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Pastimes : Double Zero -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Josef Svejk who wrote (3424)	10/6/1998 12:53:00 AM
From: jhild	Respond to of 4295

Using Greenspan as a paddle seems a little desperate I will have to admit.

To: Josef Svejk who wrote (3424)	10/8/1998 3:14:00 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4295

* FBN featured in Fortune Magazine!!! The Scary Rise of Internet Stock Scams Part 3 (of 3) Katrina Brooker Investors have no time for such excuses. They just know not enough is being done to protect them. "The SEC doesn't get there until it's too late," complains Elliot Gittleman, a chemical engineer in Seattle who says he got duped by the Electro-Optical Systems scam. To fill this void, cybervigilantes--ordinary online investors who have taken to policing their territory themselves--have sprung up all over the Web. They are relentless about exposing cyberscamsters, or anyone operating online who appears the least bit dubious. On Silicon Investor (www.techstocks.com), there is now a "thread" entirely dedicated to "Stocks That Should Be Investigated by the SEC." Other sites go after individuals--suspected con men. Still others warn investors of questionable Internet stock tip sheets. The unofficial queen of the cybervigilantes is Janice Shell, a 50-year-old art historian who lives in Milan and got hooked on busting online con men after she was burned in an Internet investment scheme two years ago. A tireless--even obsessive--pursuer of online malefactors, Shell says she spends 12 hours a day trolling the Internet, looking for crooks. Thanks to this single-minded dedication, she has become a celebrity--at least to those who hang out on Silicon Investor. There are two threads devoted just to her: "Janice Shell for President" and "Janice Shell--A Retrospective." In the past two years, Shell says she has exposed an investor relations director with a murder rap, a so-called biotech company that really sold kitty litter, and a CEO who claimed to have run the largest corporation in Nevada but who was really the head of a two-man air-conditioning repair shop. "God help us if [Shell] ever goes to work for the hypester pump-and-dump gang," one admirer gushed in an August posting. "Being an international sex symbol is hard work, but someone has to do it." In June, Shell took note of a mining company called Mountain Energy. What caught her eye, she says, were postings announcing that the stock, then trading for pennies, would soon hit $5. Shell started digging, and here is what she says she found out: An "informant" told her that Mountain Energy's management team had once been charged with fraud. She also heard that the firm's main asset--a tract of land Mountain Energy claimed was worth $200 million--was worth little more than $100,000. Between June and August, Shell posted her findings on Silicon Investor, warning investors to stay away. During that time the stock, which had earlier climbed 200%, fell from $1.70 to 22 cents. That's when trouble began. Investors who had already bought Mountain Energy stock were furious. "These Bulletin Board Stock Guardian Angels...why don't they want us honest investors to make money?" complained one. Finally, in late July the SEC halted trading in the stock. So far it hasn't taken any further action, but it still has its eye on the company. Meanwhile, the company's management has resigned and dismissed all its employees. "A lot of people were really hard on her; they didn't believe her, but she was right all along," says Bill Liang, a medical researcher at Harvard who invested $3,000 in Mountain Energy. "We should have listened." What's Mountain Energy's side of the story? FORTUNE tried calling company headquarters. The phone was disconnected. Shell has been accused of being an underhanded broker, a short-seller...and a whole lot worse. ("Well, Miss Janice, protector of the small investor," reads one typically creepy Silicon Investor posting, "you must be very tired of being the north end of a south bound donkey, a.k.a. horse's a.") She's even received death threats. But Shell isn't fazed--she's far too busy defending her fellow investors, whether they like it or not. "There are a bunch of psychos out there--I'm not exaggerating--each one weirder than the next," she warns. How easy is it to con online investors? Shell wanted to find out. Last April Fools' Day, she and seven other cybervigilantes set up a phony IPO for a firm that promised it could cure the year 2000 problem. They named the firm FBN (for Fly By Night) Associates, established a Website for it, and started a forum on Silicon Investor where they announced FBN's public offering. The site was a doozy: It included information about FBN's hot product, seductively named NeuralNet2000; a section on careers at FBN; and a slew of glowing press releases with headlines like "FBN Cures Y2K Bug." They even created a very legitimate-looking issue of FORTUNE with a cover story about FBN. There was one small giveaway: a press release that noted, "FBN to receive papal blessing." But even that did nothing to slow people's interest in FBN's IPO: Shell was inundated with E-mails requesting the prospectus and other information about the company. "Now that I know how people do these things, I'm thinking maybe I should do it myself," says Shell with a laugh. "I could make a lot of money." <snip> Full story: pathfinder.com