Benzinga is a financial news website in Detroit, Mich. operating since 2010. According to its founder Jason Raznick, Benzinga had more than 25 million monthly visitors as of 2021. The company, which had a history of publishing fraudulent articles and plagiarism, provides investment advice and analysis as well as services to several brokerage companies.<ref name=  

Beringer Capital acquired Benzinga in 2021 in a private transaction valued at "more than $300 million,"   according to Jason Raznick, although this amount was unconfirmed. Raznick also said Benzinga featured 150 (unpaid) contributors and 75 full-time employees.

Awards and Highlights
Raznick, who has said he favors "rule breakers, dreamers and doers," received a 2022 award  for "disrupting financial media" from the Michigan Venture Capital Association, which describes itself as "the voice of Michigan's investment community."

Failed Crypto-Currency Investment
Also in 2022, Raznick  was among the seven largest unsecured creditors of crypto-currency broker Voyager Digital. Benzinga didn't disclose Raznick's relationship with Voyager in its coverage of the company at the time. This coverage included a June "Exclusive" in which  Voyager's CEO claimed that its customers' assets "are safe." A few weeks later, Voyager sought bankruptcy protection.

The Federal Reserve and the FDIC in July 2022 jointly ordered Voyager to "cease and desist" from making false or misleading representations about its deposit insurance status "directly or by implication."

'Pump and Dump'
In 2017 Benzinga was implicated in two separate civil lawsuits filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission  concerning illegal stock promotion schemes. 

Benzinga, not a defendant in either complaint, said it was "a victim, not a culprit" and unaware of the multiple fraudulent articles it published during a nearly four-year period that were purportedly written by "outside contributors."  

Related to these lawsuits, the SEC issued an "investor warning," noting that: "Articles on an investment research website that appear to be an unbiased source of information or provide commentary on multiple stocks may be part of an undisclosed paid stock promotion."  

The allegedly fraudulent articles numbering in the "hundreds," were also published by similar web sites including  "Wall Street Cheat Sheet" as well as SmallCapNetwork.com,
InvestorVillage.com, Fool.com,
InvestorsHub.com, Investing.com and others according the SEC, which
didn't accuse the web sites of wrongdoing, although it pursued civil complaints against eight people. 

At least one of the defendants who agreed to an SEC settlement in 2018,  continued to provide Benzinga with news items as of August 2023 through her financial communications company.

Plagiarism
In 2011 Benzinga plagiarized an entire op-ed essay written for the Wall Street Journal by Berkley law professor Orin Kerr. Benzinga.com published this work under the byline "Patrick Harvard." Kerr's essay was published separately around the same time by Forbes.com under the byline of Benzinga CEO "Jason Raznick," who was among more than 1,000 unpaid Forbes "contributors" at the time. Benzinga told Kerr it fired an employee because of the incident. Kerr said subsequently of the plagiarism that he was "more amused and intrigued by this than annoyed or upset."

References

2010 establishments in Michigan
American websites