An Investor 'Village' Goes Into Hiding

In past posts I've noted oddities at the Investor Village stock message board -- censoring critics of Overstock.com while allowing cyberstalking to flourish (see here, here and here) , allowing stock hype to run rampant in its Novastar message board, ridiculing stock skeptics as "bashers" -- and generally allowing its boards to be turned into stock-pumping mechanisms where critical questioning can result in being kicked off.

The dreary picture has gotten even murkier. An alert reader points out that IV has suddenly gone into hiding, transferring the registration of its website to an anonymous domain registrant.

This seems like a strange tactic to employ for a supposedly neutral purveyor of investment information. It's usually something you find among phony blogs and worse, like Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site and the nutty "thesanitycheck.com" conspiracy site.

Antisocialmedia used an anonymous domain registration, of course, to hide its Overstock connection, now moot since it was outed. Thesanitycheck cowers behind an anonymous registration to conceal that it is run by a nonentity -- some bozo named Phil Saunders who used to peddle used medical equipment. If investors knew that some guy with no financial background was running the site, they might not have rushed to buy his fave stock pick--the disastrous Novastar subprime lender.

In other words, you don't cringe behind an anonymous domain registration unless you have a reason to cringe. Investor Village is run openly by a couple of guys with a murky background who don't like "bashers." I'll admit, they have a lot to be ashamed of, but is it that bad? Why are they hiding the ownership of their website?

Copyright © 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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