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Salt Lake City was once dubbed a ‘stock fraud capital.’ Here’s why.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced it’s closing its Salt Lake Regional Office after 70 years. Here’s why it opened and the schemes that kept it busy — including beaver ranching.

(Utah State Historical Society) Workers at a uranium mine near Moab in the 1950s. The demand for uranium, brought on by the Cold War, fostered a fair number of scam artists selling shares of Utah uranium mines that were not actually created — which prompted the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to open its first office in Salt Lake City in 1954.