Prosecutor Accuses Orange County Businessman of Illegal Stock Manipulation

The Orange County branch of the U.S. Department of Justice this month filed a criminal conspiracy charge against a Southern California businessman accused of illegally manipulating stock prices for four months in 2011.

Assistant United States Attorney Jennifer L. Waier claims in her filing that she can prove Michael Young “and his co-conspirators would willfully use a device or scheme to defraud purchasers or potential purchasers of the stock of the companies they identified by making or causing to be made materially false statements and failing to disclose material facts” in order to “artificially” inflate stock prices.

No alleged co-conspirators have been named in the government's case.

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Included in Waier's evidence, however, is her assertion that in April 2011, Young “traded 2,500 shares of SYVN at a fraudulently inflated price of $0.79 per share,” according to court records.

Waier also claims she has already negotiated a guilty plea agreement with Young, who was born in 1981, but the prosecutor has not made the document public.

Waier did not include any other additional identifying information about the defendant in her reports.

The case is so new that it has not yet been assigned to a federal judge inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana.

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