That’s a new twist, but what’s interesting is what isn’t new. There’s the old boiler-room favorite—undisclosed compensation. According to the SEC, the pair was compensated by receiving millions of shares of the companies that they touted, selling them on the open market even as they were claiming that the shares were going to rise in value. There’s actually nothing wrong with that as long as it’s disclosed to investors—which, in this case, it wasn’t, according to the SEC.

PennyStockChaser.com boasted a while back that it was “No. 1 in the business,” which probably wasn’t too far from the truth. It certainly was large and brazen enough to attract the attention of a muckraking website called Streetsweeper, which ran an exposé on the website back in November.

A similar route was taken by an outfit called InvestSource, which was the subject of another recent SEC enforcement action. Again, there were the same elements as in the PennyStockChaser case—compensation, mainly in stock, by 85 clients, mostly penny-stock companies. Again, the shares were allegedly sold at the same time that they were being touted to clients. There was disclosure that that might happen, but the SEC deemed it to be inadequate. The breadth of its operations was wide. According to the SEC, the firm sent more than 450 email messages to 24 million recipients between January 2008 and March 2009.

There’s another commonality with the boiler-room era in both these cases: Except for a company headed by one of the promoters charged by the SEC, none of the execs of companies whose stocks were touted were named in the enforcement actions. The SEC, as is its practice, focuses on the stock promoters rather than on the companies using their services. The only case that comes to mind of a corporate CEO being thrown in the clink for participating in a stock-hustling scheme was Steve Madden, head of the shoe company that bears his name. Madden was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for colluding with the notorious Stratton Oakmont chop house. That was back in 2002.

The SEC has had a hard time suppressing penny-stock promoters, and I wonder if it’s because there’s not just a lot of demand from investors, but also a steady supply of companies that aren’t too particular about who is touting their shares. Stock promoters wouldn’t get anywhere if corporate executives shared responsibility for the tactics used to push their shares and were required to do due diligence about the methods used.

The SEC may not have legal authority to pursue the companies that hire unscrupulous penny-stock promoters. If so, it’s time that our securities watchdogs got some. A better way of ending the whack-a-mole tournament may be to use the new agency that was just created. This may be a job for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the newly enacted financial crisis legislation. I can’t think of a better way to protect consumers from one of the biggest, most persistent threats out there.