After the company stopped paying for downloads, the app's rankings plummeted.
"Rather than come clean about the fact that the spike in downloads was a result of paid download campaigns, the company, Nerlinger, Streiner and Colucci lied and told shareholders that the number of downloads continued to grow at the same rate," the SEC said in a press release.
The coverup of Nerlinger's criminal past, which involved the inappropriate allocation of profits from commodities trading, was carried out by the officers and directors between 2012 and 2017 and involved the use of falsified documents, lies and manipulation of Google search results, the lawsuit said.
A key component of the scheme was to hire a company to clean up Nerlinger's record on Google, where stories about his conviction were at the top of the results list when his name was typed into the search engine. The "reputation management" campaign involved hiring the company to create website and blog posts containing favorable coverage of Nerlinger to suppress stories about his criminal past, the SEC said.
"As users clicked on the articles and posts, these sites would move higher in the Google search results while the sites containing information about Nerlinger's criminal history would move down and be less likely to be seen in a search," the lawsuit said.