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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (66842)	2/9/2001 12:37:16 AM
From: StockDung	Respond to of 122087

COMPANY BLAMES FAILURE ON INTERNET MESSAGES LAWSUIT: POSTINGS CAUSED 2THEMART.COM STOCK TO FALL, ATTORNEY SAYS. Thursday, February 1, 2001 Byline: Credit: BY CHRIS FARNSWORTH IRVINE -- 2TheMart.com may not have offices or a Web site anymore, but it still has lawyers. An attorney for the failed company blames message-board postings on the Internet for his client's stock decline, and he has subpoenaed the names of a group of posters to the Raging Bull online message board to try to prove it. In 1999, 2TheMart's stock shot to $50 from $2 in a week after it said its site would compete with Web auctioneer eBay. The shares tumbled last year after 2TheMart's auditors quit and it couldn't get its Web site running. The stock recently traded at 5 cents. The company, which had offices in Irvine, is being sued in bankruptcy court by three creditors who say they are owed almost $547,000. Many of the messages on the Raging Bull site are from people angry at the stock's fall. But attorney Keith Bardellini, who is defending 2TheMart in a lawsuit brought by shareholders, said he believes the stock was brought down by traders using the board to profit. Bardellini said people who posted messages on the board might have been trying to ``short'' the stock, a technique in which investors sell borrowed shares, hoping to buy them back if the stock falls and then pocket the difference. Bardellini said investors get a lot of information from online message boards like Raging Bull's and that false news could cause a sell-off. That kind of scam isn't unheard of. Emulex Corp. of Costa Mesa lost half its market value in less than an hour last year when a phony news release said the company was under federal investigation. It is company policy to comply with subpoenas demanding the identities of posters, said Kirsten Rankin, a spokeswoman for Lycos Inc., the parent company of Raging Bull. Subpoenas aimed at discovering the identities of the authors of anonymous messages on the Web are common. Ingram Micro Inc. of Santa Ana filed suit in August to discover the identities of people posting messages about the company on Internet boards. Contact Farnsworth at (714) 796-7083 or cfarnsworth@notes.freedom.com