The SEC wants to save Scam Victim #1 by allowing them to sell shares in the scam to a nascent Scam Victim #2?
Pretty much. I think they may have felt these people were "different", because they weren't your average penny plungers. They were older people who thought they were investing for their retirement. They'd never messed with pennies before. Durante had paid off their investment advisers.
I exchanged a lot of email with one of them.
But the SEC has a lot of strange ideas. This, for example, is what they say about floorless convertibles:
...it is generally understood that the market for convertible securities is an important and highly innovative market that can provide solutions to investment inefficiencies or barriers to capital formation that would otherwise occur if issuers were restricted to offerings of only non-hybrid securities...
Not exactly...you are forgetting the role of the "market maker". It's a two sided affair...so given this premise...the market maker feels the burden as well.