NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - A California man paid $25,000 to settle a civil complaint that he posted a fake news report to a Web site to profit by $350 on a stock trade, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday.

Nikolai Safavi sold shares of SINA, a Chinese Internet company, short at $42, according to the SEC. Short sellers bet the price of a stock will fall, selling borrowed stock and hoping to buy the shares back more cheaply later to repay the loan.

When the price of the stock continued to hover above $42, he wrote and posted what looked like a Reuters story on a Yahoo! Finance message board saying that SINA had received a "Market Underperform" rating in a newly issued Goldman Sachs research report, the regulatory agency said.

In fact, Goldman Sachs does not cover SINA.

Safavi then tried to delete the fake story, according to the complaint, but was unable to get access to the account he used to post it.

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The stock dropped 3 percent after the fake release was posted, and the next morning, he sold it for $41.65, earning a profit of $350, before transaction costs, the agency said.

Safavi agreed to pay a $25,000 fine without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, it added.

John Stark, the SEC's Internet enforcement chief, told Reuters the Safavi case marks the ninth such online "impersonation" case the SEC has brought so far.