• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

App Annie and co-founder charged with securities fraud, will pay $10M+ settlement

September 14, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged App Annie, a leading mobile data and analytics firm, as well as its co-founder and former CEO and Chairman Bertrand Schmitt, with securities fraud. App Annie and Schmitt have agreed to pay over $10 million to settle the fraud charges which are related to “deceptive practices and making material misrepresentations about how App Annie’s alternative data was derived,” the SEC said.

App Annie is one of the largest sellers of mobile app performance data, offering details that are useful to developers, publishers, advertisers, and marketers — like how many times an app is downloaded, how often it’s used, the revenue it generates, and other competitive analysis and insights. This is what trading firms call “alternative data,” because it’s not detailed in their financial statements or other traditional data sources, the SEC explains. App Annie told app makers it would not disclose their data to third parties directly, but would rather use the data in an aggregated and anonymized way to provide app insights. Specifically, companies were told the data would be used to build a statistical model to generate estimates of app performance.

However, the SEC says from late 2014 through mid-2018, App Annie used non-aggregated and non-anonymized data to alter its model-generated estimates in order to make them more valuable to sell to trading firms. It also says that the company and Schmitt then misrepresented to its customers how it was able to generate the data, saying it did so with the appropriate consent from customers, and that it had effective internal controls to prevent the misuse of confidential data, ensuring it was in compliance with federal securities laws. Trading firms were making investment decisions based on this data and App Annie had even shared ideas as to how they could use the estimates to trading ahead of earnings announcements.

In other words, App Annie was telling customers its app data was the result of its sophisticated statistical model which was in compliance with federal law, when it was not.

“The federal securities laws prohibit deceptive conduct and material misrepresentations in connection with the purchase or sale of securities,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, in a statement. “Here, App Annie and Schmitt lied to companies about how their confidential data was being used and then not only sold the manipulated estimates to their trading firm customers, but also encouraged them to trade on those estimates—often touting how closely they correlated with the companies’ true performance and stock prices,” Grewal added.

The SEC says App Annie and Schmitt violated the anti-fraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5. App Annie, without either admitting or denying the findings, consented to a cease-and-desist order and is paying a penalty. App Annie agreed to pay a penalty of $10 million. Meanwhile, Schmitt is ordered to pay a penalty of $300,000 and is prohibited from serving as an officer or director of a public company for three years.

Reached for comment, App Annie’s current CEO provided a statement:

“Since I have taken over as CEO, we have established a new standard of trust and transparency for the newly created alternative data market. App Annie is uniquely positioned to be the first to deliver on a unified data AI vision,” said Theodore Krantz, CEO at App Annie. “Many businesses may be unknowingly leveraging data reliant on confidential public company information without explicit consent which we believe puts companies using digital/mobile market data at significant risk. It is our opinion that the entire alternative data space needs to be regulated.”

 

 

 

Source Link App Annie and co-founder charged with securities fraud, will pay $10M+ settlement

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Golf-Garcia, Lowry and Poulter made captain’s picks for Europe’s Ryder Cup team
  2. Japan’s vaccines minister Kono favoured as next PM in opinion polls
  3. Hit to oil output from Ida overshadows demand impact, says Goldman
  4. Nigeria says 75 abducted children released amid army crackdown

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • 400,000-Year-Old Fossil Shows Butchering Elephants Helped Early Humans To Supersize Their Tools
  • Ignore The Nonsense: Here Are The Real Images Of Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS
  • This Rare Spider Is Half-Female, Half-Male Split Down The Middle – Oh, And A New Species
  • Comet 3I/ATLAS Caught On Camera From Mars Orbit: “This Was A Challenge”
  • JWST Captures Best Image Yet Of A Supergiant Star Before It Went Supernova
  • Isaac Newton’s “Apocalypse Calculations” Predicted A World-Changing Event In 2060
  • 2024-25 Saw The Most US Kids Dying From Flu Since The Swine Flu Pandemic
  • Technology, Tactics, Or Just Toughing It Out: How Exactly Did Neanderthals Take Down Mammoths, Anyway?
  • Nobel Prize In Chemistry Awarded For New Material Breakthrough
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS May Be A 10-Billion-Year-Old Time Capsule From An Earlier Age Of The Universe
  • Restless Leg Syndrome Might Increase Someone’s Risk Of Parkinson’s Disease
  • Behold! The World’s First Butt-Drag Fossil, Committed By A Rock Hyrax 126,000 Years Ago
  • Norovirus Is Rife On US Cruise Ships – 2025 Hits 18-Year Outbreak High
  • New Species Of Tiny Glowing Lanternshark And Ghost-Like Crab Discovered In Deep Sea
  • Hairy Frog: The Wolverine Frog That Breaks Its Bones To Make Claws When Threatened
  • Move Over, Footballfish – This Deep-Sea Freak Might Just Be The Most Cursed Creature In The Ocean
  • The Strongest Magnetic Field On Earth Is Located In The US. It Measures 1,000,000 Gauss
  • Gold Literally Grows On Christmas Trees In Lapland
  • Meet The Fishing Spiders: Stealthy, Semi-Aquatic Hunters That Can Kill Prey 5 Times Their Size
  • Jupiter-Bound Mission To Snap Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS: “This Campaign Was Unexpected For Everybody”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version