Two former CEOs of Linqto Inc., one the first tech platforms to promise access to small investors into the high-risk, high-reward world of private investments, face criminal fraud charges for their alleged roles in a $450 million scheme to defraud thousands of investors hoping to cash in on private companies before they went public, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Linqto Inc. promised investors access to a white-hot market: shares in companies before their initial public offering, or IPOs, like SpaceX.
William Sarris, 75, who founded Linqto and was CEO of the now-bankrupt Silicon Valley online investment platform for 14 years, was charged in Manhattan on Wednesday with six counts including securities fraud, wire fraud, broker-dealer fraud and conspiracy, according to Reuters.
Joseph Endoso, 66, who succeeded Sarris as CEO after serving as president, pleaded guilty to securities fraud, broker-dealer fraud and conspiracy charges and is cooperating with prosecutors, Reuters reported.
"William Sarris is innocent of these charges and intends to fight them," his lawyer Tim Treanor said, according to the Reuters report. "Linqto's customers do face real questions about what they will get back, but those questions come from a bankruptcy filed six months after Bill stopped running the company—not from the investments themselves."
A lawyer for Endoso did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The alleged scheme occurred from 2020 to 2025. Linqto filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2025.
“Linqto ran through bankruptcy court as a legitimate business that failed,” said Scott Silver, a plaintiff’s attorney. “Unfortunately, investors recovered just pennies on the dollar and never got to question the fair value of the illiquid stock these two executives bought and controlled.”
Linqto’s “trading platform helped pioneer a private stock trading avenue for the little guy, with fewer rules and less regulation than the public market,” according to a report last year in the Wall Street Journal.
“Its ‘guerrilla’ tactics harked back to the days of boiler-room trade operations, featuring blast emails and posts on social media hyping up stocks and playing on customers’ fear of missing out—or “FOMO”—on new investments, most of them sought-after tech companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the artificial intelligence company Anthropic,” according to the Journal.
According to the indictment, Sarris falsely assured investors they were buying at "market" prices, based on an algorithm that would set prices based on supply and demand, Reuters reported. Instead, Sarris allegedly imposed high double-digit percentage markups, and sometimes markups exceeding 200%, though his lawyers told him repeatedly it was illegal.
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