By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading in the stock on Wednesday, its shares—which only traded on the over-the-counter market typically reserved for penny stocks—had exploded 330% this year to more than $56 each. The company’s market value swelled to more than $35 billion, zooming past that of Tesla tsla and not far behind the $42 billion for Netflix nflx . Neuromama, which claims it’s developing a new kind of neural search engine (“NeuroMama is Google…. before Google became Google,” according to a company document), doesn’t even have any revenue.
The SEC was concerned, for one, that “the identity of the persons in control of the company” might not be what the market thought it was. And it’s not hard to see why.
While Neuromama’s management team hails from the capital city of Siberia, Novosibirsk, where the company was originally based, the man pulling the strings is a serial fraudster masquerading under an alias and living in exile in Mexico. In a case that sent him to jail a decade ago, a San Diego district judge concluded, “He is in fact a danger to the community.”
A Man of Multiple Monikers
That man is Vladislav “Steven” Zubkis, who now goes by Steven Schwartzbard at Neuromama, and who was forced to leave the U.S. after serving more than five years in prison for defrauding investors and money laundering in two separate schemes. A native of Russia-controlled Ukraine, Zubkis says he considers himself “still the citizen of Soviet Union.” He’s such a veteran troublemaker that the New York Times noted way back in 1997 that he already had “an extensive regulatory rap sheet.” Since then, Zubkis was permanently banned from serving as a director or officer of a public company, associating with a broker-dealer or participating in an offering of penny stock—not that it’s slowed him down much.
Zubkis doesn’t dispute any of that. In fact, he catalogs his saga..
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