Cole Bartiromo
Cole Bartiromo, also officially called by himself after his prison time as The Dollar Scholar, is an American blogger and former scammer, convicted felon, and public speaker from Mission Viejo, California. He has engaged in various financial schemes and other notorious activities that have garnered him national media coverage; appearances on shows such as "MoneyTrack", "The Dr. Phil Show", and "Dateline NBC"; civil penalties from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; and federal prison time.

When Bartiromo was very young, he had a desire for fast-and-easy moneymaking not only out of avarice but also his family's poor financial situation, where the Bartiromos faced bankruptcy twice and a home foreclosure in the 1990s. His first online financial frauds were done with his father in 2000, when he went around eBay taking money from would-be sports card collectors. The next year, while still in high school, he ran two online securities fraud operations that got him in trouble with the SEC. From May to July of that year, he ran a pump-and-dump scheme that made a net profit of more than $91,000, and from November 1 to December 15, he operated the service Invest Better 2001 (IB2001), which advertised "guaranteed" and "risk-free" returns for investing in sporting investments. The 1,000-plus people, in total, invested $1.6 million into IB2001's programs, but none of them had any money regained.

The SEC filed an enforcement charge against IB2001 on December 13, 2001, and, with the help of research by two sports card collectors previously scammed by Bartiromo, identified the 17-year-old as the person behind IB2001 on January 7, 2002. On that day, he garnered national news attention for being the second youngest person, at the time, to commit an online fraud, behind a 15-year-old New Jersey resident named Jonathan Lebed. Due to the SEC's IB2001 charge and another one filed on April 7, 2002 against Bartiromo for his pump-and-dump scheme, he not only had to give the victims their money back but also face a $1.2 million civil penalty that ballooned to $2.7 million in 2010 due to interest. He was also taxed by the Internal Revenue Service $1.1 million for running Invest Better 2001. In 2004, as a result of charges by the SEC for mail and wire fraud and bank fraud for eBay scams and bank account wiring schemes he committed in 2003, he faced a 33-month federal prison sentence and was prohibited from using the internet as part of his probation until 2010.

In the 2010s, Bartiromo again received attention from the media for two reasons. One of them was for his involvement in running the crime investigation blog NewsBall, particularly its posts relating to the murder of Skylar Neese; started in 2013, the blog revealed private details about crimes and incidents not normally covered by mainstream news outlets for ethical reasons. During the 2016 presidential election, he was being covered in the national news for his activities as a supporter of Donald Trump, posting anti-Muslim messages on his Facebook page and facing a cut on his forehead while fighting with protestors at Costa Mesa.
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