A California attorney has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for operating a multimillion-dollar stock fraud scheme in Florida.
A federal judge in West Palm Beach imposed the sentence Friday on 53-year-old lawyer Mitchell Stein of Hidden Hills, California. Stein was convicted by a jury in May of multiple fraud and conspiracy charges arising from the so-called "pump and dump" scheme.
Trial evidence showed that Stein and others sought to artificially inflate the stock of a heart monitoring device company called Signalife. Through false purchase orders and documents filed with government regulators, Stein and the others made Signalife's sales appear much more robust than they actually were.
Evidence showed Stein would then disguise his sales of the falsely-inflated Signalife stock. Stein also was ordered to forfeit $5.3 million.
