If you believe in the inherent goodness of your fellow man, reading the Securities and Exchange Commission's daily news digest could persuade you to seriously reconsider your outlook on life.

The digest, available at www.sec.gov/news/digest, offers a compendium of enforcement actions that federal securities police are taking against ne'er-do-well brokerages, Ponzi scheme perpetrators, inside traders, boiler room pitch artists and other species of bad actors frequenting the financial services industry.

Occasionally, a big fish will show up in the digest, as was the case this month when the SEC announced it had filed securities fraud charges against former Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo and other executives of the debilitated mortgage provider that was acquired last summer by Bank of America.

While Mr. Mozilo and his cohorts were telling outsiders Countrywide was a prime quality mortgage lender, the SEC alleged that Mr. Mozilo used the term "toxic" to describe a profitable subprime product in internal documents. The agency accuses him of pocketing nearly $140 million in profits from selling Countrywide shares based on nonpublic information.

Casual financial page readers will recognize Mr. Mozilo's name, but most of those appearing on the SEC's daily blotter are unknown except to their victims.

Take the June 9 edition, which detailed charges against Berkshire Resources, a Wyoming outfit that raised about $15.5 million from 265 U.S. and Canadian investors who thought all of their money was going into oil and gas drilling projects.

Instead, about $6.7 million went to expenses that had nothing to do with such projects, according to the SEC. By the agency's accounting, the diversions included $1.3 million used to pay for mortgages, home furnishings, electronics, cars and credit card bills belonging to family members of David and Jason Rose, the father-and-son team who are Berkshire's principals.

Seldom is a digest published these days without the mention of the ubiquitous phrase "Ponzi scheme." The June 9 edition was no exception, detailing three such operations.

The largest resulted in charges against two California men accused of operating an $80 million Ponzi scheme that victimized about 500 investors in the United States, South Korea and Taiwan.

According to the SEC, Peter C. Son and Jin K. Chung promised investors annual returns of up to 36 percent from trading foreign currencies, going so far as to generate monthly statements showing fictitious returns. Instead, they used the money to pay other investors and for personal use, such as mortgage payments for Mr. Son's "multimillion-dollar home," according to the digest.

The other two incidents involved limited partnerships offered by a Virginia man that were supposed to invest in stock and bond index derivatives and other investments, and a Grayson, Ga., attorney who raised more than $62 million from about 2,200 investors expecting eye-popping returns by flipping foreclosed Atlanta real estate.

Another colorfully named securities law violation was in the June 9 edition, describing how the SEC ordered the distribution of $139,000 from a restitution fund established to compensate the victims of "cherry picking" done by Seth Gerson and Gerson Asset Management of Mount Kisko, N.Y.

According to the SEC, Mr. Gerson "cherry picked" trades in two ways. First, he purchased securities at the beginning of the day, but waited until the end of the day to decide whether the purchases were for himself or his clients. If they went up during the day, the trades were allocated to his accounts; if they did not, they went to his clients.

For other clients who ordered him to purchase securities, Mr. Gerson made the purchases then waited to see the results of that day's trading. If the price went up, he called the purchase his own and took the profits, then bought the same security for his clients later in the day at a higher price, the SEC said.

Also detailed in the June 9 edition were amended insider trading charges the SEC brought against Swiss national Lorenz Kohler and his Swiss Real Estate International Holding. The agency alleges they illegally profited from trading in advance of the October 2006 announcement that GlaxoSmithKline was acquiring CNS at a significant premium to CNS' market price.

Mr. Kohler purchased CNS options in the name of Swiss Real Estate "based on material, nonpublic information relating to the company's potential acquisition," the SEC stated.

The agency said profits from the trades totaled nearly $388,000. Mr. Kohler tipped off his wife and brother-in-law, who also traded CNS options in advance of the announcement, the agency said.

The edition's compilation of alleged and sanctioned offenders doesn't end there, but you get the idea. The world is filled with vultures, a sucker's born every minute and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true.

While the offenders chronicled in the daily digest do not reflect the character of most financial services industry practitioners, bad apples are always with us, in good times and bad. In bad times, we are more likely to be on the lookout for them. That sort of behavior is appropriate in good times as well.