Pandemic ‘bull market’ firm charged
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — The founders of a company called Raging Bull tout themselves as expert stock traders who teach customers how they, too, can become millionaires. Marketing emails said they found a “hidden bull market” in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Federal regulators say the company operators have defrauded consumers out of more than $137 million over the past three years. And the coronavirus-fueled economic crisis hasn’t tempered their “reckless” efforts to dupe vulnerable investors, government lawyers wrote in a court filing Monday.
The Federal Trade Commission sued Ragingbull.com LLC and the company’s co-founders, Jeffrey Bishop and Jason Bond, in Maryland. FTC attorneys are seeking federal court orders freezing company assets, halting the fraud scheme and awarding relief to consumers, including refunds and restitution.
A purported disclaimer buried on the company’s websites acknowledges that there is nothing to substantiate its claims that consumers are likely to make the “market-beating returns” that Raging Bull advertises, Monday’s lawsuit said.
“To sustain this illegal operation, Defendants have poured millions of dollars each year into their deceptive marketing campaigns, filled with false earnings claims and targeting scores of new consumer victims,” FTC attorneys wrote.
The FTC said Raging Bull used celebrities, including former baseball star Jose Canseco and former stockbroker Jordan Belfort, to promote their services. Belfort was the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s 2013 movie “The Wolf of Wall Street.” The FTC lawsuit doesn’t accuse Canseco or Belfort of any wrongdoing.
Bishop and Bond formed Raging Bull in 2014. The company sells online services related to stock and options trading and claims to have thousands of subscribers, according to the lawsuit.
The FTC said bank records show the company is bilking consumers, many of whom are retirees or immigrants, out of millions of dollars each month. Many consumers have had their refund requests denied and had trouble canceling their online services, the FTC said.
Ads for Bishop’s services call him a “genius trader who has made millions in the stock market.” The company’s website said Bond is a former gym teacher who taught himself to trade stocks and rid himself of $250,000 in debt.
The company’s marketing materials don’t tell consumers that Bishop and Bond primarily derive their incomes from Raging Bull customers’ subscription fees, not from stock and options trades. The lawsuit said they have incurred “substantial and persistent losses” from their own stock and options trading activities.
In 2017, Raging Bull emailed subscribers that Bond was invited to speak at Harvard Business School and posted video of the speech. But the FTC said the school never invited him. Instead, the agency said Bond paid a third-party promoter to stage the event at the Harvard Faculty Club using a fake Harvard insignia.