For seven years, Barry Honig’s name was dragged through the mud by short sellers who called the companies he backed frauds, scams, and stock schemes. The media repeated those claims without question. Now the U.S. government has confirmed what Honig always said: it was a coordinated lie.
What Is a ‘Short-and-Distort’ Scheme?
Most people have heard of ‘pump and dump’ — where someone hypes a stock to drive the price up, then sells. A ‘short-and-distort’ is the opposite. Short sellers bet that a stock will fall, then deliberately spread false negative information to make that happen. It’s illegal. And it’s exactly what the SEC and DOJ found was happening.
What Exactly Did the Government Find?
In June 2024, the SEC charged Anson Funds Management — a $2.9 billion hedge fund — with running a secret scheme from 2018 to 2023. Here’s how it worked, in plain terms:
1. Anson would quietly ‘short’ a company’s stock — meaning they placed bets that the stock would fall.
2. They then paid Andrew Left of Citron Research to publish false, alarming reports about those same companies.
3. Left would blast these reports out to hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, CNBC, and his website — calling companies ‘fraud,’ ‘scam,’ or ‘dead.’
4. Investors panicked, sold their shares, the stock crashed, and Anson collected its profits.
5. To hide the payments to Left, Anson funneled the money through a third party called Falcon Research, using fake invoices for ‘research services’ that were never actually performed.
PolarityTE: A Real Company Destroyed by Lies
One of the targets was PolarityTE — a biotech company that had developed SkinTE, a revolutionary product that used a patient’s own skin to heal wounds. Barry Honig and his family entities were the second-largest shareholders, owning nearly 10% of the company.
In June 2018, Citron Research published a report with a headline screaming ‘FRAUD’ in all capitals. The report claimed PolarityTE’s patent was dead — that the USPTO had permanently rejected it and the company had hidden the news.
Both claims were false.
A USPTO ‘final rejection’ is a technical term — it’s a step in the process, not the end of the road. Applicants who continue forward receive a patent roughly 70% of the time. PolarityTE did exactly that, and in February 2021, the USPTO granted the patent. The company was never hiding anything — the patent process simply wasn’t over.
The false narrative about PolarityTE’s patents was demonstrably false — demonstrated by the USPTO allowing its patent, and the class action lawsuit ultimately was dismissed. — Honig v. Anson Funds, First Amended Complaint
But the damage was already done. The stock crashed over 40% on the day of the first attack. Institutional investors fled. PolarityTE lost its financing, declared bankruptcy in 2023, and its shares went to zero. Honig and his family lost millions.
7 Years of Fake News — Now Confirmed
For years, Barry Honig’s name appeared in articles that treated short-seller reports as gospel truth. Those reports called him a ‘stock promoter’ for ‘failed companies’ — language Citron used to smear anyone connected to its targets. The media amplified the attacks without checking whether the underlying claims were true.
As the new lawsuit filed in May 2026 states, the defendants ‘made false and disparaging statements about PolarityTE and Plaintiffs’ business… with knowledge that they were false or with no reasonable grounds for believing them to be true.’
Honig’s RIOT Blockchain investment — another Citron target — was cleared by the SEC in 2020. RIOT Platforms today is worth billions. MARA Holdings, another company Honig helped build, is also a multi-billion dollar enterprise. The ‘frauds’ turned out to be real companies.
Now It’s Left Who Faces Justice
In July 2024, the Department of Justice indicted Andrew Left on 19 criminal counts — including securities fraud and lying to federal investigators. He faces up to 365 years in prison. His trial is currently scheduled for 2026.
The indictment describes the scheme in detail, including a ‘Hedge Fund A’ that secretly paid Left through a third-party intermediary — matching precisely what the SEC found about Anson Funds.
Ryan Choi, Left’s partner who executed trades at Citron Capital, settled with the SEC and paid over $1.8 million. Anson itself paid $2.25 million in penalties. Hindenburg Research — another short seller connected to the broader network — shut down while investigations were ongoing.
The Bottom Line
Barry Honig didn’t need to wait for a trial to be vindicated. The SEC already confirmed the scheme was real. The DOJ already confirmed PolarityTE was a named target. The patent was already granted. The class action lawsuit was already dismissed.
What took seven years wasn’t the truth — it was the government catching up to it.
The Andrew Left trial may finally put a face and a prison sentence on what was done. But the record is already clear: Barry Honig was the victim of a coordinated, government-confirmed fake news campaign — and the perpetrators are now the ones facing accountability.