Prospector -- here's the condensed version of the IAS saga.
The company was founded by Neldon Johnson in 1988 as a "development stage company" trading on the OTC Bulletin Board. Ten years later, it's still in the development stage. Even startup companies in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals manage to get products out the door in 10 years.
If you look at their Web site, iaus.com , you'd think they were an up-and-coming high tech outfit. The reality is different -- carefully read their most recent quarterly (10-Q) and annual (10-K) filings on the SEC's Web site, to see what I mean. The links for these are: sec.gov and sec.gov . They are filled with comments like "At this time the Company is not generating sufficient funds to sustain its operations." Also, yes those numbers you see on the SEC documents are in dollars, not in thousands of dollars like for most companies. I guess I have to give them a little credit though -- they at least file financial reports with the SEC, unlike a lot of the fraudulent companies here on SI in the "5 dollars and under" thread.
They claim to have 3 products, but they have no commercial sales. Those products are:
(1) DWM -- this was supposed to be used in a 6,000,000 bps modem that would work with unmodified phone lines. The company hyped this endlessly, including ads in Investor's Business Daily newspaper. The share price climbed from an eighth (12 1/2 cents) a share to 57 dollars a share before it collapsed. It is the 2 year anniversary of when IAS was supposed to demonstrate this wonderful technology. They had an event with a large crowd, and then told those assembled that they couldn't show anything because of "patent problems". (More cynical people feel that it was because they had nothing to show that worked.) The share price collapsed, a lawsuit was filed by the investors alleging fraud, and a SEC investigation ensued (that is still ongoing - I had a role in the SEC investigation 2 years ago.) A number of engineers here on this thread, like Norm, have been trying to debunk the wild IAS claims for DWM.
(2) AFIM -- a fingerprint machine. They claimed this would be used by law enforcement all over the world. Based on the SEC documents, it looks like the company had a little revenue selling 80 prototypes of the AFIM, but then lost money when people canceled their orders because IAS didn't deliver the promised machines.
(3) U-Check - a grocery store technology where people check out their own groceries while being prevented from stealing. IAS was supposed to build a prototype store in Utah, but according to the pictures on a link posted here recently, the prototype store is just an empty building with little sign of construction activity.
Paul M. |
