A Vancouver con man's guilty plea is set to punctuate a shadowy tale of fraud, deceit, and millions in illicit earnings. Steve M. Bajic, at 53 years old, is prepped to admit his part in a sneaky pump-and-dump scheme involving microcap stocks—the kind of penny shares that can make or break fortunes in the blink of an eye, authorities from the U.S. Attorney's Office revealed in an announcement reported by the Department of Justice.
According to the article by the Departmant of Justice, Bajic and his posse of conspirators played a financial shell game with foreign corporate fronts to hide their stranglehold stocks, thus keeping their shareholding of five percent. An act known as a "pump-and-dump," implicated in pulling the wool over the investing public's eyes, Bajic and his crew's operations allegedly raked in tens of millions in trading proceeds, including over $6 million from just one company renowned as Blake Insomnia Therapeutics, Inc., with its ticker symbol BKIT whispered through the stock market grapevine.
When the gavel comes down, Bajic could face a stretch of up to five years behind bars, three years on parole-like supervision, and a fine that could break the bank—$250,000 or double the windfall or loss, which is enough to give any scam artist nightmares, so says the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines that the judge sticks to like a trusty roadmap in doling out the penalties. Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy and Jodi Cohen, the FBI's top agent in Boston, shone a spotlight on the case, with Assistant U.S. Attorney James R. Drabick of the Securities, Financial and Cyber Fraud Unit taking up the prosecutorial gauntlet, as per the Justice Department's release.
