Grifco Inc (GFCI)

[jtomm]

I'd love for it all to be true. And it may be, who knows.

They have indeed provided an impressive list of supposed clients. But those are just words on a website. I could put up a website that says all those guys are my customers too.

We're asked to believe what they say, without any third-party verification -- especially when it comes to sales and earnings.

There's an impressive product catalog, but it's for Advanced Oilfield Technologies, Inc. (AOT Inc.), not Grifco. The first two pages of AOT's product catalog say "Grifco Coil Tubing Tools", but those words almost look like they could have been photoshopped in. Search the entire rest of the pdf and the word grifco does not appear. Even all of the legalese is about AOT, Inc.

A google search of Grifco's website doesn't even reveal the relationship between Grifco and Advanced Oilfield Technologies:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2003-33%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=site%3Agr...

The front page of Grifco's website makes it look like "Advanced Oilfield Technologies" is a description of what Grifco does, not the name of another company.

Is AOT Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary? A partner? Or is Grifco just a sales agent for AOT?

The domain for AOT is registered to Jerry Griffith. And this link suggests he represented AOT Inc. on an advisory board:

http://www.cgrpttc.lsu.edu/pag.html

But does Grifco own AOT? Does AOT own Grifco? Are the two companies partners? Does Jerry Griffith serve two masters? Is there a sweetheart deal by which AOT is his private company and he has some sort of agreement to buyout Grifco down the road? Or some sweetheart ownership of preferred shares of Grifco?

And asking the company won't necessarily clarify any of this. Because if this is a scam, a scammer doesn't just throw up his/her hands and say, "Darn, that was a good question! I guess you caught me! I admit it, the whole thing is a scam."

It doesn't work that way. The scammers have usually thought out their scam and tend to have the best stories.

Third party verification isn't a perfect system, because sometimes the auditors are in on the scam as well. But at least it's one more level of theoretical scrutiny. It makes a scam that much harder, because more people have to be in on it.

Nearly all the information one can find on the net about Grifco is simply a reprinting of the company's press releases. Again, no verification of anything, all info is coming from the company. If it were a scam, that's how you'd do it.

Doesn't mean it has to be a scam, just means we've got no way to verify anything the company says.