Is the Overstock.com Board Rousing From its Slumber?

Scam fighter Sam Antar has a detailed post in his blog this morning, detailing how the Investor Village Overstock.com message board has been turned into an extension of the Overstock P.R. department by selective enforcement of rules. But the really juicy stuff concerns the antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site.

Sam provides confirmation of what had been obvious for some time: Overstock's resident stalker Judd Bagley takes his marching orders from Overstock.com in running antisocialmedia.

Sam, you see, has been in touch by email with the Overstock board of directors concerning ASM. And as you can see from the post, one of Sam's emails quite obviously led to the deletion of some particularly vile reader comments from ASM, including a physical threat against myself from operators of Alpine Analytics that I have previously written about.


The Overstock board has apparently been aroused from its slumber. But not entirely, because the corporate smear site still exists.

No one can seriously dispute the ASM-Overstock connection. It is, after all, openly run (after his anonymous cover was blown by the New York Post) by the company's director of communications, the nauseating Judd Bagley.

But this demonstrates that Bagley takes his orders directly from the company in his Internet activities. That includes his obsessive stalking of Wikipedia editors who have curbed his efforts to put Overstock.com propaganda in the online encyclopedia (see this post and this one).


Just this past weekend, Bagley, posting under his Wikipedia pseudonym "WordBomb," posted on an anti-Wikipedia site what he described as IP addresses for two Wikipedia administrators he has stalked. "I am sneaky," said Bagley, in a rare moment of candor, in reference to the pretexting and spyware that he regularly utilizes. He was too sneaky for the anti-Wikipedia site, which later removed the IPs and threatened Bagley with expulsion if he continued.

The culpability for this hideous conduct lies, ultimately, not with Bagley but with Overstock.com and its lapdog board of directors.

Bagley, when hired by Overstock in August, was given the responsibility of operating a Wikipedia clone, using Wikipedia's software, called "Omuse."

Omuse has been a disaster, attracting few users and generally wasting corporate resources.

Yet here we have the operator of Omuse, stalking the volunteer editors of the real Wikipedia.

The board of directors of Overstock has a lot of work to do. But personally I wonder why anyone would serve on the board of an ethical train wreck such as this.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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