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:
“I met a Californian who would
Talk California—a state so blessed
He said, in climate, none had ever died there
A natural death, and Vigilance Committees
Had had to organize to stock the graveyards
And vindicate the state’s humanity.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Things gained through unjust fraud are never secure.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“If they have a popular thought they have to go into a darkened room and lie down until it passes.”
—Kelvin MacKenzie (b. 1946)
“When women finally get liberated, they’ll do the same that men do—dog eat dog— that’s what our culture is.... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.”
—Alice Neel (1900–1984)