At the end of every month, the SEC publishes a Notice of Covered Action (NOCA) for recent enforcement actions with monetary penalties exceeding $1 million. For September the SEC published fifteen NOCAs which featured nearly $36 million in sanctions.
Once a NOCA is published, any whistleblower who provided information to the SEC on the case has 90 days to claim a whistleblower award by filing a Form WB-APP. With $36 million in fines noticed in September, there is nearly $12 million in potential whistleblower awards up for grabs.
Here’s a summary of the NOCAs from this month which feature fraudsters hawking fake real estate investments, an app that can(not) detect Covid, $90 million in family loans, luxury cars, vacations and illicit spending on romantic partners.
According to the SEC, Shimon Rosenfeld (an attorney in Brooklyn) convinced friends to send him $7 million in investment funds by telling them he would invest it in real estate. Rosenfeld actually put the funds into a personal brokerage account and lost almost all of it trading, leading to a loss of $6 million to the investors. The case is ongoing.
The SEC settled charges against an alleged fraudster, Aron Govil. The SEC allegesthat Govil defrauded investors in two companies he controlled, Cemtrex and Telidyne. The SEC alleges that Govil:
- Took company money and used it to finance personal expenses;
- Secretly sold company stock while paying stock promoters to tout the stock; and
- Lied about the companies’…
