Actually it matters a great deal whether fraud was involved. If it weren't, Ribotsky wouldn't be in the hot water he's in now.
Here's what he did: He had several funds that he called hedge funds, I don't know why. Probably because it sounded good. The funds did well; his clients did well. And then the wheels began to fall off.
His real business isn't trading; it's toxic financing, as the article makes clear. Naturally he made money: toxic financing is the only entirely risk free investment I know of. I assume he used money held in the funds to make toxic investments in those penny stock companies. No surprise that the funds flourished, at least for awhile.
...Ribotsky, its fund manager, engaged in a massive fraud by manipulating penny-stock companies and made "sham transactions designed to improve its own stock trading prospects to the detriment of the companies themselves."
Well yeah. That's what toxic financiers do. And don't forget that the companies are often entirely complicit:
In October, the SEC charged a California company called Ingen Technologies, in which NIR was once the largest investor, with securities fraud for its role in a kickback scheme to manipulate the volume and price of Ingen's stock and illegally generate stock sales.
Note this as well:
Kaufman said all of the companies suing NIR Group should have known about the potentially negative effects a toxic convertible deal could have on their finances.
They most certainly should have. They signed on the dotted line...
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