For more than three years, Christopher Joseph Bongiorno of Mayfield Heights, Ohio, and Jason Allan Arthur of Henderson, Nevada posed as registered securities brokers, cold-called ordinary Americans from coast to coast, and extracted millions in commissions from investors who never knew the person pitching them was operating under a fictional identity. Neither man held a securities license. Neither was registered with the SEC. The scheme ran through two companies already entangled in their own regulatory failures, one of them led by a CEO who openly discussed moving his operation to Barcelona to escape U.S. regulators. It ended with prison sentences, a civil enforcement record six years in the making, and a presidential pardon for one of the men convicted alongside them.
How Two Unlicensed Men Used Fake Identities on FINRA’s BrokerCheck to Get Hired as Brokers
Neither Bongiorno nor Arthur had the credentials to legally solicit investors. When they approached the management of US Lighting Group, Inc., a penny stock company traded on OTC Markets as USLG, looking for work as investor solicitors, they invented names, checked those names against FINRA’s BrokerCheck database, and found that the fictional identities returned clean licensing results. They presented those results to USLG’s CEO Paul Spivak as proof they were licensed to work.
Spivak, who was simultaneously manipulating USLG’s stock price through a separate scheme, hired them. The arrangement served everyone except investors. Bongiorno and Arthur received transaction-based commissions ranging from 40 to 50 percent of investor funds, rates no legitimate brokerage firm would pay and that no informed investor would accept. To conceal those commissions, they submitted misleading invoices to the companies framed as consulting service payments.
US Lighting Group and Petroteq Energy: Two Compromised Companies Supplied by the Same Cold-Call Operation
From September 2015 through November 2018, Bongiorno and Arthur solicited investors not only for USLG but also for Petroteq Energy, Inc., a Canadian oil sands company trading on the OTC Pink market as PQEFF and headquartered in Sherman Oaks, California. Petroteq paid average commissions of approximately 39 percent. The companies operated in different industries and different countries, but the pitch mechanics were identical. Both men used lead lists to cold-call prospective investors nationwide, recruited sub-brokers to work beneath them, and directed investor funds through entities they personally controlled.
In Bongiorno’s case, the SEC alleged he directed investors on at least two occasions to send funds to North Star Assets LLC, an entity he controlled, and that he misappropriated $30,000 from two of those investors directly. Petroteq was not a passive victim. The company later reached its own SEC settlement in June 2022, paying a $1 million civil penalty alongside a $450,000 penalty against its former executive chairman Alex Blyumkin for disclosure failures, undisclosed related-party transactions, and a $7.4 million unregistered stock offering in which the company concealed $2.9 million paid to the individuals conducting it. USLG’s situation was considerably worse.
Paul Spivak’s Penny Stock Scheme and the FBI Recordings That Brought It Down
Spivak founded USLG in 2012 and took it public through a reverse merger with a shell company in 2016. Between 2016 and 2019, the company collected approximately $6.9 million from hundreds of investors, many of them elderly and located across the country, investing amounts ranging from $4,000 to $1 million. The commissions paid to Bongiorno, co-conspirator Larry Matyas, and others totaled approximately $2 million and were never disclosed. In covertly recorded conversations, Spivak told prospective co-conspirators that it “wouldn’t take very much to get the stock to go very high. I mean like very high,” and that securities regulators “don’t care what we do out of the country,” explaining his intention to move the operation to Barcelona. After his arrest, recordings captured him calling his wife from jail and directing USLG’s CFO to offer the FBI agent on the case $200,000 to make the investigation disappear.
A federal jury convicted Spivak in September 2024 on conspiracy and wire fraud counts. He was sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison in February 2025 and is appealing from a low-security facility in Pennsylvania. Co-conspirator Charles Scott, convicted of securities fraud conspiracy in the same trial, was sentenced to three and a half years but served only two weeks before President Trump pardoned him in May 2025. The trial judge stated at sentencing he had “no doubt” Scott broke the law.
The Criminal Sentence Bongiorno Received and the Civil Judgment That Closed Six Years of SEC Litigation
Bongiorno pleaded guilty in the parallel criminal action, United States v. Bongiorno, Case No. 1:21-CR-00491-JPC(9), to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. In early February 2025, he and Matyas were each sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison. On April 7, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio entered the final consent judgment in the SEC’s civil action, originally filed in February 2020. The judgment permanently bars Bongiorno from violating antifraud and broker-dealer registration provisions of federal securities law, imposes a five-year prohibition on soliciting any securities transaction, and orders disgorgement of $2,370,987.43 plus prejudgment interest of $551,924.45, offset by the $929,729.38 restitution ordered in the criminal case.
Arthur’s civil judgment was entered earlier in the same litigation. His gross commissions from USLG and Petroteq totaled at least $1,174,057.10. Both men invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify during the SEC’s investigation.
Conclusion
The Bongiorno-Arthur case is not a complex financial scheme built on instruments ordinary investors could not be expected to understand. It was a cold-call boiler room built on invented identities, concealed commissions, and stolen funds. That it ran for over three years, across two companies, and generated more than $3.5 million in combined illicit commissions reflects both the reach of penny-stock infrastructure and the exposure of investors who received no disclosure and no recourse. The civil record closed April 7, 2026. The victims of USLG have not recovered their losses. The CEO who built the larger enterprise is appealing a 17.5-year sentence from a federal prison in Pennsylvania. The co-conspirator convicted alongside him walked free after two weeks.
