SEC Charges Felon and Six Others in Oil-and-Gas Offering Fraud

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged seven individuals, including criminal recidivist Richard Dale Sterritt, Jr., with defrauding investors through a multimillion dollar oil-and-gas offering fraud and related market manipulation scheme. The SEC's complaint alleges that, between March 2018 and at least November 2020, Sterritt – who used the pseudonym "Richard Richman" – Michael Greer, Deanna Looney, Robert Magness, Jr., Katie Mathews, James Christopher Pittman, and Mark Ross raised more than $16 million from more than 300 investors through an unregistered private placement of the common stock of Zona Energy Inc., a Dallas-based company that claimed to be focused on the oil and gas industry.