Phantom actions, very real losses for more than 650 American retirees. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, the American stock market watchdog) has filed a complaint against a network of more than 100 brokers who have sold, since December 2020, shares presented as privileged access to SpaceX, Anduril, Anthropic and Perplexity. The arrangement brought in $74 million to eleven private funds set up from offices on Long Island and New Jersey. Nothing far removed, in substance, from the $8.6 billion investor fraud that the SEC was already tracking this summer. The hunting ground is the same, the bait too, the promise of an entry ticket into the tech nuggets before anyone else.
The boiler room, an old recipe for new bait
The method is nothing original. The term boiler room (literally “boiler room”) has for decades referred to these pharmacies which have dozens of agents on the phone, scripts in hand, to sell dubious investments to poorly informed individuals. Here, more than a hundred agents canvassed thousands of prospects with rehearsed arguments, promising access to the most closed tech companies on the planet and swearing, hand on heart, that no hidden fees would burden the investment.
The network, led by The Spaventa Group (TSG), founded in 2020 by former broker Andrew Spaventa, targeted a particular clientele. More than 650 investors put in $100,000 or less. More than 100 were retirees, according to the SEC complaint detailed by Fortune on August 15. The strong argument: access to these companies before their IPO, at a time when SpaceX and Anthropic concentrate all stock market fantasies.
Anthropic at a high price, the hidden margin of the secondary market
The detail that hurts is the margin. The network's Fund 8 bought shares of Anthropic between $32.62 and $41.53 apiece, to resell them for $58.50 to clients. An increase of 41 to 79%, which made it possible to raise $5.8 million in 2024 alone. This secondary market for pre-IPO shares (the shares of companies not yet listed on the stock exchange) already operates in a regulatory gray zone, where prices are set over the counter and where the traceability of securities sometimes leaves something to be desired.
The phenomenon is not isolated. As Forbes recalled last May, this murky market for the resale of SpaceX and OpenAI shares has been attracting unscrupulous intermediaries for months, driven by the general appetite for everything related to artificial intelligence. This growing sector attracts vultures, it’s as old as finance.
Retirement savings sacrificed on the altar of AI hype
The choice of retirees as a target is no coincidence. Unfamiliar with the mechanics of venture capital, they form an ideal population for this type of setup. Many are also seduced by the promise of a return that would make their savings account pale in comparison. The subject goes far beyond the Spaventa case. The Trump administration is pushing to open American retirement plans (401k, the local equivalent of the PER) to private assets and cryptocurrency, in the name of democratizing investment.
Nice project on paper. Except that as the doors open, pharmacies like TSG find new loopholes to exploit, with regulation struggling to keep up.
