The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued fraud charges and an asset freeze against a trader who used Twitter to spread false information about a defunct company. According to the SEC’s Complaint, the trader, Andrew Fassari secretly profited $900,000 by selling his own holdings of the company’s stock. The SEC complaint said he used his Twitter handle @OCMillionaire to tweet false statements about Arcis Resources Corp. (ARCS), a defunct Nevada company with publicly traded securities, in December. Specifically, the complaint alleges that, on Dec. 9, Fassari began purchasing more than 41 million shares of Arcis stock shortly before tweeting false information about the company to his thousands of Twitter followers, including falsely claiming that it was reviving its operations, expanding its business, and being backed by “huge” investors . The complaint also alleges that, “between Dec. 9 and 21, 2020, Fassari made approximately 120 tweets that referenced ‘$ARCS,’ dozens of which were false and misleading.”
