Microcap Stock Fraud in Popular Culture
Microcap stock fraud has been explored in several books and movies.
A book that explored microcap fraud was the 2003 book Born to Steal by Gary Weiss. It described the microcap underworld of the 1990s through the eyes of a young broker named Louis Pasciuto. Although the book focuses on Mafia infiltration of brokerages, it also describes in detail the operation of microcap fraud.
Microcap fraud was explored in the anonymously written books License to Steal and in The Scorpion and the Frog. Both books explore pump and dump schemes in some detail but, unlike Born to Steal, do not provide the real names of the specific firms and people described.
This kind of fraud has also provided the title for a book by Robert H. Tillman and Michael L. Indergaard called Pump and Dump: The Rancid Rules of the New Economy.
A fictional account of pump and dump schemes can be seen in the movie Boiler Room. According to press accounts, the director and writer of the film worked briefly as a cold-caller for the Stratton Oakmont brokerage house, which was shut down by regulators in the late 1990s.
A pump and dump scam was also the subject of several episodes of the popular HBO series, The Sopranos, pulled off by Matthew Bevilaqua and Sean Gismonte.
On an episode of the legal drama Law & Order, entitled "Trade This," the murder of a young stockbroker at a prestigious firm is found to be related to his boss's involvement in several pump and dump scams financed by members of a Mafia crime family. Similarly, in the franchise's first computer game, Law & Order: Dead on the Money, the victim is a female stockbroker who was being investigated for a pump and dump scam involving a biotech company's suspicious IPO.
This strategy was also fictionalised by Jeffrey Archer in his book Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.
Read more about this topic: Microcap Stock Fraud
Famous quotes containing the words stock, fraud, popular and/or culture:
“Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“He saw, he wish’d, and to the prize aspir’d.
Resolv’d to win, he meditates the way,
By force to ravish, or by fraud betray;
For when success a lover’s toil attends,
Few ask, if fraud or force attain’d his ends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)