He calls himself “America’s Prophet,” a psychic, trained by Nepalese m0onks in the art of time travel, who can foretell the future of the stock market. But to the authorities, Sean David Morton is simply a fraud — and a really, really bad psychic.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Morton for securities fraud on Thursday, claiming he swindled more than US$6 million from investors by promising them “piles of money” and spiritual happiness.
“I have called ALL the highs and lows of the market giving EXACT DATES for rises and crashes over the last 14 years,” court documents quote Morton as saying.
Next to the Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Bernard Madoff, the Morton case might seem like little more than a footnote in the annals of financial fraud. But the story is so unlike the usual Wall Street fare — it touches on late-night talk radio, a company called Magic Eight Ball and the Dalai Lama — that even in this post-Madoff world it all seems a bit hard to fathom.
By his own reckoning, Morton is a modern-day Nostradamus. According to his Web site, the Dalai Lama sent him to a monastery in Nepal, where a fusion of Eastern spirituality and Western psychic techniques helped him develop the “spiritual remote viewing” system.
He told the Los Angeles Times that he grew up in Texas, the son of a NASA public relations official.
Morton solicited investors through a newsletter with 20,000 subscribers, run through his Delphi Investment Group; his Web site; and his frequent appearances on radio shows like Coast to Coast, a late-night syndicated program focused on the paranormal. He and his wife, Melissa, created three unregistered vehicles for their investors. One was called Magic Eight Ball Distribution.
The SEC named Melissa Morton and a religious organization the couple founded as relief defendants, meaning that the regulator is seeking to retrieve profits from them but has not filed civil charges against either.
According to the SEC, Morton pledged to invest the money he collected with foreign currency traders, who would act according to his psychic revelations. The strategy purportedly earned returns as high as 117 percent over five-month periods.
The reality, the SEC claims, was less impressive — and fraudulent. In court filings, the agency claims that Morton actually deposited only US$3.2 million into the trading accounts. The rest was funneled to various entities, with US$240,000 sent to the Prophecy Research Institute, a nonprofit religious group set up by the Mortons.
His predictions weren’t particularly accurate either. On a Nov. 21, 2001, radio broadcast, Morton predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average would rise between April and June of 2002, cresting at “12,000 or so” by December of that year. According to the SEC, the index fell that year, ending at 8,341.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS