The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced it’s closing its Salt Lake Regional Office after 70 years. Here’s why it was here.
“Cadillacs were everywhere. The promoters were riding high. It was just a frenzy — a feeding frenzy — people trying to buy uranium stock, and the promoters selling uranium stock,” he said. “...There were literally thousands of these companies that were incorporated in Salt Lake City under Utah law.” “The only problem was that he really didn’t have any silver mines, and he really didn’t have any silver; and it was just a massive rip-off of the public.”
The company was buying its beavers “from trappers in Canada at approximately twenty dollars a beaver. They’d fly them into Salt Lake, put tattoos in their back foot, in the web, and start selling them,” he said. The association’s prices “ranged between $2,000 and $6,000,” according to a ruling in the case.
“We could not handle all the cases that we had,” he said. “They could resurrect the shells much quicker than we could investigate and sue them.”Salt Lake City and Denver are where “the penny stock boom” began in the 1970s, Davenport said, as brokers and promoters hyped shares in small public companies — some merged with old shells — that sold for less than a dollar on local exchanges.
During the penny stock era, the SEC Salt Lake and Denver offices, Davenport said “were, to my knowledge, the two offices who first participated in an undercover so-called sting operation,” as part of a task force led by the FBI. “Three undercover agents opened an office in Midvale, Utah, in 1988,” Decker wrote, “and spent a year pretending to be penny-stock promoters.”