SEC brings case over $74M in pre-IPO sales to more than 800 investors

SEC brings case over $74M in pre-IPO sales to more than 800 investors

2 min read•Aug 19, 2026•
Liu Wei
Liu Wei

The SEC has brought a case against Long Island-based The Spaventa Group, alleging that pre-IPO sales raised more than $74 million, first reported by Fortune. The case puts the scale in stark terms: over 800 people invested, including over 100 retirees, and the SEC alleges a 46% average premium over what Spaventa’s companies paid for the positions.

The SEC complaint, filed Friday in the Southern District of New York, alleges that former broker Andrew Spaventa and his firm deployed more than 100 agents to make thousands of calls. The agents allegedly marketed shares in private companies including Anduril, Anthropic, Perplexity and SpaceX before its IPO, with the money raised for 11 private funds run from offices on Long Island and New Jersey.

Most buyers were retail investors. More than 650 invested $100,000 or less, while over 100 were retirees, according to the SEC’s allegations. The SEC alleges that investors paid 46% more on average than Spaventa’s own companies paid to get the positions, with the premium reaching 91% in some cases.

The central tension is a promise that investors would avoid unnecessary fees alongside alleged markups large enough to average 46%. The scale also exceeds the SEC’s case this year against Giovanni Pennetta, who was accused of misappropriating $10 million in investor funds while selling fraudulent shares in companies including Anduril; Pennetta later pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud.

The allegations emerged amid an AI-fueled run-up in private markets and a massive, unregulated secondary market. Spaventa denied the SEC’s claims when reached by phone.

Meta agrees to teen limits in settlement costing up to $17B

Meta has reached a settlement with attorneys general from 47 states over allegations that it illegally manipulated children’s attention, first reported by Newyorker. The agreement could cost the company up to $17 billion and would change how Facebook and Instagram handle teen access through age verification, daily limits and nighttime restrictions.

Meta did not acknowledge wrongdoing. The Oakland trial turned on whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects providers from liability for user-posted content, should also shield the algorithms that shape what users see; the plaintiffs argued that it should not.

The states presented evidence that senior executives, intent on maximizing the company’s growth, repeatedly set aside concerns about what Meta’s products were doing to its youngest users. A former Meta engineer testified that the chance of a teen encountering violent or graphic content was between a hundred and four hundred times higher than what the company acknowledged publicly.

Meta also spent more than two billion dollars on legal defense in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Under the agreement, Facebook and Instagram will remove the like count on posts, do more to verify that users are at least thirteen years old, limit service to two hours a day for teenagers and restrict service entirely for those users during nighttime hours.

The settlement was quickly compared with the tobacco lawsuits of the nineties. But Meta is a trillion-dollar company increasingly invested in artificial intelligence, and the agreement applies to only a single facet of its sprawling operations. The deal places a striking financial cost alongside product changes focused on teen users.

New technologies are being disseminated ever more quickly, while the machinery of politics and law delivers accountability intermittently and at a painstaking crawl. It took more than a decade of worrying about how teenagers used Facebook and Instagram for a legal settlement to enforce a change in Meta’s behavior.

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, stayed away from the lawsuit, arguing that it did not go far enough. After the settlement was announced, he said, “We’ll see them at trial.”

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