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Pastimes : Georgia Bard's Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ga Bard who wrote (8326)	12/15/1999 7:39:00 PM
From: bob sims	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9440

Wed, 15 Dec 1999, 7:01pm EST U.S. Charges Three Men With Web Stock Manipulation (Update1) U.S. Charges Three Men With Web Stock Manipulation (Update1) (Adds details of charges) Los Angeles, Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Three men, including two recent graduates of the University of California at Los Angeles, were charged with illegally netting $364,000 by using the university's computers to manipulate a stock through Internet chat rooms. The case is the first Internet stock-fraud case filed by the SEC against people unaffiliated with the company whose stock they allegedly manipulated for profit, SEC spokesman Chris Ullman said. The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles also filed criminal charges against two of the men. ''Though the perpetrators in this case went to great lengths to hide from us, we discovered them within a matter of days,'' SEC enforcement director Richard H. Walker said. The three men used 50 aliases in sending messages to 500 Internet bulletin boards, the SEC alleged. The stock they allegedly manipulated, NEI Webworld Inc., soared one morning to $15.50 a share, from a previous closing price of 13 cents, then collapsed to 25 cents a share a half-hour later, the SEC alleged. The three people charged by the SEC all live in California. They were identified as Arash Aziz-Golshani, 23, an Internet leather-jacket retailer who recently graduated from UCLA; Allen Derzakharian, 26, another recent UCLA graduate who is a pharmacy student at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, and Hootan Melamed, 23, also a pharmacy student at the same school. Golshani and Melamed also were charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, an offense that carries a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. Golshani was arre