TCTV scam exposed in this week's Barron's:
Ivan Get Rich
Ivana Trump has found a deeper pocket than her ex-hubby Donald: the stock market. But her latest enterprise involves her with some highly questionable characters, and it's unclear whether or not she knows about their past history of stock-market shenanigans. Just a couple of weeks ago, Ivana told viewers of The Rosie O'Donnell Show that she was working with a company called Tel-Com Wireless Cable TV, which was going to help her get into Internet retailing. No sooner had she uttered these words than shares of Tel-Com began to move from $6 to $25, briefly giving the firm a market value of $220 million. Since then, the shares have settled back to $10. But still, Ivana's televised plug seems to have inflated Tel-Com's shares by more than $30 million.
Based in North Miami Beach, TelCom is but the latest company to excite
investors with talk of online retailing. In this holiday season, publications from Newsweek to Business Week are predicting that shoppers will spend heavily with the 'Net's "e-tailers." In this giddy atmosphere, stocks of relatively well-known Internet companies like Amazon.com and America Online are trading at crazy levels. Yet these outfits look like positively blue-chip businesses compared to some other stocks in the e-tailing field. Among the players are some once-floundering companies whose executives insist they will now make
good on the Internet. Among them are K-tel International, Egghead.com and Bluefly.
But Tel-Com, the company Ivana Trump is involved with, looks even worse than this lot. In exchange for 10% of a Tel-Com subsidiary, Ivana Trump has agreed to put her name on Tel-Com's Internet site and host its home shopping conduit, called the Fifth Avenue Channel. A peek into Tel-Com's back room, however, reveals that the company's boosters and big shareholders include convicted stock manipulators, shameless promoters and brokers who've been banned from the securities business.
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Gerry
p.s. I don't have a position in TCTV...I was just curious to see who's promoting this dog so I'll know to avoid them in the future. |
