SEC v. Drake et al., Messier et al., Brooks (boiler rooms, 2020)

Judgment entered

Checked against the primary document on October 2, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, with sampled and disputed records read a second time. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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In 2020, the SEC charged five people with running boiler-room operations for a matched-trading scheme in dozens of microcap stocks, and three solicitors with acting as unregistered brokers by cold-calling investors into buying at prices and volumes coordinated with selling shareholders. Five of the eight consented to final judgments.

The record

Structured fields for this action, as recorded in our case library.
Agency	SEC
Release number	LR-24718
Date filed	2020-01-16
Date resolved	2020-01-16
Status	judgment
Asset class	equities
Criminal parallel	No
Bars imposed	conduct-based injunction
Defendants	Gregory Drake (individual) ; Scott Messier (individual) ; Jay Scoratow (individual) ; Jason St. Amour (individual) ; David Wolfson (individual) ; Thomas Brooks (individual) ; Stephen Grossman (individual) ; Stephen Moleski (individual)
Cited as charged or alleged	Exchange Act s.10(b) and Rule 10b-5 ; Exchange Act s.15(a) ; Securities Act s.17(a) (statutes and rules cited in the document; not a finding that they were violated)
Techniques	Boiler rooms

What was ordered

Civil penalty: —
Disgorgement: —
Prejudgment interest: —
Total relief: —
Alleged gain: —

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

the Securities and Exchange Commission announced this matter on January 16, 2020 as litigation release 24718. The defendants named are Gregory Drake, Scott Messier, Jay Scoratow, Jason St. Amour and David Wolfson (charged with fraud) and Thomas Brooks, Stephen Grossman and Stephen Moleski (charged as unregistered brokers), in complaints filed in the Central District of California and the Southern District of Florida. As alleged, from at least December 2014 to March 2018 the first group ran boiler rooms whose solicitors cold-called prospects and had them buy microcap shares at coordinated prices and volumes so that selling shareholders' sell orders would match. Drake, St. Amour, Brooks, Messier and Scoratow consented to final judgments with injunctions; the claims against the other three continued. The earlier record listed the defendants as three truncated surnames.

This library tags the matter as boiler rooms, based on the conduct the document describes. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's: agencies charge statutory provisions, not technique names.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

Boiler rooms — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

2020-01-16 Litigation release published

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

SEC litigation release

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Action	Agency	Filed	Technique	Penalty	Status
SEC v. Andrew Spaventa and others (boiler rooms, 2026)	SEC	2026-08-17	Boiler Rooms	—	filed
SEC v. Timothy Page, Trevor Page and others (boiler rooms, 2024)	SEC	2024-11-20	Boiler Rooms , Undisclosed Control Blocks	$7.7m	judgment
SEC v. Mario Gogliormella, Steven Lacaj, and Karim Ibrahim a/k/a/ Chris Hayes (boiler rooms, 2024)	SEC	2024-06-12	Boiler Rooms	—	filed
SEC v. Legend Venture Partners LLC (boiler rooms, 2023)	SEC	2023-07-11	Boiler Rooms	—	filed
SEC v. Vuuzle Media Corp., Vuuzle Media Corp. Limited, Ronald Shane Flynn, and Richard Marchitto (boiler rooms, 2023)	SEC	2023-06-27	Boiler Rooms	$25.8m	judgment
SEC v. Matthew Nicosia, William Reininger, Fabrizio Di Carlo, and Ronald Touchard (boiler rooms, 2023)	SEC	2023-04-10	Boiler Rooms	$223k	judgment

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.