SCAMS-R-US

[tredenwater2]

I was waiting for Pershing Gold to surface from somewhere. It would be real interesting for the SEC to to look into stock sales during mid 2014-2015 with the same characters.

According to the complaints in those cases, the defendants schemed to deceive investors by leading them to believe that the articles they were reading at SeekingAlpha, TheStreet and other financial sites represented impartial analysis rather than paid advertising.

Our investigation turned up a certain amount of overlap between those schemes and the touting network covered in this report.

Some of the writers who were charged by the SEC last year wrote bullish articles about companies backed by Honig, Brauser and Frost, including Chromadex Corp. (Nasdaq: CDXC), Pershing Gold Corp. (Nasdaq: PGLC) and Senesco Technologies Inc. (formerly OTC: SNTI). Those articles appeared in the period covered by the SEC actions.

Similarly, some of the writers in the still-active touting network wrote favorable pieces about companies identified in the SEC cases. That list included DelMar Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Nasdaq: DMPI), CytRx Corp. (Nasdaq: CYTX) and OncoSec Medical Inc. (Nasdaq: ONCS). Those articles, too, appeared in the period covered by the SEC actions.

DISCLOSURE ISSUES

It is legal for public companies, their investor relations consultants and other third parties to pay for touting campaigns and other promotional activities. Under SEC rules, however, writers or websites that get paid to provide favorable coverage must disclose that. They also are supposed to say how much money they received and who paid them.

Fewer than 30 of the articles we flagged about companies backed by Honig and his associates included statements saying the authors were paid to write them, or to conduct third-party research.

The vast majority of the stealth promotion pieces that were posted at SeekingAlpha asserted that the writers were not compensated for their efforts and had no business relationships with any of the companies mentioned. Most of those disclosure statements also said that the writers did not own shares in any of the companies.

The bulk of the articles at other sites, such as Gurufocus.com, Equities.com and Investing.com, had no disclosure statements saying whether the writers had been paid or had business ties to the featured companies.

Most of the touted names were penny stock companies whose share prices are, or were, under $5. Despite their modest size, the combined market capitalization of those companies at their respective peaks was still considerable, approaching $3 billion

http://sharesleuth.com/investigations/2018/03/pretenders-and-ghosts-stealth-promotion-network-exploits-financial-sites-to-tout-stocks#more-3216

Tred