sell the bonds at inflated prices, substitute different bonds, mislead investors about the risks, or fail to deliver the bonds to the investor. In the 1990s, organized crime in New York City became involved in microcap stock fraud using boiler rooms. Although many disappeared in the 1990s following the burst of the "dot-com bubble", many boiler rooms still operate across the world. Reductions in telecommunication costs mean that a company can viably operate in one country while calling prospective investors in another. The advantage of such an operation is that a company can operate without fear of prosecution from the investor's native legal system. For example, many boiler rooms contacting prospective investors in the United Kingdom operate from Spanish cities such as Barcelona and Valencia. A boiler room operation is well exemplified by the case of Fort Lauderdale-based company First Resource Group LLC, charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with conducting a fraudulent boiler room scheme in 2012. According to the SEC, First Resource (and the company's founder, David H. Stern) used a telephone sales boiler room to make inflated claims and defraud investors while simultaneously manipulating the price of the stocks and making profits for themselves. With the advent of the internet and the ability to create web sites easily without any regulatory involvement, as well as the ability to operate from other jurisdictions, boiler rooms have continued to operate into the 21st century. It is easy for scammers to set up a web site in one country, operate from another country and target victims in a third country, hiding their identity and making it difficult to trace them. Financial regulation varies significantly from country to country, and some countries deliberately promote low regulatory environments in order to attract financial business. This makes it easy for boiler rooms to use this to their advantage. Financial regulatory authorities in each country have significant difficulty enforcing rules on scammers in other countries. With low financial literacy by investors or victims (particularly in the increasingly complex ways that global financial markets operate), and without better coordination between financial regulators in different countries, boiler rooms continue to operate. Gold Coast boiler room scams The Gold Coast has been described by investigators as the capital of investment fraud in Australia, with numerous boiler room operators selling bogus investment and sports betting schemes to Australian and overseas customers. The Australian Crime Commission estimates