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by Mike Caswell

Andrew Hackett, the Toronto man who received four years in a U.S. jail for a 2017 pump-and-dump on the OTC Markets, has filed an appeal. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hackett ran a scheme to boost a supposed social media listing though phone rooms and manipulative trades. A California jury convicted him on Aug. 2, 2021, following a five-day trial, and the judge subsequently handed down the four-year jail term.

Mr. Hackett's appeal is contained in a brief notice filed on Wednesday, June 22, in federal court in San Diego. The notice does not set out Mr. Hackett's reasons for appealing, but he previously complained that he did not receive a fair hearing, with prosecutors failing to disclosed evidence that would have been favourable to his defence. For their part, prosecutors said that the evidence of his crime was overwhelming.

The case against Mr. Hackett stemmed from the manipulation of Arias Intel Corp. in 2017. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hackett and others, including a Vancouver man named Kuldeep Sidhu, were behind a scheme to boost Arias Intel through a boiler room and a website called TheMoneyStreet. The evidence against Mr. Hackett included testimony of the boiler room operator as well as text messages in which he and others agreed on a target price for the stock.

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