the SEC just paid 279 million dollars to one person for their role as a whistleblower on
successfully enforced corporate fraud here is how you can do the same thing Bradley birkenfeld was
to receive 30 million dollars for alerting the SEC to a major case of fraud that's more than
double the largest amount to date this week the SEC announced the largest ever award paid
to a whistleblower for their assistance in an undisclosed case that involved a very big fine
the 279 million dollar award more than doubled to 114 million dollar reward that the SEC issued in
October of 2020. in total their whistleblower Rewards program has paid out over a billion
dollars since it was established in 2010. the best part is because the Dodd-Frank Act protects the
confidentiality of whistleblowers and informants no additional information is known about the
people who have received these life-changing payouts they are the voices of our conscience
behind every major fraud if you look hard enough you will find a whistleblower the Securities and
Exchange Commission actually recognizes in their press releases that these payouts have added up to
a lot of money that could have been given back to the victims of financial crime but there is three
good reasons that despite the spiraling costs the SEC has kept the program and actually doubled
down on it promoting it with payout leaderboards and flashy announcements every time a big payout
is made list suppliers provide a critical public service and duty to our nation you get the feeling
that if it wasn't for the informant privacy laws they would present a novelty sized check in front
of the press like the whistleblowers just won the Powerball but they can't
so if you decide that you like the idea of a completely Anonymous multi-million dollar payday I
will also tell you the steps that you need to take to become a successful snitch the first reason
that the SEC has set up this program is that it's very hard to collect evidence on the white-collar
crime they go after instead of trading hurts regular investors but if the Insiders are
careful about their Communications channels they can make it almost impossible to collect evidence
even with full-time surveillance the senior business people and financial professionals
that regularly have access to material non-public information are going to know the laws and how to
get around them the SEC admits that a significant amount of clearly illegal activity goes undetected
or unpunished independent investigations have estimated that only about 15 percent of financial
crimes are ever detected and even fewer are enforced so the SEC needs informants to do
its job I think of all areas of fraud uh I think that's perhaps where we need whistleblowers the
most right to unravel some of these complex fraud schemes uh that hide behind numbers it's hard
without that whistleblower nobody knows exactly what this 200 and 179 million dollar payout was
made for because the SEC keeps that information private as well but with such a big payment it's
not hard to work backwards and figure it out for ourselves the SEC Awards between 10 and 30 percent
of the money collected from Financial sanctions that exceed one million dollars to whistleblowers
that provided material contributions that made the conviction possible 30 would be awarded to
an informant if they presented the case to the SEC on a silver platter with filed and dated
irrefutable evidence and closing Arguments for good measure 10 would be awarded to an informant
if they just reported a tip and helped with an ongoing investigation most payouts would be
somewhere between these two possible payouts for the 279 million dollar reward the money collected
by the SEC would need to be between 930 million dollars and 2 billion 790 million dollars fines
that make big headlines and the only fine that falls into that range recently was a
two billion dollar settlement That Wall Street firms had to pay to the SEC as punishment for
letting employees use WhatsApp to share messages between themselves all community locations between
employees at financial institutions conducting potentially Market moving operations must be
maintained for a minimum of three years in case the authorities need to review it when the banking
staff were sending encrypted WhatsApp messages between each other the SEC had no other way of
knowing if they were planning a Friday afternoon dinner or conducting insider trading the SEC would
have no way of uncovering this problem or forcing a settlement so quickly if it wasn't for one now
very wealthy informant that proved definitely that the people were using the program for
business Communications and that's just reason one why multi-million dollar payouts are worth
making so being a whistleblower could be pretty good business it is we've given out 57 million
dollars now to people since the program started in 2011. um and uh in in 30 million dollars in
one case and that's you know it's life-changing so it's time to learn how money Works to find out how
billions of dollars worth of government-funded prize money has actually paid for itself many
times over and how it could be surprisingly easy for you to get one of these payouts for yourself
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the second reason that the SEC is paying millions of dollars to informants instead
of using the money to pay back the victims of financial crime or taxpayers is at its very
profitable when a company pays a fine to the SEC they transfer it into the investor protection fund
the fines and settlements are normally equal to the amount of damage caused to the victims with
additional fines on top of that to make sure that the payments to the SEC don't just become the cost
of doing business the first group to be paid out of this fund are the victims when there is a case
of clear wrongdoing resulting in material damages for a group in the case of the WhatsApp settlement
there was no such clear group so The Whistleblower got their cut and then the rest of the money will
be used by the SEC to fund further investigations reducing the expense to the taxpayer to fund this
Authority The Whistleblower program has resulted in more convictions that actually cost less money
to pursue investigations can cost the SEC millions of dollars and result in no convictions most cases
also don't result in billion dollar settlements so even if the SEC wins it often ends up costing
them more to to investigate a case than they make back from a successful settlement in 2022
the SEC recovered a record 6.4 billion dollars in penalties on behalf of the investing public from a
total of 760 enforcement actions that record Hall was thanks to the success of the Whistleblower
program that the SEC mentioned 10 times in their press release the average penalty paid was 8.4
million dollars and that average is pulled up by a lot of few very large cases that means if every
single case involved an informant that voluntarily provided information the average payout would be
between 840 000 and 2 million five hundred and twenty thousand dollars getting insiders to do
most of the legwork on smaller cases that wouldn't otherwise be profitable to investigate means that
the SEC can stop more fraud on a tighter budget even if they need to make record settlements
lots of small acts of fraud can do just as much damage to regular investors as a few big cases The
Whistleblower program has sent the message that nobody is safe just because they aren't worth
going after and that gets us on nicely to the Third reason that the SEC is happy to pay billions
of dollars to informants it gets attention the SEC has taken a page out of the Mr BEAST's Playbook
and found that when they make big payouts to informants it gets a lot of media attention and
it obviously works because I am making this video now effective law enforcement is about visibility
someone is less likely to speed if they have a cop behind them and they are not as likely to defraud
their customers or commit insider trading if they have read articles about people making millions
by snitching on their co-conspirators 2022 was a record year for fraud and the SEC only has a 4 500
person staff and a three billion dollar budget they have to make themselves appear bigger than
they really are running a program that is making people millionaires is the best way to make sure
no would-be corporate wrongdoer feels safe a crime never committed is the best outcome for
everyone so if you hate your boss and you would be willing to turn them into the feds for a Million
Dollar Payday here are the steps to actually do it you don't even need to be an American the SEC
received a total of 26 000 176 tips between 2011 and 2018. those came from 114 different
countries the top five being the United Kingdom Canada China Australia and India the SEC will pay
out money to anybody with credible information regardless of where they live step one is to
actually have some information that could lead to action being taken against an individual or
a company committing Securities violations once you have that step two is literally as simple as
going to the sec's website and clicking submit a tip then you fill out the questions providing your
contact information and submitting any evidence you have of wrongdoing by choosing to be a part
of the SEC whistleblower program your identity and the information you provided will not be
shared with any third parties including current or potential future employers which is a good
thing if you want to keep your job while waiting on your snitch check to come through step three is
that you may be contacted by the SEC if they need additional information about the tips you provided
step 4 is just waiting around SEC investigations take between 6 months and three years to complete
according to law firms that deal with these cases so this is not a tip for fast money while waiting
you should check the claim an award page on the SEC website this lists all the judge from cases
brought forward by the SEC like this one against NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce who was charged by
the SEC for promoting the cryptocurrency emacs on Twitter without disclosing that he was being paid
244 thousand dollars by the creators of emacs even if you have never submitted a tip or committed
insider trading I definitely recommend checking out this page because it's full of cases like this
it's honestly what I imagine coffeezilla's happy place is Pierce agreed to settle this particular
case for 1409 thousand dollars which is over the one million dollar Benchmark for The Whistleblower
Awards program if you had submitted information in relation to this case step 5 would be to fill
out this form here and try to claim your award you can send the form by post or email to the
address on the SEC website within 90 days of the Judgment being made public on the claiman award
page submissions are then reviewed along with the tips you sent in in the first place and are either
accepted or denied you can also find a list of the claims made on the SEC website and their judgment
if the judgment is denied then the office will provide reasons for the denial with all personal
information redacted to protect the Whistleblower privacy most of the claims do get denied normally
because they did not provide original information to the case sending the SEC to Paul Pierce's
tweets wouldn't qualify you as an informant because he made the evidence public himself
like the financial genius he is if your claim is approved a letter will be sent to you with
information regarding your cut of the proceeds and a return letter to provide your wiring information
this video was obviously made just for fun but I also spend a lot of time on this channel debunking
misinformation about personal finance that could be costing you money there are other creators
out there that are fighting the good fight but educating people can only do so much the best
way to make fraudster stop taking advantage of regular people is to make them pay back everything
they have ever made from their grift and more and if you can get paid a few million dollars for it
even better but maybe the real first step is to get into a position where you are actually going
to have access to material Market information like being an investment banker but if you're unsure
what that job involves go and watch my video on what investment bankers actually do a special
thanks again to skillshare for making it possible for everybody to keep on learning how money works