A retail investor in Phoenix watched a Citron Research tweet and shorted Roku alongside the man he trusted. Federal prosecutors say that man had already closed his position. The trial of Andrew Left begins this week.
Christopher Knight Lopez ran a Houston investment shop for nearly ten years on forged bank letters and a fictional $2 billion in Treasury bonds. On May 7, 2026, a federal judge called it the most offensive white-collar crime he had seen.
Vincent Camarda built A.G. Morgan Financial Advisors in a Massapequa storefront and steered at least $138 million of his clients' retirement money into a Philadelphia Ponzi, a western mining bet, and his son's coffee startup. On April 3, 2026, he pleaded guilty.
Christopher Knight Lopez ran a fraudulent investment shop out of Katy, Texas for nearly ten years, forging bank letters and selling access to $2 billion in Treasury bonds that did not exist. On May 7, 2026, a federal judge called it the worst white-collar crime he had seen from the bench.
The SEC says a Los Angeles M&A attorney and a Long Island trader ran a leak pipeline out of global law firms for six years, turning client confidences into trades. Twenty-one defendants. Twelve-plus deals. Two fugitives.
The SEC says two CEOs sold a short-squeeze story to drive a stock high enough to raise $137.5 million, then spun the oil and gas assets into a private company nobody could sell. The trading halt came on a Friday in December.
Jason Burt spent twenty-two years inside the agency that polices the screen you trade on. On May 1, 2026, he walks out the door, and the room he leaves behind is quieter, leaner, and pointed at a smaller list of cases.
For more than a decade, Jay Lucas raised $50 million from over 200 investors by presenting himself as a builder of early-stage wellness companies. The SEC now alleges the building was a stage set, and the investors were the ones holding it up.
In March 2026, the SEC settled a three-year case against one of crypto's most powerful operators for ten million dollars and a charge that required only negligence, then dismissed everything else. The people who bought the tokens when the trading looked real got nothing.
Two hundred and seventy-two investors put money into a California real estate fund that promised steady monthly income from rental homes. The SEC alleges the monthly checks kept coming only because fresh investors were paying for them, and the people running the fund knew it from nearly the beginning.
The SEC just released its best enforcement number in history, and the headline is almost entirely one man who ran a Ponzi scheme before some of the people reading this were old enough to vote. What the number underneath that number looks like is a different story altogether.
The agency that is supposed to catch financial fraud just announced it is done measuring success by how many cases it brings. Before you decide whether that is reassuring or alarming, read what they replaced the old measure with.
The SEC shrank its enforcement staff by nearly 17 percent in 2025 and dismissed dozens of cases inherited from the prior administration. For people who got a private placement pitch last year, that number matters more than the press release announcing it.