How a Long Island Boiler Room Fleeced Retirees on SpaceX and Anthropic Dreams
(SeaPRwire) – By: Cedric Cole
Andrew Spaventa built a pyramid dressed in the uniform of Silicon Valley exclusivity. The Spaventa Group told over 800 retail investors they were getting a front-row seat to the next trillion-dollar exits. SpaceX. Anduril. Anthropic. Perplexity. The pitch was clean, the scripts were polished, and the target audience was exactly who you would fear most: retirees with life savings and a hunger for outsized returns. The SEC complaint reads like a textbook of financial predation, only this time the victims were not crypto degens chasing meme coins. They were people who had spent decades working, now targeted by a boiler room operation that knew exactly how to press.
The numbers tell the story with brutal clarity. More than 650 investors put in $100,000 or less. Over 100 were retirees. The funds pulled in $74 million across 11 private vehicles between December 2020 and June 2025. The average markup charged to these retail buyers was 46 percent above what Spaventa’s own companies paid. In some cases it hit 91 percent. Fund 2 bought SpaceX at $595 per share and resold at $975. Fund 8 acquired Anthropic between $32.62 and $41.53, then marked it up to $58.50. Fund 10 and 11 bought Perplexity at $340.72 to $389 and sold at $495. Fund 3 across multiple vehicles took Anduril positions at 29 to 57 percent premiums. None of these private companies are accused of wrongdoing. The fraud lived entirely inside the Spaventa structure, which bought shares through TSG Invest Ventures at wholesale prices, then resold them to its own funds at inflated rates. The markup was not disclosed. Investors were never told.
The fee structure was a multi-layered extraction machine. The SEC alleges $23 million in undisclosed fees were collected. Twelve million went to sales commissions. Spaventa personally pocketed at least $4 million, which the complaint says funded a home purchase, renovations, luxury car payments, and personal travel. The sales handbook explicitly coached agents to say their name for commissions was a “referral fee,” never a commission. When prospects asked what the fund actually paid per share, they were told to respond with ignorance. The script for selling Anduril told agents to declare, “When you make money, we make money. If you don’t make money, we don’t make money.” The reality was the opposite. The markup was extracted from investor capital the moment the fund closed. The agents also cited phantom track records of 200 to 1,000 percent returns from Airbnb, Palantir, and SoFi, investments the funds never held. More than 90 percent of the fund holdings were stakes in other private pre-IPO funds, adding a second hidden layer of fees and risk that no investor was told about.
What makes this case so damaging to the private markets ecosystem is the mechanism of exploitation. Spaventa controlled the seller, the buyer, and the fund manager. He needed written client consent for these related-party transactions. He never obtained it. The funds had no board of directors to provide independent oversight. No third party evaluated whether the prices were at arm’s length. And when SEC staff opened an inquiry in 2023, the complaint alleges Spaventa backdated equity transfer agreements to cover the tracks. Several sales agents were unregistered, and some had prior Finra suspensions or bars. The model is simple and it is devastating. Pre-IPO share scarcity creates urgency. Scarcity justifies premium pricing. Premium pricing without disclosure becomes profit extraction. The only question left is whether the more than 800 investors who have not recouped their capital will see any return, or whether the money is already gone into Spaventa’s real estate and lifestyle accounts while the SEC pursues disgorgement, civil penalties, and a permanent industry bar.
Author bio: Cedric Cole is a forensic accountant and advisor to private equity restructuring partners, specializing in venture fund fraud detection and liquidity risk analysis.