The founder of a Silicon Valley investment platform is now facing federal fraud charges after prosecutors say he manipulated prices to drain hundreds of millions of dollars from thousands of everyday investors. His name is William Sarris, and he’s 75, from Monterey, California. He founded and ran Linqto Inc. as CEO for 14 years.
Sarris was arrested and is set to be presented in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He faces a six-count federal indictment out of the Southern District of New York, covering securities fraud, broker-dealer fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy.
What Linqto Was Supposed to Be
Linqto marketed itself as a way for regular investors, not just wealthy institutions, to buy into private companies before they went public. Think Ripple, SpaceX, and Anthropic, companies that plenty of people wanted a piece of before an IPO ever happened. Since private company shares don’t have the transparent pricing you’d get on a public stock exchange, investors had to trust that whoever was setting the price was doing it fairly.
That’s exactly where prosecutors say things went wrong.
How the Alleged Scheme Worked
According to the indictment, Sarris ran the scheme from 2020 through 2025 by taking advantage of how hard it is for customers to know the real market value of private-company shares. Prosecutors say he manufactured artificial scarcity to push prices up and told customers they were buying at “market” prices, when in reality, he was allegedly manipulating the pricing model behind the scenes. In some cases, the markups reportedly went above 200%.
Linqto had introduced something called an Automated Market Maker in 2023, presented to customers as a system that set prices based purely on supply and demand. But the indictment says it wasn’t actually fully automated, and that Sarris adjusted its settings to boost daily revenue.
There’s also an angle involving how Linqto structured its investment vehicles. The company reportedly capped each special-purpose vehicle at 99 investors, then just created another one for the same company whenever it needed more room. Prosecutors allege that setup was designed to dodge registration and fee-disclosure requirements under federal investment law.
Why This Mattered to Sarris Personally
Here’s a detail that stands out. Back in October 2023, Linqto’s board granted Sarris around 1.9 million shares of company stock, but that stock would only vest if Linqto hit a $500 million valuation event, like an IPO, acquisition, or capital raise, by the end of 2025. The indictment states plainly that Sarris understood his payout depended on Linqto’s revenue, and that revenue depended on the markups he was allegedly charging customers.
So the incentive, at least as prosecutors lay it out, was pretty direct.
When Linqto Ran Into Trouble
When the company hit financial pressure in January 2025, prosecutors allege Sarris sold off shares that had already been allocated to customers’ accounts, without telling those customers, in order to help Linqto hit its revenue numbers. Linqto announced IPO plans in 2024, but by the middle of 2025, the company had instead filed for bankruptcy. By that point, the alleged scheme had pulled in more than $450 million from over 13,000 customers.
His Former Second-in-Command Already Pleaded Guilty
Joseph Endoso, 66, of Ross, California, took over as CEO after Sarris and served as president before that. He pleaded guilty on August 27 to securities fraud, broker-dealer fraud, and conspiracy charges, and he’s now cooperating with the government. That’s often a sign prosecutors are building toward more detail becoming public as the case against Sarris moves forward.
Sarris Is Pushing Back
Sarris’s attorney, Tim Treanor, said his client is innocent and intends to fight the charges. Treanor pointed out that the $450 million figure the DOJ is citing reflects money that came into the platform, not necessarily what went out or what customers ultimately lost. He also noted that Sarris resigned from Linqto on January 2, 2025, with what he described as the investment portfolio still intact, and argued that customers’ real losses stem more from the bankruptcy filed six months later than from the underlying investments themselves.
What He’s Facing
Sarris faces two counts of securities fraud, one count of broker-dealer fraud, and one count of wire fraud, each carrying a maximum of 20 years in prison. He’s also charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud and broker-dealer fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conducting unregistered investment company transactions.
Deputy U.S. Attorney Sean Buckley said that in private markets, which don’t have the pricing transparency of a public exchange, investors have to rely on the honesty of the people giving them access, and that Sarris and Endoso allegedly lied about prices and fabricated scarcity to impose what he called staggering markups.
For now, the case is still working through the courts, and Sarris hasn’t been convicted of anything. Given how many people invested through Linqto, and how much interest there’s been in pre-IPO access to companies like SpaceX and Anthropic, this case is likely to draw a lot more attention as it develops.