A man named his fraud vehicle “Optimus Prime Financial” and a federal court still took four years to catch up with him. In that time, real people lost real money.

The Anatomy of a Con: Shell Companies From A to Z

Ongkaruck Sripetch did not run one fake company. He ran at least nine entities simultaneously, each designed to create the illusion of a legitimate financial operation. These included Adtron Inc. (also marketed as Stockpalooza.com), ATG Inc., DOIT Ltd., Doji Capital Inc., King Mutual Solutions Inc., Optimus Prime Financial Inc., Orca Bridge, Redline International, and UAIM Corporation.

The strategy is called a “pump-and-dump” scheme. Sripetch and his co-defendants created a false appearance of active, legitimate trading in penny stocks by coordinating fake buy and sell orders at the same price and time. Ordinary investors, seeing what looked like real market activity, bought in. Sripetch then sold, pocketed the profits, and left those investors holding worthless shares.

Sripetch served as president of Adtron Inc., which also operated under the name Stockpalooza.com. The SEC complaint named six individual defendants alongside the shell companies, meaning this was a coordinated group operation, not a lone wolf.

The Mechanics: How Fake Trades Rob Real People

Federal law prohibits creating a “false or misleading appearance of active trading” in a security. Sripetch violated this by entering coordinated buy and sell orders of substantially the same size, at substantially the same time, and at substantially the same price. This is called “wash trading,” and it tricks the market’s own systems into reporting fake volume.

Penny stocks, by definition, trade at under five dollars per share. They are thinly traded, lightly regulated, and attract retail investors who cannot afford blue-chip stocks. Targeting penny stocks means Sripetch deliberately chose the markets where working-class and small retail investors are most active.

When real investors saw apparently active trading in these stocks, they bought in, believing real demand existed. It did not. The only real trades were the ones Sripetch and his network engineered to create the illusion. Every dollar of Sripetch’s gain represents a real loss for someone who trusted what they saw on their brokerage screen.

The Non-Financial Ledger

What the Dollar Figures Can’t Capture

The court’s disgorgement order of $2,251,923.16 (roughly what a minimum-wage worker earns in 112 years) represents Sripetch’s profits. But it does not represent the total money that left victims’ accounts. Disgorgement only recovers what the fraudster made. The losses suffered by every investor who bought in on the fake trading signals: those losses are not fully counted here. Those people lost real money. Some of them lost savings. Some lost retirement funds. The court document does not tell us their names. Federal enforcement rarely does.

Consider who invests in penny stocks. These are not hedge fund managers. Penny stocks market themselves to everyday people who cannot afford a single share of Amazon or Google. These are nurses, warehouse workers, gig economy workers, and retirees trying to grow a few hundred dollars into something more. Sripetch’s operation specifically targeted this stratum of the investing public, because it is the stratum easiest to fool and the least equipped to fight back.

The fraud ran long enough that a four-year legal process followed. The SEC filed its complaint in 2020. The final judgment landed in April 2024. During those four years, the frozen accounts sat locked. The victims waited. The scheme’s architects went through legal proceedings while everyday life continued for everyone they had harmed. That four-year gap between filing and final judgment is itself a kind of secondary harm: the system moves slowly, and slow justice costs victims time they do not have.

Federal law provides a specific protection buried in Section VIII of the final judgment: Sripetch cannot declare bankruptcy to escape this debt. The court explicitly ruled that the disgorgement, interest, and penalties survive bankruptcy under Section 523 of the Bankruptcy Code. This matters because bankruptcy is historically the escape hatch that wealthy fraudsters use to leave victims with nothing. The court closed it. But the victims still have to wait for the SEC to propose and execute a distribution plan, under the court’s supervision. That plan has not yet been announced in this document. The money collected sits in a fund. The people who lost it are still waiting.

Legal Receipts

Straight From the Court Documents. No Spin.

“Defendant Sripetch is permanently restrained and enjoined from violating Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934… to employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud.”

Final Judgment, Section I — United States District Court, April 17, 2024

“Defendant Sripetch is permanently restrained and enjoined from violating Section 9(a)(1) of the Exchange Act… for the purpose of creating a false or misleading appearance of active trading in any security… to effect any transaction in such security which involves no change in the beneficial ownership thereof.”

Final Judgment, Section IV — Wash Trading Prohibition

“Defendant Sripetch is liable for disgorgement of $2,251,923.16, representing net profits gained as a result of the conduct alleged in the Complaint, together with prejudgment interest thereon in the amount of $1,051,353.77, for a total of $3,303,276.93.”

Final Judgment, Section VI — Financial Penalties

“Defendant Sripetch is permanently barred from participating in an offering of penny stock, including engaging in activities with a broker, dealer, or issuer for purposes of issuing, trading, or inducing or attempting to induce the purchase or sale of any penny stock.”

Final Judgment, Section V — Permanent Penny Stock Bar

“Any debt for disgorgement, prejudgment interest, civil penalty or other amounts due by Defendant Sripetch under this Final Judgment… is a debt for the violation by Defendant Sripetch of the federal securities laws… as set forth in Section 523(a)(19) of the Bankruptcy Code. The allegations in the operative complaint are true and admitted by Defendant Sripetch.”

Final Judgment, Section VIII — Bankruptcy Non-Dischargeability

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality: The Market Belongs to Everyone, Except When It Doesn’t

Stock market fraud does not strike all investors equally. Institutional investors, hedge funds, and high-net-worth individuals have compliance teams, risk departments, and sophisticated algorithmic tools that flag suspicious trading patterns. The retail investor, working from a phone app or a discount brokerage account, has none of that. Penny stock fraud is an inequality amplifier: it extracts wealth from the people least able to absorb the loss and channels it to the operators of the scheme.

Sripetch’s network of nine shell entities allowed the scheme to spread across multiple fake companies, each potentially attracting its own pool of victims. The coordinated wash trading, where buy and sell orders at identical prices create fake volume, is a technique that directly exploits the logic retail investors are taught to follow: volume means interest, interest means value. The entire fraud operated by weaponizing the rules of rational investing against the people who followed them.

The total disgorgement of $2,251,923.16 (equivalent to the lifetime earnings of roughly six median-income American workers), plus $1,051,353.77 (enough to send 35 students through a full year of in-state college) in prejudgment interest, tells only the story of Sripetch’s gains. The aggregate losses across all victims are a larger number that this document does not disclose. Every dollar Sripetch extracted represented a real household budget that came up short somewhere down the line.

The court ordered that funds collected from Sripetch’s frozen accounts at E*Trade, TD Ameritrade, Citibank, and Bank of the West go into a holding fund. The SEC will then propose a distribution plan, subject to court approval. This process takes time. Victims do not receive their money the day the judgment is signed. They wait, again, while the administrative machinery of justice grinds forward. For someone who lost retirement savings, that wait has a cost measured in anxiety, not dollars.

Public Trust and Market Integrity: When the System Feels Rigged, It Is Because It Was

Every successful securities fraud scheme erodes public trust in financial markets. When retail investors get burned by schemes like Sripetch’s, a portion of them leave the market entirely. Others become cynical and stop investing at all. Wealth-building through market participation, one of the few tools available to working-class Americans who cannot afford real estate or private equity, becomes associated with danger rather than opportunity.

The six individual co-defendants named in the original complaint, Amanda Flores, Brehnen Knight, Andrew McAlpine, Ashmit Patel, Michael Wexler, and Dominic Williams, indicate that this was an organized group. This document covers only Sripetch’s final judgment; the proceedings against the other defendants are separate and their outcomes are not included here. The existence of a multi-person network means the scheme had redundancy, coordination, and likely a division of labor. That level of organization signals premeditation, not impulse.

The Cost of the Con

What Now?

Who Ran This and Who Watches Them

The following individual defendants were named in the original SEC complaint alongside Sripetch. Their individual case outcomes are not included in this document and remain separately adjudicated:

• Amanda Flores, Co-Defendant
• Brehnen Knight, Co-Defendant
• Andrew McAlpine, Co-Defendant
• Ashmit Patel, Co-Defendant
• Michael Wexler, Co-Defendant
• Dominic Williams, Co-Defendant

Ongkaruck Sripetch served as President of Adtron Inc., the primary entity in this case. He is now permanently barred from penny stock trading and faces a judgment that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.

The Watchlist: Agencies That Should Be Doing More of This

• SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission): Filed this action. Continues to hold the recovered fund pending a distribution plan. Track SEC enforcement actions at sec.gov/divisions/enforce.
• FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): Regulates brokers and brokerage firms. Reports of suspicious broker activity can be submitted at finra.org.
• CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau): Tracks financial predation against consumers. File complaints at consumerfinance.gov.
• DOJ (Department of Justice): Criminal charges related to securities fraud often run parallel to SEC civil enforcement. Watch for any related criminal proceedings.
• State Securities Regulators: Your state has its own securities regulator. Many pump-and-dump schemes cross state lines but originate locally. Find yours via NASAA.org.

The Ground-Level Response

If you or someone you know lost money in a penny stock scheme, start at sec.gov/tcr to file a tip or complaint. The SEC runs a whistleblower program that pays financial awards for information that leads to successful enforcement actions. You do not have to be a lawyer to report what you saw. Grassroots investor protection organizations like Better Markets (bettermarkets.org) push for stronger financial regulation and represent the public interest in regulatory proceedings. Join them, support them, or amplify their work. The fraudsters had a nine-company network. The resistance needs one too.