LOL FAITH. Faith can lead people astray, eh, hey hay. Faith can cost a lot of lost money, honey. Like bees to a hive, you're lucky to survive, while scammers like Trump and Hayseed thrive -- until it catches up to them, and they don't anymore, then it doesn't matter how much money they have stolen, they always die poor.
Thanks, it's a beauty of an example which sure does add to the "end times" outlook and it's influence in so many cultures today.
Have said before, looking forward to the Rapture and death would be a terrible way to enjoy life.
It's a good read: Let There Be Light Crude
Evangelical preachers claim that a giant oil find in Israel will usher in the end of days. Enter the con men and penny-stock hustlers.
Mariah Blake
Illustration: Yuko Shimizu
When james cojanis heard the first rumblings of Armageddon, he was sitting in his San Jose home with the radio tuned to a popular Christian show called The Prophecy Club. Featured that day was a charismatic Texas oilman named Harold “Hayseed” Stephens. Speaking in the rousing cadence of a Southern preacher, he told listeners that “the greatest oil field on Earth is under the southwest corner of the Dead Sea”—and that his company, Ness Energy International, was about to tap into it. In doing so, he said, it would drain the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, prompt Arab countries to attack Israel, and at last touch off the great battle that would usher in the end of days.
As soon as the show was over, Cojanis got on the phone to find out how to invest in the venture. Days later the 70-year-old retiree received a form letter addressed, “Dear End Time Servant.” It claimed that the oil reserves at Ness’ planned drilling site ranged “from one billion to 40 billion barrels…putting this prospect in a class of the super giant oil fields of the world.” Without a second thought, Cojanis bought $120,000 worth of stock in Ness. “Faith is a gift God puts in your heart,” he explained when I visited him in October at his cluttered town house, piled with crumpled boxes of prophecy-themed newsletters and cassette tapes of old Christian radio shows. “And I didn’t have any doubt that Ness was a plan of God. He raised up Hayseed Stephens to find Israel’s oil.”
Eight years later, Ness has yet to sink so much as an initial borehole for a Dead Sea well. In fact, for most of its existence it has never even held exploration rights in Israel. Its U.S. headquarters, a barnlike storefront topped with an open Bible sprouting an oil well, was shuttered in 2006. Since then, its stock price has fallen from a high of nearly $5 to a mere 3 cents; Cojanis’ $120,000 investment is now worth $3,000. Not that he’s worried. “I’m glad the stock price is in the tank,” he says. “When they hit oil and the stock goes sky-high, that means Armageddon is around the corner.” At that point, he plans to use his gains to spread the word that the end times are here, preparing as many souls for heaven as possible.
[...]
Among those swayed was Michael, a 53-year-old Kansas farmer who asked that his last name not be used. In 1999, he invested half a million dollars in Ness, learning only later that the shares he bought couldn’t be resold—a claim echoed in lawsuits filed by other Ness stockholders. He was forced to watch from the sidelines as the share price climbed from the 45 cents he paid at one point to around $5, then sank back to around a quarter. At the peak, his stock would have been worth $11 million. “I thought God was in the project,” he says. “It turns out it was a trap laid for me by the enemy, Satan.”
Over the past 10 years, Ness has issued 180 million shares and collected almost $10 million from investors. What most of them didn’t know—and still don’t today—is that behind the fire and brimstone lurked a standard penny-stock play known as the pump-and-dump scheme, which entails buying a publicly traded shell company, inflating the stock price with misleading claims, then selling off shares at a huge profit and leaving investors holding the bag.
Key Ness executives had a history of such cons. The company’s original chief financial officer, Ivan Webb, moonlighted as president of a firm called Broadband Wireless, where, according to sec investigators, he and convicted con man Donald Knight cheated stockholders out of at least $5 million. Ness’ founding ceo, Stanley Swanson, headed an outfit called Safescript Pharmacies, which had its registration revoked by the sec for artificially inflating its stock value through a fraudulent accounting scheme. A few other Ness insiders had ties to Safescript, including Webb, who served as a consultant. In 2000, Ness purchased $1 million in Safescript stock—shares that became nearly worthless within months.
Stephens played a similar game with Ness’ stock—driving up prices with apocryphal claims, then selling shares, ultimately clearing at least $3.5 million. But in this case, pump and dump was just part of the swindle.
one of Stephens’ darkest secrets is buried in Israel’s oil register, a battered leather binder held together with red electrical tape whose crumpled pages hold exploration permits dating back several decades. During a visit last summer to the offices of the Ministry of National Infrastructures in Jerusalem, I combed through the book with the help of deputy oil commissioner Avraham Honigstein, an unassuming geologist who speaks in a precise monotone. It took nearly an hour, but we eventually unraveled an elaborate shell game designed to give the illusion that Ness held drilling licenses. In fact, the rights were held by a private company called Hesed—a firm owned by Hayseed Stephens. What’s more, Ness and Hesed had an operating agreement saying that Ness was to perform all the work on the proposed Israeli drilling sites while Hesed would receive all the potential profits. In other words, had either company struck oil, Ness investors wouldn’t have seen a penny.
In the end, the terms didn’t matter much, since Stephens never even laid the groundwork for a Dead Sea well. “He didn’t do the geological work because he didn’t want to spend the money,” Moshe Goldberg, Israel’s former oil commissioner, told me. He called the claims that Stephens sold “lies” and “nonsense.”
In April 2003, Stephens sold Hesed and another firm he owned to Ness for around $4 million—at least four times what they were worth, according to sec documents. Stockholders were led to believe that Hesed’s value lay in proprietary geological and seismic data collected on the sites where it had held licenses in Israel; in fact the only geological work Hesed had ever done was to reinterpret an existing seismic study.
The deal was Stephens’ last. He died the following month, struck down by a heart attack while praying with a neighbor outside of his Texas home.
Actually bashing can and should be educative, shouldn't it. Bashing a stock i mean then could be seen as a positive pastime. Looks you are providing a decent service there.
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