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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Rocky Mountain Int'l (OTC:RMIL former OTC:OVIS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan Merfeld who wrote (32655)	1/3/1998 7:36:00 PM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 55532

I found some interesting articles to which all most may relate: The Wild, Wild Web By Gregory Spears In the untamed frontier of online investing bulletin boardsand home pages, insider tips too often come from outlaws. "DUMP YOUR STOCK NOW!!!!" shouted the urgent message sent one recent Friday to misc.invest.canada, an Internet bulletin board about Canadian stocks. "AND SHORT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN!!!!!! The company will disintegrate as of Monday and all shareholders will be left with absolutely nothing!" The subject of the "flame," as emotional electronic messages are called: Urban Resource Technologies, a money-losing recycling company in Vancouver, British Columbia. The note caught the attention of followers of Urban Resource because it was signed "billboy," the handle, or electronic nickname, of the biggest booster of this long-shot penny stock. Urban Resource, which claims its patented process converts worn-out carpets, old tires and other materials into sturdy building materials, so far has no steady revenue; it stays afloat chiefly by issuing more stock. But it does possess a World Wide Web page to tell its story and a band of Internet adherents, who own millions of shares. Their chief cheerleader, "billboy," is William DeMorrow, a 55-year-old estate planner from Clearwater, Fla. Almost every day, DeMorrow e-mails a roundup on the company to 275 fellow investors and followers of the stock. He calls them the Garbage Gang, after the company's line of work. So if a bedrock believer like DeMorrow had lost the faith, others were likely to conclude that the company was in bad shape. But the note on the bulletin board was a hoax. And that, in essence, is the problem with the Internet: You don't always know who you're talking to. It could be a savvy investment wizard--a born stock picker--or a Wizard of Oz using the anonymity of the Net to cloak the lever-pulling. Securities regulators, mindful of the millions who are venturing into cyberspace for a first look, are warning investors to be skeptical. Slackers and Hackers DeMorrow and the gang wanted to know who had written the fraudulent post. The message did leave behind small bits of electronic evidence that identified the hoaxer's Internet provider as a firm in Minneapolis. The provider won't name the offender, but describes him as a twenty-something slacker who lives with his mother, who may be a stockbroker. "For whatever reasons--juvenile behavior more than anything else--he just felt he would pull their chains by saying this stock was going to crash," says a spokesman for the provider. It didn't, which DeMorrow credits to his rapid online disavowal. "If I had been on vacation," he says, "it could easily have created a situation where they went into a panic sell." There was relief, too, at Urban Resource's headquarters. Says Tony Canzi, architect of the company Web page: "With a great communications tool like the Internet, a lot of real boneheads can go out and do wacky stuff." And they do.