By: Cydney Posner

The SEC announced today that it had filed charges in a scam designed to con investors into believing they had inadvertently received a confidential stock tip faxed from a stockbroker to his client. Click here for press release. The fax was not the typical unsolicited junk fax recommending penny stocks; rather, the handwritten fax was designed to have the appearance of an urgent message from a financial planner intended only for his client, "Dr. Mitchel," urging "Dr. Mitchel" to immediately buy shares of a stock that was about to triple in price. The SEC alleges that neither the financial planner nor "Dr. Mitchel" exists. Instead, the bogus fax was sent to more than one million recipients across the country in a blast fax, including a fax machine in the SEC's San Francisco office, by stock promoters who made over half a million dollars unloading their shares on duped investors. The complaint also charged a copycatter, as well as a salesman at the fax blast company who encouraged the copycatter.

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