NEW YORK (AP) — A 25-year-old man who invented a phoney buyer to manipulate the price of Fitbit stock and cash in was sentenced Friday to two years in pen.
Robert W. Murray told a New York federal judge he deeply regretted be dressed done “one of the stupidest things I can imagine anyone ever doing.”
While Murray didn’t manage a killing — federal regulators put his profits at about $3,000 — U.S. District Consider Katherine Forrest said there was more at stake.
“You undertook a wrong that needs to be treated seriously in our society because so much of our economic well-being depends on a well-functioning capital market,” she said.
Murray, a reflex engineer from Chesapeake, Virginia, pleaded guilty last November to protections fraud.
Prosecutors say he filed a regulatory document in November 2016 saying a mythical company had offered to buy fitness tracker maker Fitbit at well all through its share price. He used someone else’s name — scrounged from the internet — to insist on he was an officer in the phony company and took steps to disguise his computer’s internet greet, according to prosecutors and the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
The stock in short shot up about 10 percent, and Murray sold Fitbit ancestry options he had. Other investors ended up paying artificially inflated tolls, according to the SEC, which has an ongoing civil lawsuit against Murray.
San Francisco-based Fitbit Inc. dipped to comment.
Murray’s lawyer, Christopher Flood, said the crime occurred when his client was at “a significant emotional low point” after a difficult breakup. The stock-market rookie didn’t fully grasp the wider impact of his action, his lawyer asserted.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Allen said the crime “goes to the nerve of the markets that rely on the integrity of participants.”