On December 29, 2021, Lawrence Meyers was formally charged with fraud and illegal touting by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Meyers is the troll who has been using fake names to make false statements about Legion M for more than three years,

The SEC charges stem from Meyers’ involvement with Medallion Financial (MFIN) and their attempts to hide the financial setbacks they were incurring due to the success of rival companies Uber and Lyft. Meyers’ company, Ichabod’s Cranium, Inc. (d/b/a Asymmetrical Media Strategies), was also charged with fraud.

The SEC Complaint, which was amended in April 2022 to include additional information, alleges that Meyers promoted MFIN and disparaged their competition without disclosing he had been paid to do so (known as illegal touting). It also alleges that Meyers knowingly made misstatements about the company’s financial situation in his articles, which would be fraud.

Per the SEC Complaint:

• MFIN’s CEO, Andrew Murstein, hired Meyers, whose specialty was “stealth” public relations.

• Meyers was paid to anonymously promote (tout) MFIN by providing various public relations, marketing and communications services, such as articles, blog posts . . . in order to influence public opinion with regard to company issues.

• Over a period of a year and a half, Meyers published more than one hundred articles under his own name, as well as three aliases, across more than a dozen web sites.

• He used his various personas to create the false appearance that multiple individuals, with a range of backgrounds, agreed with his arguments.

• He also posted more than nine hundred comments on just one site, in addition to hundreds more on various online forums.

• Meyers prepared his articles and comments in close coordination with Murstein. In some cases, Murstein sent emails to Meyers on what to write and how to respond to negative articles.

• For these services, MFIN paid Meyers approximately $65,000.

• Meyers never disclosed the compensation he received from MFIN, and several of Meyers’ articles even included the following statements:

  • “I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions.”

  • “I am not receiving compensation for it.”

  • “I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.”

• Later, a Contractor was also hired to tout the stock, and Meyers tutored her on his methods for posting anonymously.

• Meyers told the Contractor “get a fake ID from the Internet” in order to avoid having to identify herself and reveal her connection with MFIN. He also advised the Contractor that “first you have to come up with a fake resume.”

“Larry [Meyers] sent me the process I have to go through, it’s kind of crazy. In order to be a contributor I have to make up a whole person so I have to do a fake resume, everything. This goes for basically every single website I have tried to get published on. It’s a process.”

— MFIN Contractor

“Meyers did not merely write under a variety of aliases; he used his various personas to create the false appearance that multiple individuals, with a range of backgrounds, agreed with his arguments . . .”

— Securities and Exchange Commission

“By engaging in the conduct described above, the Defendants, knowingly or recklessly . . .
(a) employed devices, schemes, or artifices to defraud;
(b) made untrue statements of a material fact or omitted to state a material fact . . . “

— Securities and Exchange Commission

We believe Meyers has been employing many of these same tactics against Legion M since 2018, including:

• Using multiple fake names and personalities in order to appear to be different people

• Writing as many as 400 social media posts, comments and emails

• Spreading false and misleading information about Legion M

To read more about our experience with this troll, please see Who is Lawrence Meyers?

According to the SEC, Meyers was paid to falsely praise Medallion Financial as well as to attack Uber and Lyft. (You can see many examples of his work in our collection of his Taxi Medallion Articles.) Even before the SEC charges were announced, we strongly suspected that Meyers was being paid to attack Legion M, albeit for reasons unknown. We’re more convinced than ever now that he’s been officially outed as a troll-for-hire.

If you’d like to see the full, amended SEC Complaint against Meyers and Medallion Financial, it can be found here.