On one of the websites, Jonathan met a man called Ira Monas. Ira worked for two of the companies whose stock Jonathan owned. Ira’s job for these companies was to tell people on the internet that they should buy these companies’ stock because the companies were making a lot of money and the stocks’ value was going to rise quickly. Ira did this even though he knew that, in fact, the companies were losing money. Because Ira was being paid by the companies, he was breaking the law by being dishonest in this way.

Some other people realized what Ira was doing and they told the “SEC” about it. (The SEC controls the stock markets in the United States.) Then the SEC found out that Jonathan had been repeating, on the websites, some of the things that Ira had said. They called Jonathan to their office and told him that what he had been doing was against the law and that he was in serious trouble.

They couldn’t prove, though, that when Jonathan had repeated what Ira said, he knew that these things were false. They made him give them $280,000 of the money he had made, but he was allowed to keep the rest, about half a million dollars.

Jonathan gave them the money, but he still said he had done nothing wrong and he continued buying and selling stocks and talking about them on the websites.

-information from: The Los Angeles Times, 04.01.30 (Daniel Yi); The Los Angeles Times, 04.02.10 (H.G. Reza, Joel Rubin); The Los Angeles Times, 04.02.12 (Joel Rubin, Christine Hanley); The Los Angeles Times, 04.02.13 (H.G. Reza, Jennifer Mena); The Los Angeles Times, 04.02.23 (H.G. Reza, Christine Hanley, James Ricci);