Paul Springer writes about corporate finance. He began his career on the options floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange. He's a Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Berkeley and includes classical languages and the study of human error among his hobbies.
I consider it a good sign--perhaps an indication of a widely felt public urge to "Hang 'em High when it comes to financial fraudsters.Let's face it, most of them can't pay the victims back, and...
Yes Virginia, there is a fraudster in all of us, even youToday Commodity Futures Trading Commission acting director of enforcement Steve Obie came right out and said what everyone is thinking while commenting on a recent bust.:This CFTC litigation...
It's not fraud, but it sure is annoying . . . .As the wave of retail bankruptcies goes on and on, plenty of other companies are working hard to stay out of the hole.But oddly, at a time when jobs are...
Those of you following the New York pension fund placement agent debacle are probably wondering what kind of conflict of interest stories will come from California.In the meantime, wrap your mind around the $20 million "payment" that...
Former Legg Mason broker William Joseph Boyle has been barred from the business for defrauding a nun, according to the recent FINRA disciplinary report.It came down like this:FINRA found that Boyle deceived a 64-year-old nun into...
The best frauds are the legal ones, where some diabolical character figures out a way to do something that's soul-shatteringly wrong--and leave the authorities gasping for air when they find that no statute has been violated.A...
Now that pretty much everyone who has real property in California has paid their first installment of tax on it, the pain of paying has resuscitated the old tax reassessment fraud business.It's safe to say that no one...
ETFs, or exchange traded funds, first became popular as listed proxies for such plain vanilla indexes as the S&P 500 (ticker: SPY) and top 100 Nasdaq issues (ticker: QQQQ).Now we have a plethora of ETFs for all...
Thanks to Connie Loizos at PE Hub, we have the inside track on a possible San Francisco mayoral candidacy by venture capitalist Joanna Rees.Rees, when she went by the name Rees-Gallanter, was involved in the embarrassing wind down...
You don't hear this one every day--and that's a good thing.Awards for most morbidly creative fraud planning go out to two Los angeles women who allegedly participated in a scam to cash in life insurance policies...