More Fallout from the CMKM Stock Fraud

A CMKM shareholder making a fool of herself, 2005

In Wall Street Versus America I described how a bunch of brainless boobs, mainly shareholders in a piece of dung called CMKM Diamonds, were demonstrating in front of the offices of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. in lower Manhattan--and not at CMKM's offices, wherever they might be.

It was a prelude to the Tea Parties that would follow a few years later: a handful of idiots, one demonstrating in assless chaps, who were unhappy with something and lashed out at a phantom menace. The difference is that the CMKM demonstrators had plenty of evidence, freely available on the Internet, that their company was an outright fraud.

CMKM was at the time one of the leading standard-bearers in the naked shorting conspiracy club, a job now taken by the loopy CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne.

Today an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal describes how bad a scam CMKM was, and how just plain dumb some of these people were:

If at first you don't succeed, try again.

That appears to be the guiding principle for Daryl O. Anderson, 41, of Henderson.

Anderson was one of the defendants named in June in a federal court judgment over the $64 million CMKM Diamond stock fraud.

He was a stock broker at now-closed NevWest Securities which sold CMKM stock. Many of the shares were purchased by NASCAR race fans around the country because CMKM was promoted at NASCAR events.

While CMKM was promoted as a mining company, U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks ruled that CMKM had no legitimate business.

That lawsuit was handled by the Los Angeles office of the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. On Thursday, the SEC's Fort Worth, Texas, office sued Anderson and accused him of a "stock scalping scheme" involving over-the-counter stock Cloudtech Sensors.

Stock scalping is the illegal practice of recommending others buy a security or stock while secretly selling the security or stock.

"During the scalping scheme, he secretly sold 323,405 of his personal Cloudtech shares, realizing a profit of $930,852," the lawsuit said.

I guess Anderson knew a bunch of suckers when he saw them. Here's a link to the SEC action.

Now, in fairness I should point out that not all CMKM shareholders should be lumped together. Many rejected the conspiracy pap. But all too many used their victim status to push conspiracy theories that enabled other shareholders to be victimized in the future.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me -- or, in this case, shame on them.


© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.