A federal grand jury indictment unsealed in Manhattan this month accuses the founder of a “pre-IPO” investment platform of running a five-year pricing scheme that drew more than $450 million from thousands of ordinary investors. The case, brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, lays out in detail how a company marketed as a way for everyday savers to buy into private companies before they went public allegedly turned that promise into a mechanism for inflating prices customers had no way to check. For households who put retirement or brokerage money into similar pre-IPO offers, the allegations show exactly what can go wrong when there is no public exchange setting the price.
A Pricing Scheme Built on Secrecy
According to prosecutors, William Sarris built Linqto Inc. around a simple pitch: ordinary investors could buy shares in private companies that had not yet listed on a stock exchange, getting in early on the kind of returns usually reserved for venture capital firms. The catch, prosecutors say, is that those shares had no independently verifiable price. Sarris is accused of exploiting that gap by manufacturing false scarcity to drive demand, telling customers they were paying “market” prices when no real market existed, and layering on markups that his own company’s lawyers had repeatedly warned him were unlawful.
Prosecutors allege the scheme ran from 2020 through 2025 and pulled in more than $450 million from more than 13,000 customers, with markups in some transactions exceeding 200 percent over what Linqto itself had paid for the shares.
Prosecutors say the scheme was not incidental to Sarris’s business; it was tied directly to his own payout. He held a sizeable personal stake in Linqto and was looking for a way to cash out of it, and making the company look larger and more successful than it was helped convince outside buyers the business was worth what he wanted for his shares. To keep that story intact, Sarris allegedly worked to avoid the kind of regulatory oversight that would have forced Linqto to disclose its pricing practices and would have limited how large a markup it could legally charge customers.
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Two Executives, Two Different Legal Paths
Court papers filed in the case, including the indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court, charge Sarris with two counts of securities fraud, one count of broker-dealer fraud, one count of wire fraud and two conspiracy counts, with each fraud count carrying a maximum of 20 years in prison. Sarris, 75, of Monterey, California, was arrested and is expected to be presented in federal court in Northern California. The Justice Department’s own release states plainly that the charges are accusations only and that Sarris is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
Endoso, 66, of Ross, California, took a different path. He pleaded guilty on August 27, 2026, to one count of securities fraud and one count of broker-dealer fraud before U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote, and he is cooperating with investigators as the case against Sarris moves forward. FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle, Jr., who oversees the bureau’s New York Field Office, said the alleged scheme caused real financial harm to victims who trust the financial markets, and credited the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force for building the case.
How the Money Disappeared Before the Collapse
Prosecutors say the scheme unwound in stages. When Linqto’s finances came under pressure in January 2025, Sarris allegedly sold shares that had already been allocated to customers’ accounts, without telling the customers those shares were gone, in order to help the company meet revenue targets. By the middle of 2025, Linqto had collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving customers who believed they held a stake in still-private companies to sort out what, if anything, remained of their investment through the bankruptcy process.
For those customers, the timing compounds the loss: money that went in as an investment in a private company’s future was, in some instances, quietly used to prop up Linqto’s own finances months before the company failed outright. Bankruptcy proceedings, rather than a public market with a visible share price, are now the venue where remaining investors will find out how much of their money is recoverable.
Why Private-Market Investing Carries a Different Kind of Risk
The Linqto case is a reminder that the protections built into public stock markets, real-time pricing, required disclosures and independent exchanges, do not automatically extend to private companies. When a platform tells a customer they are paying a “market” price for a stock that has no public market, the customer has no independent way to check that number against anything. Prosecutors noted that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission assisted the investigation, a sign that regulators are treating the pre-IPO marketplace as an area needing closer scrutiny as more everyday investors are pitched early access to private companies before those companies ever go public.
The case is being prosecuted by the Southern District’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force, with Deputy U.S. Attorney Sean S. Buckley stating in the announcement that investors in private markets rely on the honesty of those offering access precisely because that market lacks the pricing transparency of a public exchange, and that his office intends to keep pursuing cases where that trust is broken.
The Benefit Programs That Sit Well Away From the Markets
The money in this case moved through a private market with no public price attached to it. A much plainer kind of money goes uncollected every year for a reason that has nothing to do with fraud: the benefit programs built for older households are opt-in, and no agency signs anyone up automatically. SNAP keeps simplified rules for adults 60 and older, LIHEAP helps cover a heating or cooling bill, and circuit-breaker credits cap how much of a fixed income a property tax bill can take.
The Benefits Checklist sets out 11 of those programs across 63 pages, with the 2026 income limits for each one and a 50-state directory of the offices that handle them.
Open The Benefits Checklist for the printable tracker that keeps all 11 applications in one place.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
