URGENT >> BULLETIN >> MOVING: An undercover sting by the FBI in Florida has led to criminal and civil charges against five alleged penny-stock fraudsters in Florida, Texas, Nevada and California.
The sting featured a phony “consulting” company created by the FBI, authorities said. News about the make-believe consultancy followed on the heels of news last month that U.S. investigators had created a “payment processor” as part of a different probe into illegal gambling.
Charged criminally in today’s undercover cases were Brian Gibson, 63, of Coconut Creek, Fla; Donald W. Klein, 40, of Frisco, Texas; Douglas Newton, 66, of Rancho Mirage, Calif; Charles Fuentes, 66, of Dana Point, Calif; and Thomas Schroepfer, 54, of Las Vegas. Schroepfer also is known as Thomas Schroepfer Baetsen.
The men and several companies also were charged civilly by the SEC in what the agency described as a coordinated law-enforcement assault against microcap hucksters.
“Investors deserve better than secret investment strategies based on kickbacks and bribes,” said Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.
The Miami region’s top federal prosecutor, meanwhile, said the cases evolved from the Southern District of Florida’s ongoing Securities and Investment Fraud Initiative, a task force aimed at criminals and fraudsters operating in the region.
“The defendants charged today abused their knowledge of the capital markets hoping to misappropriate money held in pension fund and brokerage accounts to enrich themselves and their co-conspirators,” said Wifredo A. Ferrer.
Undercover FBI agents posed as scammers and set up a phony “consulting” business as part of the probe, the SEC said.
“The defendants charged today were intent on making profits for themselves while defrauding others,” said Eric I. Bustillo, director of the SEC’s Miami Regional Office.
Newton, the SEC said, was chief executive officer of Real American Brands Inc., now known as Real American Capital Corp. He was accused of paying kickbacks to a “purported employee pension fund trustee” to buy more than 6.2 million shares of restricted Real American Brands stock.
He further was accused of trying to conceal the kickbacks through a “consulting” firm.
However, the trustee Newton believed to be corrupt actually was “a fictitious person,” the SEC said. Meanwhile, “the trustee’s business associate who helped arrange the deal was an undercover FBI agent,” and the consulting company was a “phony” one created by the FBI, the SEC added.
Klein was the president and chief executive officer of KCM Holdings Corp. He is accused of engaging in two restricted stock transactions and one market transaction involving KCM Holdings’ stock.
“Klein and the company paid kickbacks to an undercover FBI agent who portrayed himself as a business associate of a corrupt trustee of an employee pension fund, in exchange for the fund’s purchase of 2.5 million shares of restricted KCM Holdings stock,” the SEC said. “Klein attempted to conceal the kickbacks through a consulting agreement with a phony company that would receive the kickbacks. In another scheme, Klein bribed a purported corrupt stockbroker (actually an undercover FBI agent) to purchase KCM Holdings stock in the open market for brokerage clients with discretionary accounts.”
Thomas Schroepfer was president and president of of SmokeFree Innotec Inc. He, too, got caught in the sting, the SEC said.
For his part, Fuentes was a promoter of SmokeFree’s stock, and “paid kickbacks to an undercover FBI agent, posing as the business associate of a corrupt employee pension fund trustee, in exchange for the fund’s purchase of 400,000 shares of restricted SmokeFree stock,” the SEC said.
Schroepfer, the SEC said, “attempted to conceal the kickbacks through a consulting agreement with a phony company created to receive the kickbacks.
“In addition, SmokeFree issued shares of its stock to a cooperating witness for acting as a middleman in the scheme,” the SEC said.
Gibson “created a now-defunct website, Roaringpennystocks.com, to promote shares of Xtreme Motorsports International Inc., as part of a planned pump-and-dump scheme,” the SEC charged.
He is accused of touting Xtreme Motorsports “by blasting a series of e-mails to potential investors” and posting “false testimonials on the site from purported investors raving about their success in following the website’s stock picks,” the SEC said.
In a separate case in Maryland last month, prosecutors announced that federal agents had created a “payment processor” to infiltrate illegal gambling operations.
The name of the Feds’ “payment processor” was Linwood Payment Solutions — and its website now serves this message:
“Linwood Payment Solutions is a Department of Homeland Security Undercover Business set up to identify and prosecute companies accepting and paying out funds for U.S. customers who gamble online illegally.”
In response to a white-collar fraud epidemic involving huge sums of money and fraudsters and criminals operating both domestically and internationally, U.S. agencies, including the Secret Service, ICE and others, have been employing techniques once largely reserved for organized-crime probes.
