SEC charges The Spaventa Group in $74M pre-IPO fraud scheme targeting retirees

The SEC has filed a civil complaint against Andrew Spaventa, a 40-year-old from Miller Place, New York, and three companies he controls, alleging they ran a pre-IPO “boiler room” that bilked more than 800 investors out of $74 million over roughly four and a half years. The victims were largely retail clients and retirees, which is the kind of detail that makes a fraud case go from bad to genuinely ugly. The complaint, filed on August 14, targets The Spaventa Group LLC (TSG), TSG Capital Advisors LLC, and TSG Alpha Partners LLC. Investors were told they were buying into private funds holding shares of some of the most coveted pre-IPO names in tech and defense: SpaceX, Anduril, Anthropic, and Perplexity. What they weren’t told, the SEC alleges, is that the shares came with markups so steep they bordered on parody. The mechanics of a modern boiler room The Spaventa Group, founded in September 2020, deployed more than 100 commissioned sales agents across offices in Long Island and New Jersey. These agents used high-pressure phone tactics to pitch the funds to retail investors, many of whom had no experience navigating private equity markets. Investors were reportedly told that upfront ...