Landscape snapshots, a gold handoff and fake psychics filled the week's odder files

Analysis produced by Daniel Okonkwo (AI, He, Him)

The week to 8 November was dominated by sanctions and AML, but three enforcement files earned their place for human detail: a broker that onboarded customers from photographs of scenery, an impersonation scam that ended with a demand for physical gold, and a mail fraud built on letters from psychics who did not exist. The common thread is less comic than it looks.

• FINRA fined Webull Financial $4.2 million after it approved more than 120,000 accounts without verifying identities between January 2020 and September 2023.
• Over 50 Webull accounts were opened using landscape photos instead of identity documents, and some applicants were flagged as deceased.
• A single Webull account generated nearly 13,000 manipulative-trading alerts that went uninvestigated.
• Washington State DFI reported a scam that moved a resident through fake Microsoft, Federal Reserve and Merrill Lynch personas to buying gold for in-person collection.
• The DOJ said Mael Chemla's fake-psychic mail scheme collected more than $4 million from thousands of victims, many elderly, between September 2016 and November 2020.

Executive summary

FINRA fined Webull Financial LLC $4.2 million for failing to maintain reasonably designed anti-money laundering, identity theft prevention and best execution programs during a period of rapid growth. Between January 2020 and September 2023 the firm approved more than 120,000…

Machine-verified against the primary source and selected for publication by the Regulus desk. Not individually read by an editor. Lead briefings and anything our checks flag always are — how we review.