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To: James H. Irwin who wrote (1506)	5/17/1999 3:25:00 PM
From: fiberman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2420

Do you work for Datek? Or do you have some shares in them? They are a bunch of crooks. I hope the SEC will close their doors.

To: James H. Irwin who wrote (1506)	5/19/1999 1:27:00 PM
From: fiberman	Respond to of 2420

*******OT****** Here is another scam by the Datek scumbacks: Net Scam-o-Rama: Datek Censured; Searches Hijacked; BigHub's Secret Plan Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the Web . . . [cue the "Jaws" theme], the press was happy to report scams aplenty. You like trading stocks online? Datek Online, the No. 4 e-broker, was censured and fined by the SEC for allegedly dipping into customer accounts to pay bills, and falsifying a financial report last year. Or maybe you like cheapie over-the-counter Net stocks? MSNBC's Christopher Byron [Roy Scheider in "Jaws"?] harpoons OTC company BigHub.com for a secret plan to sell cheaper shares to Wall Street, undercutting current shareholders. Or perhaps you're not a financial type and just like using AltaVista's search engine? MSNBC's Brock Meeks [the Richard Dreyfuss character?] says the latest "snake in the grass" scam involves porn sites hijacking links to legitimate sites by tricking search spiders. Despite the hue and cry about the latest Net scams, as Microsoft might say: "Where's the harm?" Datek Online reached an agreement in which it admits no wrongdoing, and fined CFO Moishe Zelcer already resigned last July. Though Datek looks like it dipped into customer money, it didn't lose any in the process. CBS MarketWatch's William Watts saw the punishment as a follow-up to SEC chair Arthur Levitt's warning to e-brokers to keep pace with increased trading activity. Datek was fined $50,000 and Zelcer $10,000. Zelcer was also suspended from the brokerage industry for 90 days. The New York Times' David Barboza noted that Datek used customer money improperly on 12 occasions, according to the SEC, and exposed it to greater risk in the case of a market downturn. Barboza gave a nice capsule on the firm: "Datek began as a small Brooklyn brokerage firm that specialized in day trading and developed a long history of fines and suspensions related to, among other things, manipulating the stocks of small companies." After a scotched IPO, the company revamped its image with a new set of execs formerly at Waterhouse Securities. Datek says it was all just "flawed calculations," and that back-end systems have been fixed. SEC officials aren't the only feds with a heavier workload because of the Internet. Over at the Federal Trade Commission, agency officials are matching wits with clever porn scammers. In a wire story run by the Miami Herald and other newspapers, AP writer Kalpana Srinivasan reported FTC officials filed suit on Tuesday against perpetrators of a scheme that had prompted 20,000 complaints to America Online. The defendants are as yet unnamed, but the FTC says they will be soon. The elaborate scam spammed Web surfers with warnings that their credit cards were about to be hit by big charges unless they dialed a long- distance telephone number. Callers to the number heard a breathy come-on for more than routine customer service - and also got a pricey international call on their phone bill. Tracking the complex scams is like the Whack-a-Mole arcade game, Ray Everett-Church of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail told Srinivasan: No sooner does the mole get hit by the mallet in one place than it pops up in another. Meanwhile, MSNBC went Net-scam crazy with its pair of stories. Byron has had a field day with OTC stocks (chum in the water to him), and he drubs BigHub for failing to disclose financial details. Of course it's all legal, since penny stocks don't have to file disclosures with the SEC and have free rein to goose stocks with press releases. In this case, Byron found that a special confidential offering for Street insiders lets them buy convertible preferred shares that become $4-per-share common stock in 30 days. The problem? The stock is now trading at an inflated $15 per share, so they'll net a 300 percent return overnight, while diluting everyday shareholders' stock by 50 percent or more. MSNBC's Brock Meeks finds that a man traced to Portugal had set up porn sites under the .nu domain, from the tiny Polynesian island of Nuie. Apparently, he copied pages from legitimate news and even kids' gaming sites, so that search spiders would find terms like "news" or "kids games" and associate his URLs. When unsuspecting surfers searched for the benign keywords, they ended up jumping to his porn pages by being redirected seamlessly from the duped pages. Meeks says the extent of the scam isn't known, but that it extends to engines beyond AltaVista. He notes that it's offensive and likely illegal, but mainly for stealing trademarked material - so the onus is on the purloined sites to take action. Of course, the overtaxed FTC is working overtime to keep up with all the online scams, but that's getting harder by the day. SEC Fines Datek cbs.marketwatch.com SEC Punishes Online Broker in Fund Shift nytimes.com FTC Pursues Case Against Unnamed Sender of Junk E-mail herald.com How BigHub Raised Big Money msnbc.com Scam Diverts Surfers to Porn Sites msnbc.com In shorts, DATEK SUCKS!!!!**