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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KM who wrote (41570)	12/27/1997 2:03:00 PM
From: Bobo Bear	Respond to of 58324

Wade Cook article in SmartMoney October 1996 issue, page 106. FWIW, here is some excerpts from that article. In 1988 a New Mexico businessman named Kenneth Starr attended one of Cook's seminars. During a break the two men began chatting. Cook told him he was planning to set up a company to buy discounted paper---would Starr be interested in heading the New Mexico office? Starr said yes. "My head was turned," Starr says now. The two agreed to raise $100,000---$50,000 of which Cook would use to take care of legal expenses and Securities and Exchange Commission fees for their new company, Sunstar. Starr brought in a group of investors with whom he was friendly and helped Cook sell the plan at a seminar in Texas. But Starr says Cook never followed through on his half of the bargain and that the $50,000 Cook took simply "disappeared." Sunstar's investors sue Cook in New Mexico and won, but they've never been able to collect. Starr says he never knew about Cook's 1987 bankruptcy or the Missouri cease-and-desist action until after the deal collapsed. "We all fell for it," says Starr. Between December 1987 and August 1990, Cook and his companies were hit with five additional cease-and-desist orders from state securities regulators in Utah, Minnesota, Illinois, Oregon and Arizona for selling securities without a license, selling unregistered securities and omission of material facts. In the last action, Arizona's Corporation Commission, the state's secutities watchdog, found that Cook had taken $390,841 from at least 150 investors by selling unregistered securities and had misappropriated almost $48,000 of it to pay his federal income taxes and help buy his Scottsdale home. The commission also found him guilty of "materal misrepresentations and omissions of material facts" (i.e., his bankruptcy and the financial condition of his companies) and concluded that he had "employed a device, scheme or artifice to defraud." The state ordered him to pay back his investors and assessed him a $150,000 administrative penalty. At his hearing Cook took the Fifth Amendment. .................. Cook says he'd like to make his former investors whole. "I could write out a check today for 300,000 bucks like that," he says, snapping his fingers. His lawyers, however, won't let him. "They say, 'Nope, don't do it, Wade---can't do it.'" Why not? "Because it would be an admission of guilt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." Meanwhile, Ken Starr says he could never rally the creditors to band together and go after their $390,841 in lost investments---he thinks people are just too embarrassed about what happened to them. The states haven't done much better. Oregon levied a $5,000 fine along with its cease-and-desist order, but it has never tried to collect. It just isn't worth it. The same is true of Arizona's $150,000 penalty, says Assistant Attorney General Norma Martens. Trying to collect in Washington would be "too time-consuming," she says. "We'd be using up our resources to get the judgment recognized."

To: KM who wrote (41570)	12/27/1997 4:01:00 PM
From: Teddy	Respond to of 58324

RE: "Wade Cook is a hypester and infomercial jockey who advocates very risky strategies to the uninformed....Mr. Cook also has a very checkered past, which he doesn't disclose in his books and other materials." Thanks Truff, guess i won't go to his seminar. BTW, what does your husband think about the latest naomi court rulings? Updated 5:21 PM ET December 26, 1997 Hell freezes over HELL, Norway (Reuters) - Far from Dante's "Inferno" and without even a hint of fire or brimstone, Hell is dominated by a shopping center. Even Pope John Paul has been to Hell, a Norwegian village that lures English-speaking tourists with images of Satan and eternal damnation to the bemusement of its 2,500 inhabitants. Usually frozen over in winter, Hell gets its name in Norwegian from nothing more sinister than the word "hellir," or "settlement by a hillside," linked to Stone Age rock carvings nearby. In modern Norwegian, "hell" means "luck."