SEC Charges Penny Stock Company, CEO and Others with Multi-Million Dollar Fraud

SEC

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced it charged an issuer, its CEO, and six other entities and individuals with participating in a penny stock fraud scheme. The SEC also charged certain of the participants with operating as unregistered dealers, and obtained emergency relief to halt their ongoing conduct. According to the SEC's complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, GPL Ventures purchased, since at least July 2017, more than 1.5 billion shares of HempAmericana Inc. stock through a Regulation A offering, with the understanding that HempAmericana would use a portion of the offering proceeds to secretly finance stock promotions that would enable GPL Ventures to sell its HempAmericana shares at a profit. read more »

SEC Charges Pearson plc for Misleading Investors About Cyber Breach

SEC

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Pearson plc, a London-based public company that provides educational publishing and other services to schools and universities, agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misled investors about a 2018 cyber intrusion involving the theft of millions of student records, including dates of births and email addresses, and had inadequate disclosure controls and procedures. The SEC's order finds that Pearson made misleading statements and omissions about the 2018 data breach involving the theft of student data and administrator log-in credentials of 13,000 school, district and university customer accounts. read more »

CFTC Fines Tyson Foods $1.5M

MarketWatch

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tyson Foods Inc. $1.5 million. The regulator said the company did not comply with reporting and recordkeeping obligations for its grains cash positions and that it exceeded the regulator's position limits for soybean meal futures contracts traded on the Chicago Board of Trade. The CFTC settled charges with the food company, it said. The penalty Tyson has to pay is a civil monetary penalty. The company did not admit or deny any of the findings in the CFTC's order. According to the CFTC, its order found that over a five-year span that ended this past January, Tyson held CBOT soybean meal futures positions that were more than the then-applicable federal position limits. read more »

How To Detect Fraud In Your Company's Financial Statements

Forbes

Organizations sometimes have gaps in their business and financial processes that allow fraudsters within the organization to take advantage. Some of the kinds of fraud that can affect organizations, for example, include accounting fraud, insurance fraud, identity fraud, billing fraud and tax fraud. It's only a matter of time until the perpetrator is caught, and the consequences can be extreme. If a member of an organization engages in fraud, though, the organization itself could face legal wrangling and liabilities in addition to losing market confidence and goodwill. However, tools, techniques and models can help detect anomalies in data and records to prevent fraud. read more »