Expo Holdings Inc. (EXPH)

[Santa Barbara Broker]

Basser...essentially that post could be applied to EXPH and all pink sheet stocks. By way of explanation....

Long before Expo Holdings, Inc. existed and email was being used with great frequency, there were the newsletters and flyers that went out to potential investors in companies like Expo Holdings, Inc. The nickel and dime sleaze merchants doing the mailing in those days were the modern day equivalent of the dirtbag promotion companies hired by penny stock scammers today to issue online, official looking, professionally double spoken press releases and promote their scam companies into something they are not. The pump and dump then was run by snail mail and accordingly took much longer and greater effort to bring in the same amount of suckered cash. Enter the "pre-excuse". These newsletters would go out with some phony rationale about how there was a "...new product about to be released..." and "...the stock was going to soar...yadda yadda" but also with an excuse already included to explain the company's lack of success to that point. The easiest excuse and one that lent itself to being most flexible to building creative prevarication was the clandestine evil short. It became as recognizable as the pigeon drop or the three card monty table to street smart investors , but it rarely failed to promote a rally amongst the uninitiated, naive "get rich quick" crowd. And, fortunately (or unfortunately dependant on how you view the situation) for the scammers, the internet was not then available to debunk the myth. And since the shorts couldn't be proven or (more importantly) disproven, it worked famously.

Round about 1996-97, the internet began to be widely used for trading stocks and many sites developed for same. It was only natural that the "short seller" myth followed along with the stock scammers into cyberspace where they found millions of new eyes to deceive. Early on in the beginning of 1999, a gentleman known as "Firebird1967" (among many other aliases) tried an experiment to see how widespread this myth had become. He posted a story on several sites claiming how he had been a corrupted stock broker who's only mission in life was to destroy good companies. He had been a "short seller" and went on from there to post a ludicrous, completely fabricated story about how most of the OTC stocks were in fact excellent companies whose only fault was the invasion of short sellers into their realm which caused them to be destroyed solely based on greed for profit from this evil bunch. He was now repentant for his "sins" and part in this destruction and was publishing this story to reveal the "truth" to the world. Now Firebird's actual idea was to start this story in circulation and then, since he had complete proof he alone had started it, to bring this fact out into the open debunking the "short seller" myth once and for all and showing people how these scammers actually operated. A noble idea but one that failed miserably.

The story took on a life of it's own and was republished literally everywhere on any stock site even remotely associated with a scam stock by people looking to promote and now "defend" the things. Here at last they claimed was ironclad evidence of what most investors had suspected all along, and if only enough people joined forces and bought up these stocks the conspiring MMs and their evil short minions would be forced to cover and the stock price would soar. Whoops. Firebird did everything he could to debunk his own myth, but alas it was too late. Even to this day, I still see that same story published by some naive fool who actually believes it and is using it to defend a scam stock and the scumbags who are defrauding them as they post.

As a result and to make up for what he had inadvertently done, Firebird joined forces with a loosely organized band of debunkers who went out into the internet determined to expose the worthless b**tards that run these things. It was known under several names but in essence it grew and grew until today there are probably well over 100 hardcore "members". One of the founders, probably the best debunker I every ran into, recently died and will be forever missed, but Firebird carries on and the members continue to debunk scams and patiently try to recruit one or two new debunkers from every scam stock board on which they are successful. There is no "club" to join or membership card to carry. We simply do our best to educate and send new debunkers out into the world to defeat more scammers. But THAT is basically how the "short seller" myth was carried over into the internet and gained traction.

Like with Expo Holdings, Inc., there are an endless variety of intellectually dumbfounding entities who continue to come up with these inexplicable and impossible to rationalize complex schemes involving MMs, share volume and clandestine naked shorts. They endlessly manipulate what is totally normal and explainable corrupt behavior into something bizarre enough to give themselves (and unfortunately, other naive and unschooled "investors") pause to retain hope in their "investment". Now it also becomes the task of the scam debunkers to not only fight the scum running the scams, but also these legions of foolish and clueless individuals who are unwittingly helping the very people who are robbing them blind. And with the advent of sites that severely restrict references to individuals, there is where they settle because there is where they can flourish.

That is one reason why the EXPHs of the world now take so long to expose. The entities who go out of their way to sustain denial at any cost and endlessly promote their irrational and borderline insane theories on why the simple, workable and obvious is actually all a clandestine ruse hidden by the complex, unworkable, improvable and unseen. All probably started by a completely fabricated story about "unseen shorts". And it may never end. As Ron White so famously said "...you can't fix stupid. There's not a pill you take. There's not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever...". All IMHO