to providing liquidity for the markets, short sellers provide a valuable service because the investment world is grossly overpopulated by“longs”.  The prospects for every company cannot always be rosy. If standard analysis can tell us when the price of a stock is likely to go up, that same analysis can tell us when the price is likely to come down. 

Short sellers truly love to spot scams. If this report is correct about Aphria and the company has grossly overvalued its acquisitions and is being pumped up only to have the insider’s shares dumped into the market, then sooner or later the stock may go to zero or very close to it. That is a win for any short seller.

There is more than enough information in the research report for any small investor who wants to invest in a cannabis company to make an intelligent decision not to invest in Aphria. But please do not think that Aphria is the only cannabis stock whose price may be the pumped up not because its prospects are actually good,but because someone has a lot of stock to dump into the market. As I was researching this article I saw at least a half dozen cannabis related microcap stocks that did not pass the smell test. There are undoubtedly more.