The SEC has charged Frederick J. Barton, formerly a vice-president and branch manager of A.G. Edwards in Atlanta, with securities fraud. The SEC’s complaint details a number of categories of alleged misconduct, the common denominator of which is Barton’s alleged misappropriation of other peoples’ money to fund his lavish lifestyle.
I was visiting yesterday with a friend at the SEC after teaching the SEC’s interns about insider trading. My friend shared with me that his father is prone to fall for financial scams, and that only constant warning from my friend keeps him from falling for more of them. Now, this is a man whose son has [...]
Paul Robert Gunter, 58, and his daughter, Zibiah Joy Gunter, 25, have been charged with duping thousands of mainly elderly UK victims into investing more than $70 million in bogus corporations. According to the complaint, the Gunter’s high jacked dormant shell companies, created a compelling story about each, and sold worthless stock in the companies through high [...]
Tom Bayles’s story yesterday in the Sarasota Herald Tribune makes the case for SEC-trained investigation of any broker baby boomers or seniors consider trusting with their nest egg. It’s a cautionary tale about retirees who chose to bypass professional help in choosing whom to trust and now face retirement without their life savings. Read the story if you have a minute. It comes with a [...]
There’s always a big house and nice car. Ponzi scheme operators can’t help buying them. Even so, Michael Duane Smith (Smith) may hold the record for extravagance among Ponzi operators. He bought not just a house, but a $6.5 million castle in Colorado. He bought not just a nice car, but a stable of eight high-performance NASCAR racing cars. [...]
She trusted him. He’d been her broker for more than 20 years. When her husband died in 1999 and she wanted to set up a charitable foundation to benefit the arts, she made the broker an officer and trustee of the foundation. In 2000, when she entered a nursing home in failing health, she gave the broker [...]
As the U.S. economy tumbles and the world economy trembles, businesses will begin laying off workers. In October, AOL announced that it would be laying off 2000 employees. Yahoo is planning on laying off hundreds of employees. Airbus is set to cut 10,000 jobs.
The SEC has charged Larry A. Rodda, a former KPMG Consulting principal, with aiding and abetting a “massive financial fraud orchestrated by senior officers at Peregrine Systems, Inc., a San Diego software company that has since been acquired by Hewlett-Packard Company.”The SEC alleged that Rodda signed four sham software license agreements that allowed Peregrine to improperly record [...]
Seniors Lose Nest Eggs in Alleged Mining Scam
He promised low-risk, high return investments. Who isn’t going to listen to a deal like that? At least seventeen investors, many of them seniors, did listen to Rick J. Boros, a/k/a Vincent Kwiatkowski (“Boros”) . . . and lost more than $1.2 million. On September 3, 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) stopped Boros before he [...]