2 years for pump-dump stock scam
A cold-calling boiler room scammer was sentenced to two years in prison Friday for his role in a wide-ranging pumpand-dump stock ripoff that yielded more than $10 million from its mostly elderly victims.
Emin Cohen, 35, will forfeit $86,168 under the sentence imposed by Long Island Federal Judge Johanna Seybert. His restitution to the victims will be decided later, the judge said.
Cohen, a Coram resident who worked under the nomde-grift Ian Grant, was a coldcaller and account executive for My Street Research in Melville, federal prosecutors said.
Along with 15 co-defendants who also worked with the firm, Cohen worked from what the feds called a telephone “boiler room” to persuade his victims to buy publicly traded stocks.
Cohen and his colleagues artificially inflated the prices of the stocks they sold to unwitting and uneducated investors, the feds say. Investors lost millions when the stocks’ prices collapsed. The government estimates investors’ losses at between $14.6 million and $16.5 million.
Some individual investors lost hundreds of thousands in the scheme, which ran from January 2014 to July 2017. “These guys are great manipulators, great talkers,” wrote a man who lost $385,000. He told prosecutors: “We need you to protect us from such scams.”
One of the five companies Cohen was accused of illicitly trading is called Grilled Cheese Truck, which traded Friday at 66 cents a share — a price far too low to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. A Florida man said he lost $30,000 in Grilled Cheese Truck and other stocks, including $10,000 he hoped would fund his grandsons’ college expenses. “The $10,000 is worthless,” he wrote.
The ethos of My Street Research was exemplified by a crude poem posted on the wall of the office called “The Creed.”
The verse — printed over an image of a movie poster for “The Wolf of Wall Street” — includes the lines: “These are my goals, this is my creed, Fueling the fire is my only sense of greed. We’ll pound the phone and with a little bit of luck, we’ll make a ton of money and won’t give a f—k.”