Cole Bartiromo, now going by Cole Anthony, is an American blogger, formerly accused scammer, convicted felon, and public speaker from Mission Viejo, California. He has engaged in various financial schemes and other activities that have garnered him national media coverage; appearances on shows such as MoneyTrack, The Dr. Phil Show, and Dateline NBC; civil penalties from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; and federal prison time.
When Bartiromo was very young, he had a desire for fast-and-easy moneymaking not only out of avarice but also his family's poor financial situation, where the Bartiromos faced bankruptcy twice and a home foreclosure in the 1990s. His first online financial frauds were done with his father in 2000, when he went around eBay taking money from would-be sports card collectors. The next year, while still in high school, he ran two online securities fraud operations that got him in trouble with the SEC. From May to July of that year, he ran a pump-and-dump scheme that made a net profit of more than $91,000, and from November 1 to December 15, he operated the service Invest Better 2001 (IB2001), which advertised "guaranteed" and "risk-free" returns for investing in sporting investments. The 1,000-plus people, in total, invested $1.6 million into IB2001's programs, but none of them had any money regained.
The SEC filed an enforcement charge against IB2001 on December 13, 2001, and, with the help of research by two sports card collectors previously scammed by Bartiromo, identified the 17-year-old as the person behind IB2001 on January 7, 2002. On that day, he garnered national news attention for being the second youngest person, at the time, to commit an online fraud, behind a 15-year-old New Jersey resident named Jonathan Lebed. Due to the SEC's IB2001 charge and another one filed on April 7, 2002, against Bartiromo for his pump-and-dump scheme, he not only had to give the victims their money back but also face a $1.2 million civil penalty that ballooned to $2.7 million in 2010 due to interest. He was also taxed by the Internal Revenue Service $1.1 million for running Invest Better 2001. In 2004, as a result of charges by the SEC for mail and wire fraud and bank fraud for eBay scams and bank account wiring schemes he committed in 2003, he faced a 33-month federal prison sentence and was prohibited from using the internet as part of his probation until 2010.
In the 2010s, Bartiromo again received attention from the media for two reasons. One of them was for his involvement in running the crime investigation blog NewsBall, particularly its posts relating to the murder of Skylar Neese; started in 2013, the blog revealed private details about crimes and incidents not normally covered by mainstream news outlets for ethical reasons. During the 2016 presidential election, he was being covered in the national news for his activities as a supporter of Donald Trump, posting anti-Muslim messages on his Facebook page and facing a cut on his forehead while fighting with protesters at Costa Mesa.
Personal life Cole Bartiromo is the oldest of three children (one son and two daughters). His parents were John Bartiromo (born circa 1958), who had sixteen years of working as a material handler at Southern California Edison as of 2002, and Jeanise (also born circa 1958), a junior college instructor where she taught to interpreters and also ran a daycare.
Financial activities 1990s: Background When he was a young kid, Bartiromo had a "growing obsession with making money." This was first evident when he sold candy bars to his neighbors as part of fundraising events for his little league baseball team and set the prices a few dollars higher than what he was allowed to sell them at. In addition to greed, both Bartiromo and his father attributed his focus for quick wealth on his family's financial struggles.
The family faced bankruptcy twice through the 1990s. By April 1993, their $2,800 monthly income was around $200 below what they were required to pay, including a time-share at the Las Vegas-based Jockey Club Resort, which they owed $4,000. John sold the share in April 2001 in order to pay for his kids' college education. In 1993, the family filed for bankruptcy at Santa Ana's U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The debts were discharged by the court in June 1993.
In April 1997, they filed bankruptcy again, this time from John failing to pay over $23,000 of his mortgage, further worsened by a lender increasing the amount to $237,419. The court chose to dismiss it in May 1997 and prohibited another petition for six months, resulting in the family's three-bedroom and two-bath home being foreclosed by a bank in the summer of that year. The Bartiromos stayed in the home by having John's sister, Donna Smallwood, pay the mortgage. In 1998, the Bartiromos paid Smallwood for the house and refinanced the mortgage loan in November 1999.
1999–2001: Sports card trading and pump-and-dump scheme Around the time the loan was refinanced, Cole and his father started to become involved in sports cards trading on eBay, working under the screenname "TigerWoods." The two performed double-digit-dollar sports card scams on eBay, taking money from (to them) anonymous, faceless collectors. Cole's peers were aware of his obsession with sports cards and were annoyed by his boasts of profiting off them; one of his classmates recalled in 2002 that the space of Bartiromos' living room was taken up by sports memorabilia such as signs, pictures, and posters.
In the fall of 2000, at the age of 16, Bartiromo learned about Tiger Woods cards that came with issues of Sports Illustrated for Kids going up in value. He bought several issues, cut out two Tiger Woods cards from them, and made $240,000 off auctioning the cards, which led him to being interviewed on ESPN's Page 2 series. His father, taking $235,000 of it, allowed Cole to open a stock account that started with the other $5,000.
Using his stock account, Bartiromo ran a pump-and-dump scheme from May 14, 2001 to July 5, 2001. He bought large amounts of penny stocks, for some days close to half of the volume, and spread more than 6,000 messages on message boards falsely hyping up the stocks. Fifteen publicly traded companies bought into the messages, and Bartiromo traded millions of shares with them; as a result, their stock prices went down. In one night, his stock account went up from $5,000 to $50,000 from the scheme, and the net profit he made totaled more than $91,000. While operating the scheme, he was shocked how easy it was to dupe trading companies into fraudulent stock offers on the web.
2001–03: Invest Better 2001 From November 1 to December 15, 2001, when Bartiromo was a senior in high school, he operated a securities fraud service named Invest Better 2001 (IB2001), which consisted of a website and a MSN Networks Communities bulletin board that shut down on December 15. IB2001 advertised itself as being for "guaranteed" and "risk-free" investments bet on professional and college sporting events: "we don't just bet on favorites to win, we bet on really favored teams." The site also stated it wasn't like other "Ponzi scheme" sites in that "we actually do invest."
The service offered four get-rich-quick programs: a "125% 3 Day Ongoing Program," where an investor would get 125% of what he invested; the "250% 1 Week Ongoing Program," which promised a 250% return in a week; the "1250% 1 Month Program," where the consumer received 1250% of what he financed into IB2001; and the "2500% Christmas Miracle Program," which promised 2500% if the money was invested into the site between November 1 and December 15, 2001.
Most victims of IB2001 claimed they were seduced into it due to the "warm" and "witty" professionalism of Tom Manning, an alias Bartiromo used when acting as the leader of the service. His messages to the investors would include comments making fun of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and comparing the government agency to the Nineteen Eighty-Four character Big Brother.
To make the operation uncatchable to law enforcement, Bartiromo kept transferring the funds to different e-commerce sites to avoid them, although he told his investors it was simply to prevent the funds from being hacked.
As the SEC was starting to investigate IB2001, he took down the website on December 1. On IB2001's message boards, he instructed investors to post "NO NEGATIVE COMMENTS" and erased all the rants about the service, also blocking SEC lawyers from commenting. He also masked its shutdown to investors as done by "hackers" instead of himself. On December 9, he sent out an email reassuring his customers that IB2001 was the "real deal" and the rants were nothing more than "ridiculous," grooming the investors by calling them "pioneers" who are "like those selected for Noah's Arc." He also announced in the same message that IB2001 would turn into a "private," email-only operation. In a quick final method to trick new clients, IB2001's last announcement would be that it would be "closed" to new investors on December 15, 2001; That was the day its MSN message boards actually shut down.
In the end, Bartiromo made approximately $1.6 million off swindling around 3,300 investors out of their money. He used around $900,000 of it to put it into an online account held at a Costa Rica-based casino.
The search for IB2001's administrator Quickly after IB2001 began, complaints started to fill up its bulletin boards, which caused the SEC to examine the service. The SEC first emailed Bartiromo, as his Manning alias, on November 19; Manning responded by lying that IB2001 had "ceased operations" and that only a few "Internet buddies" ran it and made only around $5,000 from it. In the end of that month, the SEC called Danny Matson, whose name was used as a credit for being an administrator and billing contact for IB2001. The commission learned Matson actually knew nothing about the securities fraud and that he really was a sports card collector who was owed $25,000 for a card a man named Tim Marino offered him online. The SEC noticed that the name sounded very similar to Tom Manning.
Matson then phoned San Jose sports card collector Ramon Sanchez, another one of Marino's victims who bought a Michael Jordan rookie card from him in October 2001 but never actually got it. The first email Sanchez received about buying the card was from an email address that included Bartiromo's last name. The email instructed him to go to an instant message program account named "Tigercards" to arrange the purchase. The man using the account identified himself as Tim Marino. The deal involved Marino directing Sanchez to PayPal-send money to an online betting account that was under Matson's name.
Both Matson and Sanchez decided to search for the operator of IB2001 by contacting its clients, one of them sending the investor forum of the service's message boards. It featured a comment from an account named mariners116, whom the two suspected was run by Bartiromo given that he was a big fan of the Seattle Mariners according to his friends. They also placed the contact names the scammer used ("Tigercards," "Tom Marino," "Bartiromo," "Tom Manning") in an internet search engine and, through it, found ESPN's story of Bartiromo's 2000 auctioning of the Tiger Woods cards. The two sent all of this information to the SEC, and the commission identified the person behind IB2001 as Bartiromo on January 7, 2002, among other ten other anonymous "John and Jane Does" involved.
Charges and settlements