SEC issues warning as GameStop short-selling war resumes

REUTERS

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission waded into the battle between small investors and Wall Street hedge funds on Friday, warning both brokerages and the pack of social media traders that it was closely monitoring potential wrongdoing.

The week-long slugfest, pitching the little man against major financial institutions, has inflated stocks of a number of previously beaten-down companies, drawn outrage from politicians and calls for action from regulators.

In a rare joint statement the SEC, traditionally cautious with public pronouncements, said it was working closely with other regulators and stock exchange “to ensure that regulated entities uphold their obligations to protect investors and to identify and pursue potential wrongdoing”. read more »

GameStop and Robinhood: Why everyone’s suddenly mad at this stock-trading app

LA TIMES

First it was the Redditors, hatching plans to hype the shares of a sleepy video game retailer. Then it was the hedge fund shorts they had schemed to topple. Now, one of Wall Street’s strangest weeks in memory has a new main character: the stock-trading app Robinhood.

With a historic run-up in the price of GameStop minting millionaires and showing the vulnerability of the stock market to coordinated action and mass hysteria, all eyes turned to the Silicon Valley start-up that was making it easy to get a piece of the action — until suddenly it wasn’t. read more »

Google salvaged Robinhood’s one-star rating by deleting nearly 100,000 negative reviews

THE VERGE

Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make their anger heard. read more »

Electronic Health Records Technology Vendor to Pay $18.25 Million to Resolve Kickback Allegations

DOJ

A national electronic health records (EHR) technology vendor based in Watertown, Massachusetts, athenahealth Inc. (Athena), has agreed to pay $18.25 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by paying unlawful kickbacks to generate sales of its EHR product, athenaClinicals, the Justice Department announced today.

The settlement resolves allegations in a lawsuit filed by Geordie Sanborn and a separate lawsuit filed by Cheryl Lovell and William McKusick; both matters are pending in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts. The lawsuits were filed under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the False Claims Act, which permit private individuals to sue on behalf of the government for false claims and to share in any recovery. The Act allows the government to intervene and take over the action, as it did in these two cases. The whistleblower share to be awarded in connection with the settlement has not been determined. read more »