A former broker has been sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay US$5 million for his role in a pump-and-dump scheme that targeted elderly investors.
Last October a federal jury convicted Michael Watts, a former registered broker, on charges of securities fraud, money laundering and conspiracy for his involvement in a criminal conspiracy that used a Long Island boiler room to manipulate the price of shares in Hydrocarb Energy Corp. and other companies.
Today, a U.S. district court judge sentenced Watts to 60 months in prison. He was previously ordered to pay over US$4.4 million in restitution and to forfeit US$560,000.
According to U.S. authorities, from 2014 to 2016, Watts and others worked in a boiler room, cold calling investors and using high-pressure sales tactics to push elderly investors into buying shares, artificially inflating the price and trading volume of Hydrocarb and four other companies’ stock by more than US$147 million.
“Watts, who was one of the largest shareholders in Hydrocarb and therefore knew that the business was in a downward spiral, also used the boiler room to dump more than US$2 million of Hydrocarb shares that he owned or controlled on unsuspecting investors in the months leading to the company’s April 2016 bankruptcy,” authorities said.
All 16 defendants charged in this case have been convicted. Those who have been sentenced have been ordered to serve between two and 10 years in prison.
“Today’s sentence holds Watts accountable for the economic harm he intentionally inflicted on the victims, many of them senior citizens living on a fixed income, and should serve as a warning to others like him that there will be consequences for crimes of greed,” said Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a release.