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US Charges English Twins Over $1.2m 'Stock Robot' Fraud
peetm writes "Twin brothers from England face U.S. civil charges for allegedly defrauding investors out of $1.2m (£745,000) through a bogus stock-picking robot. The twins, Alexander and Thomas Hunter, were just 16 years old when they devised the scam — which fooled around 75,000 people, according to U.S. officials."
Needed to figure out what exactly was bogus about this since there shouldn't be anything too wrong about someone recommending stocks that fail even with a "robot".
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the stocks "picked" were actually firms that paid the twins hefty fees
I assume it's because there's a difference between just being bad stocks and being bribed into recommending stocks.
21st century version of the Mechanical Turk
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Twins are evil.
Shouldn't the companies that paid them to get featured in their app be charged as well?
They have already been tried in the UK court and lost most of what the gained. It is a bid unfair in my mind.
Do you think it would be allowed, ie tried twice, once by the US government and then by the UK government if they where in the US. They would probabily get a job offer in the US.
I can't wait for the moment they get a similar issue with a Chinese coder........
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
£745,000. 75000 people. Fraud or not, they've scammed these people for on average just under £9.95 a person. Don't know about you, but if I found out I'd been scammed by two teenagers to the tune of a tenner for being greedy and gullible, I'd consider that a very cheap lesson and I might even have a laugh over it. Well done, Hunter twins, for making a million dollars out of greedy people. And another lesson learned: If you've got money, people get envious.
Now what I always find interesting is when the numbers don't work. According to TFA, "investors paid $47 for newsletters listing Marl's stock picks and $97 for a home version of the software". Yet on average, the investors are down just a tenner? I don't mean to nitpick, but to me that sounds like the bloody thing actually worked. Oh, wait, it was unregulated software. What would you expect from two 16-year-olds?
I'm a bit worried about the precedent this is setting though. If I choose to buy a newspaper with a horoscope in there, or if I buy horoscope software and the predictions don't come true, should I sue?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
they should be hired to run the government programs, such as health insurance, social security, etc. In fact Strategic Hazard Intervention Economics Logistics Directorate agency could be created with all of these guys, including Bernie Madoff as the program's director.
You can't handle the truth.
So somebody gives a shit about 2, 2 bit crooks in UK. Good for them.
How about SEC not doing their job even though they've been notified multiple times about a pump and dump operation that is ran by the very definition of a pumper and dumper?
Oh, I forgot, that's the same SEC that was notified about Madoff years before his pyramid blew up. Same SEC that was absolutely useless during the Internet and the housing bubbles and now during this bond and dollar bubble. Well, I suppose later they'll come out and say: nobody could have seen it coming.
You can't handle the truth.
There was a chinese wall ! One twin was handling commission for firms, the other one recommendations to clients.
Oh wait, that's only good if you're Goldman Sachs.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
"defrauding investors" requires there to be investors present. A more accurate description would be "defrauding speculators". Knowledgeable investors are rare when so many of us enter the stock market with no understanding of the specific details of what we are 'investing' in. We jump into 401Ks because we get taxed more otherwise, and interest rates are held low so that actual saving is impossible. We are speculators, which is why such fraud is even remotely possible.
They have already faced criminal charges in the UK, so they cannot face them again in the USA. What the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has done is bring a civil case against them. Now I am not sure why this feels wrong to me, because I would be very happy for the UK investors who lost out to bring a civil case against them, but having a government agency do it to someone who has already faced criminal charges just feels wrong.
Their main legal mistake was that they were providing unregulated financial advise.
Other than that, their business wasn't all that different from most of the others. Pretty much everyone in the financial market, big bank or small trading company, is bordering on outright fraud. Yes, I have bit of insider knowledge, from long before the crash. This has been going on for quite a while.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Figured this out a long time ago.
Although not exactly as described in the article, I figured it out to not be real simply because it didn't have access to a real-time data source. It's kinda like saying, here's a program that gives you free satellite TV, yet doesn't require a satellite dish.
So the question was, either the stock picking robot was being fed data for pump and dump scams or it was malware and actually waiting for brokerage software to run to get the passwords.
to clarify the term: a 'put' is an option to sell at a certain price. so one makes money if the market price is lower than the option price.
It's a bet that the item's price will go down, and in this case a distrust of his banker's stock tips.
('call' option is the other way around)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
How is that worth international intrigue?
This is awesome, at least the project is. Did these brothers really defraud anyone? Think about it, they offered stock advice which caused a change in the stock market, stock brokers do the same thing and there no more accurate. If your going to charge these twins then you need to charge every single broker who has ever lost money by making bad stock picks because in a sense this program did nothing different.
the Credit Default Swap was invented by JP Morgan's group - - In London.
the AIG company had all of its CDO / CDS exposure - - in it's London branch.
they did this --because London was less regulated than the US--.
Many of the banks involved in the CDO scam were -- from the UK --, including RBS.
Barclay's and HSBC, which had their names on a huge number of Synthetic CDOs, almost all of which were flat out frauds, was based -- In London--.
I do not say this because I'm talking out my ass, I say it because if you read very many of the crisis books, from "All the Devils are Here" to "Fool's Gold", you will find that is what the people in the industry themselves were saying. Go to London, there are less regulations.
Here's a few:
I was interested until I realised it was about shares and not this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQt2YOYF8Uo