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To: Jeffrey S. Mitchell who wrote (925)	1/7/2000 6:51:00 AM
From: Patrick Slevin	Respond to of 944

Yes, I read a couple of links to the story. Plus, there was quite a bit about it in the NY Times yesterday. You can get lost in the CNBC site; I just spent 10 minutes trying to find that story again and Netscape crashed. It was about scams and they spoke a bit about SI, WebNode and your comments. I'll try once again to find it but I don't hold much hope; I was pretty sure that you knew about it.

To: Jeffrey S. Mitchell who wrote (925)	1/7/2000 6:56:00 AM
From: Patrick Slevin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 944

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.