Roaring Kitty will roar no more, at least not at Mass Mutual.
The company has agreed settle with Massachusetts regulators and pay a $4 million fine over the company’s failure to supervise agents, including Keith Gill, best known on social media sites as “Roaring Kitty,” who is a chief provocateur of the meme stock craze involving GameStop.
Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin today ordered MML Investors Services LLC (MMLIS), a subsidiary of MassMutual, to overhaul their social media policies and pay the fine for failure to supervise Gil, whose job at the firm was to prepare investor education materials for MML brokers and agents to use with clients.
Gill’s employment overlapped his online involvement in the GameStop and meme stock frenzy that occurred in late 2020 and early 2021, according to consent orders signed this week.
At the same time Gill was preparing investor education materials for the company, he posted more than 250 hours of videos on YouTube detailing investment strategies and at least 590 securities-related tweets posted by Gill, which went unnoticed by MassMutual.
“It took the media less than a day to identify the person behind the Roaring Kitty posts, while his own employer took no notice of his online persona,” Galvin said. “It’s clear that MassMutual was not as diligent as it should have been in supervising its employees,”
The inquiry opened by the Massachusetts Securities Division in January showed that MassMutual failed to detect or monitor nearly 1,700 trades effected by Gill in the accounts of three other individuals, as well as transactions effected by Gill that were nearly double MassMutual’s per-transaction limit of $250,000,
Also without MassMutual noticing, Gill was able to execute at least two trades in GameStop in excess of $700,000, Galvin said. MassMutual expressed satisfaction the matter was resolved.
"MassMutual is pleased to put this matter behind us, avoiding expense and distraction associated with protracted litigation," the company's head of media relations Laura Crisco said.
The consent order details inadequate supervision of broker-dealer agents, including Gill, by MassMutual, which failed to review social media usage or catch excessive trading in the personal accounts of agents, Galvin claimed.