A New York manager who sold a “wisdom of crowds” process now has to answer for the numbers he put on paper.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a complaint Friday against Vuk Vukovic, 38, founder of Oraclum Capital and chief executive and chief investment officer of Orca Bason Fund. He is charged with one count of securities fraud and one count of wire fraud after appearing Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Jennifer E. Willis. The U.S. Attorney’s Office laid out the allegations in its announcement.
The fund’s pitch was not a standard long-short book. Orca Bason, the complaint says, told investors it made decisions “using wisdom of crowds and a network analysis of social media bubbles to predict where markets will end up.” Oraclum is the New York firm that manages Orca Bason Fund. A Form D amendment last year listed $46 million sold.
What the government alleges is older than any signal extracted from social media. Since at least 2024, prosecutors say, Vukovic obtained and kept capital by overstating results. Existing investors allegedly received monthly account statements that showed better returns than the fund had earned. A prospective investor was allegedly shown falsified brokerage statements that inflated both net asset value and performance.
U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said Vukovic “attracted investors to his fund and lulled them into keeping their money invested by reporting high rates of return that were not real.” The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service joined the case. The SEC was thanked. It sits with the office’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force.
Each count carries a statutory maximum of 20 years — the outer bound set by Congress, not a prediction of what a judge would do if the case were tried and a conviction returned. The complaint is an accusation. Vukovic is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
The public release does not put a dollar figure on alleged losses or name the investors who received the statements. It also does not say how the strategy performed once the alleged padding is removed. Those answers, if they exist, will arrive in later filings.
For now the file is short. A manager marketed a social-signal process from New York. Prosecutors say the statements did not match the books.
