He’s the teen wolf of Wall Street.
Mohammed Islam, a high school student who claimed to make a fortune trading stocks, actually didn’t.
Islam, 17, who was profiled in Monday’s issue of New York Magazine as a “genius” high school senior, was rumored to have made $72 million trading stocks. It turns out that rumor was false..
Now, the whiz kid of Wall Street is claiming that he has no idea where the dollar figure came from and that it’s wildly inaccurate.
“The attention is not what we expected — we never wanted the hype. This was about friends trying to make something exciting together,” Islam told CNBC.
“I am incredibly sorry for any misjudgment and any hurt I caused,” Islam said. “The people I’m most sorry for is my parents. I did something where I can no longer gain their trust. I have one sister, two years younger, and we don’t really talk,” Islam told the Observer.
New York Mag stood by their report, but also issued an apology to their readers for poor “fact checking.”
“In the most recent edition of New York, its annual Reasons to Love New York issue, the magazine published this story about a Stuyvesant High School senior named Mohammed Islam, who was rumored to have made $72 million trading stocks,” they wrote in an editor’s note. “Islam said his net worth was in the ‘high eight figures.’ As part of the research process, the magazine sent a fact-checker to Stuyvesant, where Islam produced a document that appeared to be a Chase bank statement attesting to an eight-figure bank account. After the story’s publication, people questioned the $72 million figure in the headline, which was written by editors based on the rumored figure. The headline was amended. But in an interview with the New York Observer last night, Islam now says his entire story was made up. A source close to the Islam family told the Washington Post that the statements were falsified.”
“We were duped. Our fact-checking process was obviously inadequate; we take full responsibility and we should have known better,” they added. “New York apologizes to our readers.”
Let’s hope these boys learned their lesson and never cry wolf … again! – ruu hawkins/@ruubabie
Photo credit: Mohammed Islam/LinkedIn
