I found it; just by luck
------------------------
cnbc.com
A recent fabrication was a well-meaning April Fool's joke -- meant to be teach a
lesson about investing intelligently.
Fly By Night Associates, a group of friends that met online, put out a press
release earlier this year for a phony company called webnode.com. The release
touted a $4 billion contract with the U.S. government using the company's
fiber-optic Web "node" technology.
"Every year we try to poke fun of a hot topic, and we try to do it in in a
humorous sort to way to show how easy it is to get conned when you don't do
due diligence," says Jeff Mitchell, an FBN member.
Message boards, such as Silicon Investor's, filled with chatter about the bogus
webnode, the contract and the technology that didn't exist. On April 1, FBN got
more than 1,500 inquiries about investing in webnode.
Even after FBN admitted it was a hoax, there was still boards questioning the
veracity of webnode. Some even claimed that they had friends in the company's
IT staff who had told them that these nodes were oversubscribed.
"If selling the Internet brick by brick, like the Brooklyn Bridge, doesn't sound
patently absurd, then there's nothing that can be done," says Mitchell, who
runs a software-development company in Westport, Conn. |
