Agora Inc., Porter Stansberry fined $1.6 million for Securities Fraud
If you have been investing for any length of time, you are probably familiar with Agora Inc. and their breathless direct marketing pieces about stocks that are poised to skyrocket.
Do not buy anything from Agora Inc. — Agora Inc. does not run money; they publish newsletters. If they were as good at running money as their newsletters say they are, they would not be publishing newsletters. They would be running money; it pays better.
The SEC sued Porter Stansberry and Agora Inc. for fraud in 2003.
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp18090.htm
In 2007, they were found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of $1,312,620 and penalties of $240,000. For your reading pleasure, I pulled the documents from Maryland Federal District Court.
Thanks to Stansberry, I lost some money on VaxGen stock, so I think this couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys. A few years later, I was having lunch with an executive of a biotech company. When I asked him about VaxGen, he said, “Everyone in the business knew that vaccine would never work.”