DD Support Board and Research Team

[nodummy]

Huge bust today - tip of the iceberg stuff

There was a huge microcap fraud bust today by the SEC and FBI

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-228

SEC Halts Microcap Fraud Scheme Orchestrated Through International Accounts

Washington D.C., Oct. 3, 2018 —

The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed an emergency action and obtained an asset freeze against two individuals and their companies in a scheme that generated more than $165 million of illegal sales of stock in at least 50 microcap companies. SEC investigators unraveled the multi-year scheme with the assistance of more than a dozen international regulators and sophisticated analysis of nearly 400 bank and brokerage accounts.

According to the SEC’s complaint unsealed today, U.K. citizen Roger Knox and his Swiss-based company Wintercap SA helped microcap securities holders evade federal securities laws that restrict sales by large shareholders. The complaint charges that Knox and Wintercap, formerly Silverton SA, helped sellers conceal their stock ownership and provided anonymous access to brokerage accounts to sell the shares in the U.S. market. For three specific issuers detailed in the complaint, Knox sold the stocks when their price and trading volume were inflated by promotional campaigns. Michael T. Gastauer allegedly aided and abetted the fraud by establishing several U.S. corporations and allowing Knox to use their bank accounts to disburse the proceeds of his illegal stock sales.

In a parallel criminal case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts today announced criminal charges against Knox.

In the Complaint the SEC names 20 of the 50 plus Issuers including EPTI, CURR, EVBC (formerly Garmatex Holdings Ltd - GRMX), ARSN, DIGAF, RETC, ENVV, GLBB, ORRP, GLLK, NEWG, PSCR, PSNP, SPRN (formerly NHUR), SRUP, UMFG, VBIO, and ZENO

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2018/comp-pr2018-228.pdf




The SEC Complaint goes into detail about the EPTI, CURR, and EVBC schemes.

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2018/comp-pr2018-228.pdf


PSNP was suspended by the SEC on September 2, 2016

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions/2016/34-78757-o.pdf

NEWG was suspended by the SEC on March 28, 2017

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions/2017/34-80318-o.pdf

GLBB was suspended by the SEC on May 12, 2017

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions/2017/34-80667.pdf

EPTI was suspended by the SEC on June 27, 2017

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions/2017/34-81036.pdf

EVBC was suspended by the SEC on June 25, 2018

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions/2018/34-83518.pdf


The DOJ is also filing criminal charges against Robert Knox, but that Indictment wasn't available yet on Pacer when I looked.


This is tip of the iceberg type stuff. Knox was helping some big name penny stock p&d players sell stock and Silverton SA links closely to other offshore entities used in the exact same way for the exact same purposes.

Some of those tickers name by the SEC were big name stock promotion tickers. I did pre promo research on ARSN, CURR, ORRP, GRMX/EVBC, VBIO, SRUP, GLLK, NEWG, NHUR/SPRN, PSCR, RETC, and others off that list.

And I know of other big name stock promotion tickers that also used the services of Silverton SA like XLIT and others.


The litigation today could lead to a lot of fallout including more litigation/criminal Indictments in the future.


It will be interesting to see what information the SEC and FBI are able to gather from Knox which could lead to much more litigation against other offshore share selling/money laundering groups and the people who were using these groups to help illegally sell stock into the market.

It will also be interesting to see if any future litigation is filed against the stock promoters used for the share selling schemes and the 3 unnamed brokers referenced in the SEC Complaint that helped facilitate the schemes. I'm curiuos to see if Scottsdale is one of those brokers with their history of being involved in these types of microcap frauds in the past.