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Confessions of a Phony Stock Basher
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/12/confessions-of.html

By Betsy Schiffman
December 19, 2007 | 5:15:21 PM Categories: Total Crock

Stock message boards are a bastion of crazies and idiots who try to manipulate stocks by spreading misinformation. "Bashers" are posters who are notably and consistently negative on a stock. They make ridiculous calls (e.g. "Microsoft shares will fall $6 tomorrow!") and they claim to have inside information about specific stocks. (They often pick on smaller sub-$10 stocks that are cheaper and easier to manipulate, as opposed to larger, widely-held stocks such as Wal-Mart.)

In recent weeks, stock message board users have been aflutter with one post, "Confessions of a Paid Basher." http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_N/threadview?m=tm&bn=22401&tid=... The so-called confession was written by somebody who claims he/she was paid by "Springfield Global Funds" to dump on a handful of stocks including Overstock.com, OmniVision Technologies, Crown Media Holdings and Dendreon.

The idea behind my group is to bash the price of a company's stock down low enough to where the group of investors who retained our company's services can buy the stock really cheap and perhaps even take it over all together.

This poster claims he/she was paid $18 per hour, plus "$1.25 bonus for every decent quality post over 100 per day as well as a monthly bonus of $100 for every penny the stock had dropped from the previous month."

This is actually pretty old news -- several versions of this same confession have circulated online at least since 2000 -- but it struck us as odd that somebody took the time to update the post to include Overstock.com, a company whose CEO,Patrick Byrne, is pretty obsessed with stock manipulation.

Byrne (right) denies allegations that he has anonymously posted on message boards to defend his company, but we wondered if an overzealous defender of Overstock, or even low-level employee might be responsible for this particular rendition of the confession.

"This is not something we had anything to do with," says Overstock.com spokesperson Judd Bagley.

Photo: Courtesy Overstock.com

http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/12/confessions-of.html




Raging Bull Chat Room Devotees Get Dose of 'Whopper'

By Robert Kowalski
Staff Reporter
11/9/00 3:12 PM ET
URL: http://www.thestreet.com/tech/internet/1165692.html


If anyone needed further proof that Internet bulletin boards attract fools like winged vermin to a Shell No-Pest Strip, Steve Tracy offered it last week when he publicly "confessed" online that he was being paid to bash stocks.

In the week that followed, lots of the gullible folk still apparently didn't realize just how badly they were being had. So badly that Tracy, the originator of the little hoax, was sheepishly wondering if his prank had spiraled out of control.

"In my view, this thing has gotten totally ridiculous," he wrote in an email interview. "While at first I was pleased at the reception it received, I am quite dismayed that so many people would believe what I had thought to be an obvious joke."

The fun began last Wednesday when Tracy, who goes by the Internet alias firebird_1965, posted a tome entitled, "Confessions of a Paid Basher", on Raging Bull.

Blastoff

Tracy posted the purported mea culpa with considerable fanfare, including a message-by-message countdown to its launch.

In the missive, he came clean in gushing prose about what many of the conspiratorial types have suspected for months about the Internet message boards: He claimed he was being paid to bash stocks as part of an orchestrated effort to drive their prices down. He said he worked for a boiler room operation called Franklin Andrews Kramer & Edelstein in Stamford, Conn.

He said he was ashamed and wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror again. "I'm too broken up to continue. I hope this confession can make up for my sordid deeds," he wrote.

OK, that kind of talk usually brings a skeptical smirk to any reporter's face. This is Raging Bull, after all, not the Little Sisters of the Poor. And there were other red flags fluttering around this tale.

There is no listing for Franklin Andrews in the Stamford phone directory. No sign of it in standard corporate records databases either. One clever observer later noticed a pattern in the first initials of each name in the firm when linked together: F-A-K-E.

"Come on, that's as obvious and silly as those acronyms they used in the old 1960s spy movies," Tracy said.

There was also a nearly identical posting of a so-called paid basher confession on another message board site with a different name for the supposed boiler room. Then there was the clincher. At the bottom of Tracy's "confession," well past the signature (for anyone who bothered to continue scrolling), read this innocuous line: "And if you believe this -- lol."

In Internet posting lingo, "lol" is short for "laughing out loud."

Bingo.

But that's the part no one picked up initially when they electronically copied the confession and began posting it all over other message board sites under headings for at least a dozen different stocks.

Those included boards for Urbana(URBA:OTC BB), Sun Microsystems(SUNW:Nasdaq), Cyber-Care(CYBR:Nasdaq) and WaveRider Communications(WAVC:Nasdaq).

"It put 'bashers' in a whole new light for me" one person wrote in a posting on Raging Bull.

Tracy claims on his Raging Bull profile to be a 35-year old Texas marketing consultant with an MBA who likes "fast cars, faster women." But we know how much to believe about what he says online.

Still, in an email interview, he said: "I would ask that it be made clear ... that I am not a paid basher."

"The truly sad thing is that after learning it was a put on, some of these people still want to believe it was part of some grand conspiracy," he said. "My suggestion to these people is: Don't go to Burger King for a while -- you've already had your share of Whoppers!"


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