SEC v. Ryan Gilbertson, et al. (undisclosed control blocks, 2017)

Alleged — pending

These are allegations. SEC has filed an action; nothing in it has been proven, and the respondents have not been found liable. Everything described on this page is what the regulator alleges, not what a court has found. See our editorial policy.

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 4, 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 April 2017 the SEC announced that Ryan Gilbertson, already sued over Dakota Plains Holdings, had been indicted on 13 counts of wire fraud with Douglas Hoskins and Nicholas Shermeta. A July 2018 SEC release reports that Gilbertson and Hoskins were convicted on June 26, 2018. The SEC's civil case against Gilbertson was not shown to have ended in the releases checked.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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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 on April 13, 2017 (litigation release 23804) that on March 22, 2017 a federal grand jury in Minnesota indicted Gilbertson, Hoskins and Shermeta on wire-fraud counts arising from the conduct the SEC alleged in its October 31, 2016 civil complaint against Gilbertson and others.

The SEC alleges that Gilbertson and a co-founder installed their fathers as figurehead executives to secretly control Dakota Plains, had the company borrow from them on terms giving them bonus payments tied to the stock price over its first 20 trading days after a reverse merger, and enlisted friends to orchestrate trading that lifted the price from 30 cents to over $12 and triggered bonus payments of $32,851,800. These are allegations in the civil case.

A later SEC release, dated July 12, 2018, reports that on June 26, 2018 a jury convicted Gilbertson on 21 counts of wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and Hoskins on 6 counts, with sentencing set for November 2018. That is a criminal outcome. The releases checked do not report a final judgment or settlement in the SEC's civil action, so the civil case is still recorded as filed; the other respondent covered by the earlier order, Shermeta, settled separately. Checked on 2026-10-04: no civil outcome found on the SEC litigation-release pages.

The record previously showed $75,000 disgorgement and $11,075 interest, which are Shermeta's figures from his own settled order; both are cleared. This library tags the matter as undisclosed control blocks; the reverse merger is background to the bonus structure.

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.

• Undisclosed control blocks — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2017-04-13 Litigation release published
2. 2018-06-26 Gilbertson and Hoskins convicted in the parallel criminal case

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
• SEC litigation release, convictions (LR-24198)

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.

Same matter

The library links these 2 records because they appear to concern one matter: the same lead defendant, an overlapping technique tag and close filing dates, or a shared court docket or a release that cites the other. Records are listed by date filed.

This grouping is the library's, made by matching names, techniques, dates and citations when the site is built. It is not the regulator's or a court's determination that the records are one case, and it errs towards missing a link rather than making a false one.

Related actions

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

Record added September 10, 2026. If this matter has since resolved, been withdrawn or been dismissed, we want to know: submit a correction.