Interesting article by Timothy L. O'Brien about UPCA in today's NY Times:
nytimes.com
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Among other things, the article includes further details concerning Flores' prior conviction and how the UPCA case came to the attention of regulatory authorities so quickly:
... Uniprime came to regulators' attention last month when Cameron Funkhouser, head of market regulation for the National Association of Securities Dealers, was feeding his 4-month-old son early one morning as he perused Internet stock boards. A message, bearing Uniprime's stock symbol, flashed across his computer screen: "Buy UPCA!"
A little digging on the Internet about Uniprime convinced Funkhouser that something was amiss. A few hours later, the NASD, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service began an investigation of the company.
"Everyone wonders how these investigations get triggered," Funkhouser said. "Well, that's how it happened. The wrong guy read the message they spammed across the Internet."
... But Uniprime devotees should have been skeptical. According to the SEC's complaint, Flores had little in his background to suggest he had stumbled upon an AIDS cure. In 1983, the complaint says, Flores was convicted on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder "based upon his participation in the murder of a friend's parents in their Colorado house after they refused to hand over valuables to Flores and their son." Flores was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but was paroled in 1992.
Moreover, Flores, who claims to be a native of Spain with U.S. citizenship, went to great lengths to pad his resume. He claimed to have spent 15 years in a laboratory outside Lisbon, Portugal, doing immunology research, an impossibility given the prison time Flores was serving. He also claimed to be an honors graduate of the University of Colorado, but he never attended it.
Claims of having successfully tested Plasma Plus on five patients were also dubious, and a supposed agreement to do further research with an AIDS foundation in the Bahamas was a fabrication. ... |
