A penny for your stock

How Jordan Belfort defrauded investors through a pump-and-dump scam and created the "Wolf of Wall Street" myth

/THREAD/
1/ Jordan Belfort was born in 1962 and raised by a middle-class family in Bayside Queens, New York.

He got his start as a door-to-door salesman for meat and seafood companies in Long Island.
2/ Despite his claims that his venture was successful and employed several workers, he filed for bankruptcy in 1987.

He was hired as a stockbroker trainee at L.F. Rothschild but was fired after the Black Monday crash in 1987.
3/ He then proceeded to found Stratton Oakmont as a "boiler room" company for selling penny stocks and defrauding investors via pump-and-dump schemes.
4/ He used high-pressure sales tactics selling questionable investments via telephone presenting falsified or bolstered information about the companies.

He was promising enormous returns in a short period of time to his potential investors.
5/ These small public companies had issued shares with prices less than a dollar and were trading over the counter since they were not being priced on the stock exchange trading floor.
6/ Stratton Oakmont became so successful that employed more than 1,000 stock brokers at one point, with a $1 billion trading volume.
7/ The most notable trade was taking Steve Madden's footwear company public via an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Belfort had a controlling interest in the company via proxies, effectively promoting his own stock to unaware investors.
8/ Belfort's lavish and bacchanalian lifestyle earned him a notorious status among Wall Street circles.

He and his firm, however, were under constant media scrutiny and criminal investigation by several federal agencies since the late 1980s.
9/ Belfort was finally indicted charged with securities fraud and money laundering in 1996.

He served 22 months out of his 4-year sentence in prison in exchange for pleading guilty to the F.B.I. for his pump-and-dump scams that cost his investors more than $200 million.
10/ Belfort was ordered to pay back more than $100 to his defrauded investors, in addition to 50% of his income until 2009.
11/ While in jail, he began writing his memoir titled "The Wolf of Wall Street"

It turned into a Hollywood film in 2013 starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie.

/END/
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