So which is worse — inducing shareholders to purchase $6.5 million of your company’s stock by falsely depicting the company as being on the verge of success curing cancer?  Or defrauding a federal judge by falsely depicting yourself as having cancer such that you are so ill that you cannot participate in a potential SEC case against you?

Take your pick, as those are the allegations in separate cases that were reported on Wednesday and Thursday of this week.  On Thursday, the SEC filed a settled case in federal court in California against Telomolecular Corp. and two of its former executives for a “fraudulent stock scheme” involving the sale of $6.5 million worth of its shares. The SEC alleges that the biotechnology start-up company and its executives “falsely depicted the company as on the verge of success as a biotechnology firm developing anti-aging treatments and cancer cures.”

Meanwhile, the day before, across the country in Boston, Massachusetts, Howard P. Richman, a former executive of Biopure Corp., was indicted in federal court on a charge of obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to a federal judge when he said he had Stage III colon-rectal cancer and could not participate in any depositions or other pretrial processes in a case the SEC was preparing to bring against him. Prosecutors allege that Richman supported his false claim of cancer with a phony letter from a doctor, and did so in an attempt to force a settlement in the SEC case.