2nd Ex-Broker Gets Prison Term In Pump And Dump Scheme With LI Boiler Room

CENTRAL ISLIP, NY — A former registered broker who conspired to promote and manipulate the price of shares in publicly traded companies was sentenced to five years in prison, the United States Department of Justice announced.

Lawrence Isen, 69, of San Diego, California, conspired with a boiler room operation based in Melville to cost elderly investors millions of dollars, the DOJ said.

Isen was charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and money laundering. He was also ordered to pay more than $8 million in restitution and more than $700,000 in forfeiture.

Isen and Jeffrey Chartier, his partner, were convicted in March 2020 after a six-week trial. Chartier, 59, of Sunny Isles, Florida, was sentenced in December 2022.

“Lawrence Isen and his co-conspirators used their skills to steal precious savings from elderly, hard-working people all over the country,” stated United States Attorney Breon Peace. "[The] sentence should serve as yet another reminder to fraudsters who prey on the vulnerable that this Office will hold them accountable for the damage they cause to the security and well-being of so many.”

From 2014 to 2016, Isen, Chartier and others working with the Melville boiler room artificially inflated the price and trading volume of stock in struggling companies with poor prospects and off-loaded it onto unsuspecting victims who were often elderly and vulnerable, prosecutors said.

Isen colluded with investors, both in the United States and overseas, to dump many shares in Hydrocarb Energy Corp. and Intelligent Content Enterprises on the victims, authorities said. The companies traded under the ticker symbols HECC and ICEIF, respectively.

Isen was barred from acting as a broker by FINRA in 1996 and convicted of wire fraud conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Southern District of New York in 2000, officials said.

He manipulated stock belonging to, among others, major HECC shareholder Michael Watts and major ICEIF shareholders in India, the DOJ said. Isen connected the investors with the boiler room, negotiating the terms of the arrangements between them, and managed the relationships between them, prosecutors said.

Isen helped the boiler room in its illegal cold call campaigns that used lies and high-pressure sales tactics to lure people by transferring money and stock required by the boiler room for the campaigns; working with the boiler room to fill the tricked victims’ orders with Isen’s crooked investors’ stock; and creating fraudulent stock purchase agreements, consulting agreements and invoices to cover up the illegal conduct, authorities said.

The conspiracy's market manipulation fraudulently inflated the stock price of HECC, ICIEF and three other companies by more than $147 million, the government said. All 16 defendants charged in the case were convicted.