How much prison time would everyone get for the Pump and Dump scam?
In the film J.T. Marlin is a chop stock brokerage firm that runs a "pump and dump", using its brokers to create artificial demand in the stock of expired or fake companies. When the firm is done pumping the stock, the investors then have no one to sell their shares to in the market, and the price of the stock plummets.
Seth is arrested by the FBI and forced to cooperate or go to prison, everyone else except for Vin Diesel's character presumably get arrested in the raid at the end of the movie by the police and FBI and Wall Street Financial Authority that raids the chop shop posing as a firm, they basically just continue working not knowing that they are about to get busted and arrested in large numbers and they will need good lawyers and even that probably would not save them from long prison sentences and heavy fines and long and drawn out courtroom battles.
Now the obvious question is what would the legal penalties be for engaging in the kind of scams that the company had been doing in the movie? Even the legitimate Brokers in the bar scene early on called J.T. Marlin a Chop Chop and correctly said that they named it like their own so that it would sound real, the fake Brokers at the firm took offense to this and threatened them.
The firm also kicked out the Broker at the first meeting that had a Series Seven License because as a legally trained and licensed Broker he would be able to spot the scams and see the legal danger that he would be in by working for the firm and thus report it once he realize what they were all about, they didnt want this to happen and got rid of him once they knew he was a real Broker and not some green kid that they could train and butter up with promises of quick wealth and few morals, this movie is loosely based on Stratton Oakmont and its owner Jordan Belfort who did several of the scams and worse in real life.