United States v. David Bentley, Richard Degen, Allen Yung, and Walter Josten

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge.

Universal Precious Metals, Inc., was a bucket shop. It “sold” metals, principally copper and silver, for future delivery. It used the mails and phones extensively. Salesmen represented that Universal had the metals in vaults or that the firm would hedge the customers’ positions through futures contracts. But Universal had no significant inventories of the metals. When it purchased futures contracts it was more likely to be short (i.e., promising to deliver metals it did not have, which magnified the risk of customers who wanted to buy the metals) than to be long. To…