That Honig-Morgan Stanley Story

On Friday November 16, I ran a story about Barry C. Honig and his Morgan Stanley investment adviser Kyle Wool. I had interviewed a person via email who proactively came to me saying they had copies of emails between Wool and Honig that showed misconduct and possible kickbacks being paid by Honig to encourage Wool to push his clients into stocks that Honig was an early investor in order to ‘pump up’ a stock and get trading volume. I published copies of the emails in my story. Within a few hours of publishing the story I then received an email saying the emails were fakes and the person who I was talking to had lied to me about some of the details they provided. The story was immediately removed because the evidence I was provided with was tainted.

Before I ran the story Morgan Stanley public relations and Kyle Wool were informed about the emails and what they said. Morgan Stanley confirmed Hoing was a client. And Kyle Wool didn’t say a word about any of the details not being true. My source told me Wool and Kyle have had a long term relationship and do party and socialize together, which checked out to be true. And Kyle Wool does have 3 customer complaint disclosures in his FINRA record. In 2009 a customer alleged Kyle Wool, while employed at Oppenheimer & Company, made unsuitable investment recommendations, churned investments and misrepresented material facts. The complaint settled for $337,500.

The person who contacted me Knew Honig’s correct AOL email address and Wool’s Morgan Stanley email address. They also knew the two had a professional relationship, which has never been disclosed before in any reporting on Barry Honig.

The email address the source used was a Proton email : barrymorgan1@proton.ch. The email of the person who sent me the second email was barrynotmorgan@protonmail.com. This suggest that the original email and the second email was sent by the same person or group. After the story ran the email account was shut down. A new email address was created to let me know the source had lied to me. I wasn’t familiar with Proton and have since learned it is an email service that uses anonomyzers and can be difficult to subpoena.

Here is the email saying the source lied.

Since the story came down I have been contacted by readers who said they thought the premise of the story is true because they either know Wool and Honig or they heard rumors about their relationship on The Street. Rumors are not journalism and they don’t go into any of my reporting. If you know these two men and are willing to go on the record of course I would like to hear from you. I will continue to cover Barry Honig and the SEC investigation into alleged fraud in small cap stock investing.

Thank you for always being loyal readers.