Legal News

If You?ve Ever Met Sean, You Are Zero Degrees Away From a Man Charged by the SEC

By Ashby Jones

As far as SEC targets go, well, this one feels like some pretty low-hanging fruit.

The SEC recently filed a civil suit against Sean David Morton, alleging he lied about using his psychic expertise in investing more than $6 million from investors. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the NYT story.

Morton, of Hermosa Beach, Calif., who the SEC said bills himself as “America’s Prophet,” solicited individuals over nationally syndicated radio broadcasts, public appearances and newsletters to put money into a fund he called Delphi Associates Investment Group. He claimed his psychic ability would be used to invest in foreign currencies, the SEC said in a suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (complaint not available).

In one newsletter, the SEC quoted Morton as writing “I called ALL the highs and lows of the market, giving EXACT DATES for rises and crashes over the last 14 years.”

Attempts to contact Morton by the WSJ weren’t successful.

The SEC charges that Morton invested "only about half of the funds" into the foreign-currency trades where he had promised to put the money. Further, the SEC said, the Morton and his wife used at least $240,000 of the funds for their own nonprofit religious organization, PRI.

On his Web site, Morton says he “uses his talents and abilities to predict future occurrences and trends such as earth changes, political events and stock market fluctuations.” He also claims to have given exact dates for such events as the San Francisco earthquake in 1989, and to have foreseen former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment scandal.

The Web site’s a rollicking read, especially the part about Morton’s own personal quest. According to the site:

In 1985, tired of the fast paced life in Los Angeles, Sean went on a worldwide spiritual quest, which led him to England and Ireland, where he became involved with the Green Stone saga (one of the stones in the hilt of Excalibur).

His quest then took him to India, where he studied at the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives in Dharmsala. After a life-changing personal audience with the Dalai Lama, His Holiness instructed Sean to trek to the Black Hat monastery of T’ang Boyche in Nepal, near the foot of Mt. Everest. At the monastery, Sean was accepted as a novitiate on the basis of a past life connection that was identified by the monastery’s High Lama Rinpoche Lopsang Thundun. Sean lived for eight months at the monastery, where he practiced, studied and learned techniques for healing, meditation, and astral projection. He also learned time travel, or the ability to view events in the past and future.

You’d think that a guy who knows how to travel through time wouldn’t need to populate his site with pictures taken with b-list celebrities. If you have ever met Sean, you are one degree away from. . . ., the Web site announces. (He’s got a few a-listers on there, but we consider the bulk — Kevin Nealon, Anthony Michael Hall, Gabe Kaplan, Adam West, and Moon Unit Zappa, to be decidedly in the b camp.)

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 05, 2010 (boomark / email).