A New York lawyer who pleaded guilty last year to taking part in an $86 million pump-and-dump stock manipulation scheme has now been disbarred after a ruling from the New York Appellate Division, First Department.
The lawyer, Darren Ofsink of Merrick, New York, formerly headed a four-lawyer firm called Ofsink LLC in Manhattan. He was indicted in 2015 along with a pair of registered securities brokers as part of a criminal case that also targeted several other co-defendants. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York accused Ofsink and the others of engineering a reverse merger that turned CodeSmart Holdings Inc. into a publicly traded company and then manipulating CodeSmart’s stock value.
