On May 28, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Nathan Fuller, a resident of Cypress, Texas, in a crypto asset trading scheme in which Fuller allegedly raised approximately $12.3 million from about 150 investors based on various misrepresentations and omissions, including that he would use proprietary AI-based trading bots to engage in high-frequency arbitrage trading in crypto assets. According…
Justice Department leaders have reached a temporary staffing compromise to return white-collar units to the Criminal Division fraud section, after they’d been transferred to the Trump administration’s new fraud division, said two people familiar with the move. An organizational memo circulating internally Thursday states that market integrity and consumer fraud teams will go back to their original fraud section home,…
On April 27, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a settled action against RYVYL, Inc., and its two founders, former CEO, Fredi Nisan, and former chairman of the board Benzion Errez, for their respective roles in making alleged false disclosures in RYVYL’s public filings.
According to the SEC’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, beginning in October 2020, RYVYL, Nisan, and Errez defrauded the investing public by falsely depicting RYVYL in its public filings with the SEC as a cutting edge financial technology company that developed, marketed and sold “innovative blockchain-based payment solutions” and that its “proprietary blockchain-based technology” served as the settlement engine for all transactions within its ecosystem. The complaint alleges that, in reality, RYVYL’s actual business was reselling credit card or ACH processing services of other companies and RYVYL never processed any transactions through a blockchain technology, as it claimed in its public filings, nor did it possess any proprietary blockchain technology. The complaint further alleges that, until May 2025, RYVYL never told the public that a substantial majority of its transactions involved high-risk merchants, such as cannabis dispensaries.
As Gibran Huzaifah stared at the Excel spreadsheet on his laptop, he was looking into the void. eFishery, the Indonesian startup he’d built from a fish-feeding prototype to a 100-employee extension of himself, was just three months away from running out of cash.
Slowly, he started plugging fake numbers into the financial report. Within an hour, he had done what five years of hard work couldn’t — turn his business into a winner, at least on paper. He hit the send button to show his investors, certain he’d get caught.
Only he didn’t…. […]
Six years after that move to start a second set of accounts — a real one for his team and a second, inflated book for investors — eFishery was one of Asia’s brightest startups with a valuation of $1.4 billion and around 2,000 staff. As well as providing automated fish-feeders to boost productivity, it had also expanded into financing services.
By the time it collapsed, the scheme had metastasized into a multinational web of fake shell companies and padded accounts. The company claimed revenues of $752 million in the first nine months of 2024, while the true number was just $157 million, according to an internal investigation.
Source: CEO Explains How He Faked Results in $300 Million Meltdown
On April 3, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged registered investment adviser A.G. Morgan Financial Advisors, LLC and its principals, Vincent J. Camarda and James E. McArthur, with allegedly perpetrating an offering fraud that raised at least $138 million from at least 431 investors.
According to the SEC’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, from approximately June 2020 through at least December 2023, Defendants fraudulently induced their advisory clients, many of whom were elderly and financially unsophisticated, to purchase securities in the form of promissory notes issued by five high-risk private equity funds that Camarda and McArthur created, managed, and owned. As alleged, while Defendants told investors that the investments were conservative and safe and that the funds would invest in several diverse areas, in reality, four of the funds invested entirely in a high-risk mining venture and the fifth invested entirely in a start-up coffee shop company operated by Camarda’s son. The complaint further alleges that Defendants failed to disclose their substantial conflicts of interest in recommending the funds to their clients, namely, that Defendants received payments in connection with the funds’ investments in the mining venture and that one of the funds was created for the sole purpose of funding Camarda’s son’s coffee shop company. In addition, Camarda is alleged to have misappropriated approximately $1 million of client money by transferring it to his personal bank account.
Because it is my schtick, people often send me fact patterns and ask “is this securities fraud?” Curiously, although my schtick is literally “everything is securities fraud,” my answer to these questions is often “no.” Most things that don’t seem like securities fraud are securities fraud, but some things that do seem like securities fraud aren’t. But this is never legal advice.
Also people sometimes give ChatGPT fact patterns and ask “is this securities fraud?” Probably don’t do that? Here’s a TechCrunch article from last week:
The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction.”
Several people sent me Lee’s posts on X, which are (as someone posted) “the most @matt_levine coded thing to have ever happened”: Lee apparently asked ChatGPT “got a call from some tech crunch reporter asking about revenue. told them 7m arr in reality 6.3m run rate. is this securities fraud,” ChatGPT replied “almost certainly not,” and Lee posted the exchange with the comment “ngl i was sweating for 2 mins.” A verified X account with Elizabeth Holmes’s name on it (!?!?!?!!??) replied “I wouldn’t trust AI with this one.”
There are various not-best-practices things here, but I think I agree with ChatGPT? (Really not legal advice!)….
Source: “Is this securities fraud?”
Jeffrey Epstein was bad. These days, it is bad for business to have been pals with Jeffrey Epstein. Quite a few public company executives were pals with Jeffrey Epstein. The lawsuits write themselves, though I think this is the first one I have actually seen: “Shareholders sued Apollo Global Management and its billionaire co-founders Leon Black and Marc Rowan on…
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today the entry of a final consent judgment as to Fernando Passos in the SEC’s civil enforcement action that charged Passos, the former executive vice president of finance and investor relations of Brazilian reinsurance company IRB Brasil Resseguros S.A., for allegedly planting a false story with the media and disseminating false documents claiming that…
On February 23, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a settled action as to Christopher B. Ferguson, former CEO of Edison Nation, Inc., and Brian P. McFadden, a consultant to Edison Nation, in connection with allegations that Edison Nation disseminated a false and misleading press release and attached it to a Form 8-K it filed with the Commission. The…
Two former Edison Nation Inc. executives made false statements about purchase orders for personal protective equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic, the SEC claimed in a fraud action Monday. Christopher B. Ferguson, Edison Nation’s former chief executive officer, and Brian P. McFadden, a consultant who later became chief strategy officer, allegedly misled investors about the business in April 2020, according to…