I hear they have good college programs in the American prison system. They probably need more professors.

Lawrence Biemiller of the Chronicle for Higher Education has the story.

2 Professors Charged in Trading Scam, Securities Commission Says

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday that it had charged a professor and a former professor in Florida with running a sham stock-option-trading scheme that began in 2010 and involved “literally thousands of trades,” netting them more than $400,000. The two men agreed to settle the charges by paying more than $670,000, the SEC said.

The charges were filed against Gonul Colak, an assistant professor of finance at Florida State University, and Milen Kostov, a former assistant professor in the College of Engineering jointly operated by Florida State and Florida A&M University. The SEC said they had engaged in “abusive naked short-selling,” which involves selling shares they did not have. Short-selling is not illegal as long as the seller subsequently purchases the shares (preferably at a lower price) and delivers them to the buyer within three days.

In the case of Mr. Colak and Mr. Kostov, however, the two men “created the illusion that they had delivered the underlying securities when in fact they had taken no steps to do so” by using “multiple brokerage accounts to disguise the spurious nature of the sham transactions, moving a short position from one brokerage firm to another every few days in order to spread the failures to deliver across multiple firms in an effort to avoid detection.”