AI gets its own "boiler room" scandal

The SEC has a new villain in the private-markets gold rush, and this one comes with a full cast of cold callers. The regulator filed a complaint Friday in the Southern District of New York against The Spaventa Group, a Long Island-based outfit run by former broker Andrew Spaventa, accusing it of running a classic boiler room dressed up for the AI era. Instead of penny stocks, the alleged pitch was shares in Anduril, Anthropic, Perplexity, and SpaceX before its IPO — the kind of names that make retail investors weak in the knees right now.

According to the SEC, more than 100 agents worked the phones, making thousands of calls over four and a half years, from December 2020 through June 2025. More than 800 people eventually bought in, the agency says, and most were retail investors. Over 650 of them put in $100,000 or less. More than 100 were retirees. Across 11 private funds run out of offices on Long Island and in New Jersey, the operation allegedly pulled in over $74 million.

The hook, as regulators tell it, was a promise that investors wouldn't get hit with the kind of hidden markups that plague this corner of the market. The SEC says that promise was hollow. Investors reportedly paid on average 46% more for their positions than Spaventa's own companies paid to acquire them, and in some cases the premium hit 91%. None of that, the complaint alleges, was disclosed to the people writing the checks.

Spaventa denies the SEC's claims, telling Fortune as much when reached by phone, so this is far from settled. But the scale here dwarfs the last comparable case the SEC brought this year, against Giovanni Pennetta, who allegedly misappropriated $10 million while selling fraudulent shares in companies including Anduril before pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud. Seventy-four million dollars and 800 investors is a different order of magnitude.

What ties both cases together is the same unregulated secondary market that lets ordinary people buy a sliver of Anthropic or SpaceX without those companies ever signing off on the sale. That market has exploded alongside the AI boom, and regulators clearly aren't done poking at it.