Teenager pays back £200,000 over Net stock scam

A 15-year-old has agreed to pay back the $285,000 (£200,000) he made in profit from dodgy share trading on the Internet. Apparently, Jonathan G Lebed bought large amounts of cheap stocks and then hyped them up by sending emails to financial newsgroups. As soon as the price peaked, he sold them.

It obviously worked as well because after 11 such occasions, he'd managed to net $272,826 in profit. However, while you could be tempted to view this as teenage cunning, the Securities and Exchange Commission took a dimmer view. And so, after a New Jersey court case in which he neither admitted nor denied findings against him, Jonathan agreed to pay the whole sum back including interest.

He's not bothered though because he's making good money on his Internet businesses which puts others on the Web. Good lad.

However, you have to question various things. How come he can pay this all back with interest? Don't know about you, but aged 15, with a huge pot of cash, there wouldn't be much left after a few months. Is he simply a young fogey and a prudent money keeper? Or, as we prefer to think, did he run a concurrent account that the SEC doesn't know about and is rolling in it?

Kids, eh? ®