A Good Guy Wins, A Bad Company Loses

For some years I've been following the activities of an Internet sleuth named Floyd Schneider, who has been conducting painstaking research on bad stocks and rotten CEOs since the 1990s. I chronicled the exploits of Floyd and other citizen activists in Business Week and also in Wall Street Versus America.

So I'm delighted to read that Floyd's No. 1 target, Xybernaut, has received the attention that it deserves from our securities watchdogs. The feds yesterday announced that the company was the subject of a massive stock swindle orchestrated by the then-chairman and vice-chairman of the company. Here is a Bloomberg article on the indictment.

Note that the time frame covered by the indictment is 2001 to 2005, when Floyd's Internet investigation of the company was at its height.

Floyd's No. 1 target today is the corporate chamber pot Overstock.com, which has made him a target of cyberstalking by Overstock's house stalker Judd Bagley. In an item on Overstock's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site, Floyd's focus on Xybernaut was highlighted.

Birds of a feather stink together, as the old saying goes.

Speaking of stench: whatever happened to the SEC's formal investigation of Overstock and its CEO, Patrick Byrne? I have a hunch, but I'll keep that to myself for now.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.