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
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
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
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including