On May 13, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California entered a final judgment against Jillian Sidoti, a California attorney whom the SEC previously charged for her role in a fraudulent scheme to sell unregistered securities to the public.

According to the SEC's complaint, filed on October 19, 2020, Sidoti acted as the attorney for penny stock company Blake Insomnia Therapeutics, drafting and signing documents that she knew contained materially false information regarding the operations and control of Blake. Sidoti allegedly then arranged to sell almost all of Blake's stock to multiple nominee shareholders to obscure the fact that the purchasers were a single control group. The complaint further alleges that Sidoti authored opinion letters containing false statements about the control of Blake to induce Blake's transfer agent to remove restrictive legends from its stock certificates, and to induce the Depository Trust Corporation to accept Blake shares for deposit. According to the complaint, Sidoti's actions enabled the control group to evade legal restrictions on the sales of stock by affiliates and sell over five million Blake shares into the public market.

Without admitting or denying the allegations in the SEC's complaint, Sidoti consented to the entry of a final judgment permanently enjoining her from violating the securities registration and antifraud provisions of Sections 5(a), 5(c), 17(a)(1), and 17(a)(3) of the Securities Act of 1933, and the antifraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder. Sidoti also consented to the imposition of a five-year penny stock bar and a five-year conduct-based injunction that restricts her ability to prepare opinion letters, and to pay a $22,000 civil penalty and just under $14,169 in disgorgement and $4,665 in prejudgment interest.

The SEC staff responsible for this matter includes Alexandra Lavin, Kathleen Shields, Eric Forni, Trevor Donelan, Rebecca Israel, David Scheffler, J. Lauchlan Wash, and Amy Gwiazda of the SEC's Boston Regional Office.