They Don't Call it 'Jonestown' For Nothing

Privacy? Never heard of it.

The Internet nickname for the Investor Village message board is "Investors Jonestown" because of its singleminded fealty to corporate management--enforced by kicking off corporate critics, as they did with Sam Antar, whose investigation of Overstock.com's accounting was vindicated by reopening of an SEC investigation.

With most critics of the company kicked off, it's little wonder that the IV board has had a grand total of one post on Overstock.com's recent firing of its auditors and late filing of its 10-Q. Hell, even in the real Jonestown there were more than one who wouldn't drink the kool-aid.

IV may be even kookier than I thought. One IV member claims that IV's owner, in violation of every privacy precept in creation, actually knew his account password, chastising him for it because it was critical of Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. ("Blue" in the message duplicated above is Ralph "Blue" Kidd, the "CEO" of this message board, which he runs out of his house in a working-class suburb of New Orleans.)

I find this account a bit hard to believe because (as the person who replied to him pointed out) ordinarily passwords are not available to board managers.

True, but this is a message board whose business model is based on censorship and kowtowing to corporate managers. I wouldn't put anything past those guys.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Censorship as a Message Board Business Model

So you'd think that stock message boards would be agog with shock and outrage at word that Overstock.com has pissed away $1.25 million on a member of its board of directors, in ostensible "consulting" fees. For a company of its miserable financial condition, that's pretty outrageous, and sure enough the boards are alive with talk--everywhere but at something called Investor Village.

What you see there, instead, are posts about the bailout, about Bernie Madoff, the horrific scourge of naked short selling, Merrill Lynch bonuses--but not a word about the payout, made to a departing director named James V. Joyce. The reason is that any critical mention of Overstock is being actively suppressed, with dissenters under threat of expulsion, their posts deleted.

In a continuation of the Stalinist phenomenon I explored in a post a few days ago, this ostensibly neutral message board has kicked off one of the few critics of the company, and deleted all of his recent posts. More details can be found here. As a result, the amount of critical commentary about the company is down to zero.

A screen capture of the bottom of one of the deleted posts, thoughtfully recorded by the person who posted it, can be found below.

"Let's have a discussion of this [the $1.25 million payola] on the merits," it says. Perish the thought! Small wonder the genius who operates IV, Ralph "Kramden" Kidd, would actively rid his message board of such heresy.

This kind of stupidity turns message boards like Investor Village, and a handful of others catering to stock touts, into a closed-loop ignorance-reinforcement mechanism, practicing what is known as "incestuous amplification." At a time when investors are being ripped off right and left, it's about as great a menace to investor wealth as any small group of amateurs could devise.

Why would a message board do something quite so cowardly? Well, duhhhh.... here's a hint, contained in an email sent to members at about the time the offending words were being blotted out:

For the several hundred of you who have already purchased your Premium Memberships, we do appreciate your willingness to step up early and support us in this way—even those of you who don't wish to use the premium site and just want to support us financially—and there are many of you. [emphasis added]

That brings me to the subject of this post--IV's sugar daddies. I mean, golly, who would want to support someone else's message board financially? Who out there have such warm hearts and open wallets? (And by the way, if you believe that "hundreds" of people are paying for something they can get for nothing, there's a bridge over the East River I'd like to sell you.)

One warm-hearted type that come to mind (pardon me while I retch) is Patrick Byrne, Overstock's CEO. He and his paid hatchet man Judd Bagley both use IV to advance Byrne's agenda. Both have the most to gain from IV's censorship spree, and both have rejoiced when previous critics--such as white collar crime-fighter Sam Antar--were kicked off.

Byrne posts on Investor Village as "Hannibal," and Bagley as "De Daumier Smith," mainly for the purpose of manipulating Overstock's share price upwards by personally attacking critics of the company like myself and Antar.

I'm not sure it would be terribly legal for corporate officials to make under-the-table "contributions" to a message board. But when have legal niceties or obsolete concepts like "ethics" ever stopped Patrick Byrne?

UPDATE: Overstock's latest proxy statement was released on Friday, showing that Joyce was paid $360,000 a year for "consulting" and $75,187 in "expenses," on top of his $1.25 million golden parachute. Typically, not a word on these amazing numbers appeared--or will appear--on Ralph Kidd's stock touting forum.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Message Board Positions Itself as Megaphone For Stock Touts

Ralph "Kramden" Kidd has a new business model in the works

As I've described in the past, the Investor Village message board has distinguished itself in the cause of investor poverty. It was a prime sounding board for perpetrators of the Novastar Financial subprime lending disaster, allowing investor hype to run rampant (as in this notorious post), to the point of drawing media attention. It was a forum for cyberstalking by Overstock.com's nauseating p.r. director Judd Bagley.

A couple of years ago, this ostensibly neutral investor forum banned white collar crime fighter Sam Antar from the Overstock.com message board for the crime of pestering CEO Patrick Byrne and Bagley with -- horrors! -- questions. He was first restricted to three posts a day, and then removed completely.

The move deprived investors of an opportunity for Antar to directly confront Byrne about his lies and accounting trickery. Overstock shares hit a high of $19 the month Antar was silenced. It's now trading at about $10.50, and has been much lower. Thank you, Investor Village!

But such ham-handed suppression of criticism is evidently insufficient to make Investor Village an antiseptic environment for corporate CEOs and their shills, and suitably hostile to critics.

Investor Village recently banned one of the few critical voices on the Overstock board, immediately after posting a response to Byrne on the message board. The response was deleted. No explanation was given. A message gloating about that was recommended by Bagley ("De Daumier Smith").

As a result, the board supposedly devoted to Overstock instead is dominated with nutty rants about everything but, and is silent on such material corporate events as its change in auditors. With its scant ranks of critics depleted, that subject has not been broached, and Byrne can now rant and rave without contradiction, at least from one persistent critic.

In an email to members, the site recently revealed that a new feature will allow users, including corporate managers like Byrne, to go back and delete or edit posts, forever and ever: "Unlimited Post Deletion and Editing, allowing you to correct mistakes when you need to." Since Byrne frequently changes his public announcements, as Lee Webb of Stockwatch has described, he can be expected to make good use of this new cover-your-tracks feature when he blurts out some incriminating admission, as he has in the past.

Cozy! Investor Village's operators, rather oddly it seemed at the time, anonymized its site registration a couple of year ago. Maybe it's not so odd after all.

Now, here's the funny part: Investor Village, which evidently hasn't made a go of it (don't ask me why), actually wants to start charging people.

I wish them luck. What the world needs now is another way for investors to pour their money down a black hole. But I really do think that the site operator, Ralph "Blue" Kidd, should call himself Ralph "Kramden" Kidd.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Patrick Byrne Confronts His Reg. FD Demons

Overstock CEO Patrick "Sith Lord" Byrne is a man of many demons, most of them imaginary, but one seems to have finally gotten the best of him -- Regulation FD.

In Internet posts over the weekend, it became clear that Byrne was being pushed, dragged, manhandled and otherwise forced into admitting that -- much as he revelled in ignoring it -- yes, there is a Reg. FD, and yes, he must make some gesture at obeying it, ancestral wealth and real or perceived political influence notwithstanding.

His weekend posts also contained -- unintentionally, as usual -- some interesting tidbits about the ongoing SEC investigation into this train wreck of a company, as well as official word that "Omuse," a lame Wikipedia wanna-be that was created to provide a cover story for in-house stalker Judd Bagley, is an absolute flop.

This rich harvest of (unintentional, as usual) self-revelation emerged in a post by Byrne on his favorite venting venue, the Investor Village Overstock message board. Seems he is not posting there anymore. Maybe.

As usual, he failed to disclose his full name and corporate affiliation and thus, for the umpteenth time, spat in the eye of Regulation FD. As I've described in the past, to Byrne Reg. FD is more of a joke than a requirement that he must obey. This rule requires that companies provide information to the investment community in a fair and even-handed manner -- not in whispered conversations or, say, posts to small numbers of crackpots on limited readership message boards.

After first acknowledging that there are indeed Reg FD issues with his posting corporate information on message boards, Byrne blurted that "the Omuse blog is still not very workable."

That's pretty amazing when you consider that this Wiki wanna-be has been up and running since February -- five months -- and had been the subject of Bagley's tireless efforts for six months before that. So here we have Byrne, in a desperate attempt to salvage this failing enterprise, announcing that he has made Omuse a collection point -- a kind of septic tank -- for his ravings and smears.

Byrne inaugurated his new policy of turning Overstock.com into a literal chamber pot by posting in toto (copyright be damned!) a recent blog item by fraud-fighter Sam Antar, and calling him "Crazy Sam."

No other wiki project--and there are many--has been reduced to attracting readers by posting personal attacks on the CEO's critics, using schoolyard epithets. You really have to search long and hard in the underside of Corporate America, starting with CEOs confined to prison, to find a corporate executive or a company quite this slimy.

Responding to speculation that he has (more or less) stopped posting on IV because of pressure from the Overstock board of directors, Byrne blurted out another goody:

. . . no one has brought the least pressure on me about my posting here (well, other than by a certain polite and proper government official, who politely and properly asked me why I post on message boards: I politely noted that the first amendment applies to me, too). [emphasis added]

It's reasonable to surmise that the "polite and proper government official" quoted above is an SEC investigator or worse. It's significant, I think, that this "official" was talking to Byrne directly and not his lawyers.

Byrne was asked to clarify the point on the Investor Village board but, in keeping with his policy of ignoring discomfiting questions, he did not do so.

(Note also Byrne's whining that Yahoo and the Motley Fool are infested with "bad guys" and "shills for powerful interests" -- Byrne-speak for "people who think I suck as a CEO.")

Sam Antar has a post today describing in detail the chain of events, and how it does suggest that finally the Overstock board has woken up.

As I observed previously, external pressure also probably explains Bagley's absence from Investor Village, and the sudden disappearance of menacing comments, including a threat directed at me, from Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site.

Of course, I suppose you can believe Byrne's story that he is taking leave of IV because his precious jewels of baloney "scroll off the screen." But he can't use that cock-and-bull story to explain the fact that he has stopped using a pseudonym on his own website. That's an action he obviously would not take unless forced to do so.

In recent days, Byrne has retroactively changed his screen name on his "Take 5 With Patrick Byrne" message board from "Hannibal" to "patrickbyrne." This is how it appeared in May:



And here it is today:


Byrne likewise abandoned his Hannibal user name on Omuse, replacing it with "patrickbyrne." Apparently the wiki software doesn't allow replacing one user name with another.

The rest of the planet, of course, is aware of the Reg. FD problems presented by a CEO posting obsessively on message board, particularly under pseudonyms. At real companies with real boards of directors, posting on message boards is such a serious flouting of Reg. FD that it is a firing offense (as the CEO of a company called Medifast has learned the hard way).

Obviously Byrne is not going to be fired, as any ordinary CEO would be who acts as Byrne does, by his lapdog, sham board of directors. Still, maybe one day somebody will give him the good word about other elementary concepts every CEO should know, such as "making money," or "not hiring people to stalk your critics." Stuff like that.

It will be interesting to see if this lame backfilling will be enough to placate the SEC and if he has enough juice from his campaign contributees to call off the hounds. It will take a gutsy SEC to withstand such pressure, so don't get your hopes up.

Elsewhere on the Overstock front, Gradient Analytics has filed an appeal with the California Supreme Court against Overstock's junk lawsuit.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

Reg FD is only half the problem for Byrne and the BOD as it relates to Byrnes/Bagley's internet message board & blogging.

Take the example of the clearly derogatory put-down "Crazy Sam" - does this comply with Overstock.com, Inc.'s corporate policy on Code of Conduct and Ethics? The short answer is no - it is reasonable to conclude the CEO has once again violated Company Policy. This is a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance problem for the BOD. For the BOD to ignore this translates into tacit approval, or waiver, of Corporate Policy requiring a pesky 8-K filing as Sam Antar has pointed out.

And that, as I have remarked before, is 300lbs of steaming dog poop on the Board table.

To ever so briefly put myself in Bryne's ego-ravaged shoes, it must be enormously frustrating to be barred from matching tit for tat all those who have made disparaging remarks about Bryne, his lieutenants, and his Company. However, Corporate Policy demands that he take the high road, and as the highest officer of the Firm, he has a special obligation to do so. Obviously, he either doesn't agree or doesn't care, either way that's another BOD problem.

It is possible to convey his disagreement with Sam Antar and all other critics (including myself) without diving head first into the cesspool.

One more point if I may - Byrnes semi-departure from message board posting is clearly the result of a change forced on him by presumably the BOD. Therefore, his explanation of why-fores is false, or at best, intentionally misleading, and that appears to me to be yet another Reg FD problem.

As Herb Greenberg would say - "the beat goes on".

The code of ethics referred to above is not, of course, available on the Overstock website -- even Byrne is not capable of such a monumental hypocrisy. However, it can be found on Sam Antar's blog, here.

© 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.

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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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.

Judd Bagley Hears His Master's Voice

I'm practically gagging on this tiresome subject, but here we have yet another lurid story sliming its way out of the wild and wacky world of Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.

Fans of the old Lassie TV series will appreciate this: it is the story of a CEO, and the lapdog that loves him.

In a message board post yesterday afternoon, Byrne mentioned in passing that he had been asked to comment upon something by a terrific New York Post financial reporter, Roddy Boyd. Roddy, you may recall, wrote an article the other day on Byrne delaying for one year his disclosure of a subpoena.

Obviously Roddy Boyd is not on Byrne's list of favorite people. In fact, having just written an article unfavorable to Byrne, and at work on yet another, he is No. 1 on the hit parade.

And then..... look what we have here!

Later that same day, Overstock.com's stalker-in-residence, the nauseating Judd Bagley, announced a brand new post on Overstock's antisocialmedia corporate smear site, which he operates.

The subject of the smear site's latest overheated fantasies is none other than New York Post reporter Roddy Boyd!

Byrne had spoken, and his lapdog was on the case. Boyd was not one of Bagley's favorite people either, because it was his Jan. 2 article in the Post that exposed Bagley as the operator of the then-anonymous antisocialmedia smear site. That ruined Bagley's careful efforts, such as an anonymous registration, to keep the site anonymous. Bagley and Byrne constantly issued dishonest and misleading public pronouncements seeking to hide Bagley's involvement.

All this would be funny if it wasn't so creepy -- and if this did not involve a public company that is a grotesque parody of corporate ethics.

However, one thing you have to admit is that this stomach-wrenching toady has been doing an excellent job stalking and and spreading fabrications about Patrick Byrne's enemies! I just learned -- and this has not been picked up anywhere -- that Byrne has recognized Bagley for his excellent performance as his personal lapdog by promoting Bagley to the position of "director of communications."

The former "director of social media" of a company that has no social media is now "director of communications" of a company that "communicates" by rambling, unsigned posts in message boards, and by maintaining a unique astroturfing smear site.

It was never announced -- which is odd for someone moving to such a visible position -- but instead was tucked away in an Overstock conference handout here. As you can see, he was elevated to his job sometime before April 30.

Note the typical Bagley lie in the handout. He was not "speechwriter and press secretary for then-Governor of Florida Jeb Bush." He worked for a minor commissioner, Cynthia Henderson, head of the Department of Business and Professional Affairs. Bagley's major achievement there was a smear campaign against a Tampa reporter who wrote tough stories about Henderson, as reported in a previous item.

Hey, you've got to admit that Bagley has worked hard for his position. Not every company has a full-time cyberstalker, and Bagley had filled that position admirably, making him richly deserving of promotion.

Besides, with all the SEC scrutiny and all, I suppose it was time that Byrne gave Bagley actual responsibilities at the company apart from running the antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site. However, this assumes he does have responsibilities other than running the smear site. This is Overstock.com and not a normal company, after all. A normal company would not only disavow such a site, but would have fired its proprietor. This being Overstock, the stalker is encouraged and promoted.

You have to admit, not every "director of communications" has done such an excellent job of getting miserably poor media coverage, with more bad coverage coming every day! His attack on the integrity of Roddy Boyd will certainly add to his reputation as a kind of one-man corporate press-enraging mechanism.

Another nice thing about his promotion is that the SEC now has a much higher-visibility target in its investigation of Byrne's misconduct, as well as securities law and ethical lapses at Overstock in general. I understand that the company's accounting practices are a particularly serious focus of the SEC's attention.

This elevation means that from the date of his employment as "communications director," whenever that was, all of his many antisocialmedia and message board posts have -- more than ever before -- the official imprimatur of Overstock.com. He certainly was speaking for Overstock on the boards before his promotion, but this underlines the official character of his Internet activities.

It means a bunch of other things that I'll be describing in future blog posts.

So let's break out the champagne and toast an upward move for one of Corporate America's most truly loathsome characters.

Oh, and I know a perfect gift to give Bagley in recognition of his crawl up the corporate ladder: a framed copy of Overstock.com's Code of Ethics.

UPDATE: An interesting coda involving the Investor Village message board, which has become an extension of the Overstock.com cyberstalking apparatus.

After Bagley's post appeared on the Investor Village message board, a user posted two message containing personal details about Bagley and his family. Those messages were almost instantaneously deleted -- in contrast to the dozens of cyberstalking messages posted on the IV board by Bagley and others, may of which are obscene or threatening in nature. One, containing a death threat against me, is still there.

IV has also kicked off critics of Bagley and Byrne, notably felon-turned-corporate whistleblower Sam Antar, as I've previously pointed out.

© 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.

Overstock.com Finds a 10-Year-Old

Overstock.com's resident stalker Judd Bagley has found the ten-year-old he needed to identify his latest victim, who dared to criticize his SEC-investigated company and its inept boss, Patrick Byrne.

The latest human being to be attacked by this nightcrawler on Overstock's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site, is -- surprise surprise -- Yolanda Holtzee, a Washington money manager who is one of the top amateur stock sleuths in the country.

I say "surprise surprise" because Holtzee is so "secretive" that she was the subject of a page-one article in the Wall Street Journal last April.

That article is only available for subscribers, but here is a link to a reprint in the Seattle Times. It describes her exploits in tackling corporate shareholder-rapists like Krispy Kreme.

Holtzee, a self-styled Internet investigator in sweat pants, focuses on exposing out-of-bounds behavior and catching bad guys. And after pointing regulators in the right direction more than once, Holtzee has achieved two things every gadfly craves: attention from those she targets — and action.

"I think people take her seriously because she has good instincts and actually produces cases," says former senior SEC official Ari Gabinet, now with the Vanguard Group, the fund-management giant. "If I could have hired her, we would have had an endless stream of cases."

Holtzee swaps notes with regulators, including the enforcement chiefs at both the SEC and another Wall Street regulator, the National Association of Securities Dealers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The SEC and NASD review her e-mails. Earlier this year, when Mary Schapiro was appointed to head the NASD, the Wall Street self-regulatory group gave Holtzee an early heads-up, according to people familiar with the matter. She has been called by the SEC to testify in Washington, D.C.

So it's understandable that Bagley and Byrne are terrified of her. It's also not surprising that Bagley would engage in this cyberstalking not just on his company's official smear site, antisocialmedia, but also on the Investor Village Overstock message board. The latter has become a regular venue for brainless stock-pumping, psychotic rants and Bagley's cyberstalking, with critics subjected to harassment and banning by IV's administrators.

In previous items I've described how IV has censored critics of Overstock, while letting Bagley and Byrne use their website to make vicious personal attacks and stalk critics like Holtzee. It has gone so far as to sic its lawyers on Overstock critic Sam Antar, after the latter complained about being barred from the site.

A new and slimy dimension in the IV saga was brought to my attention by a reader. He notes that IV has apparently promoted its site by spams on both the competing Yahoo message boards and elsewhere.

Note the comments by "cool site" on this Evel Knevel message board, with IP addresses traceable to Vietnam, Brazil, Israel, Ukraine, Germany and New Jersey. Of course, it's possible that this isn't a spam and that IV just happens to have devoted fans saying the same thing on four continents.

And then we have, oh.... maybe fifty dozen or so more spams just from "cool site." Lord (and Ralph Kidd) only knows if IV has other devoted "fans."

Then we have these message board postings on Yahoo, and these
and these
and these
and these
and these
and these

I guess you don't have to be the CEO of a money losing, SEC-investigated company or his paid hatchet man to adore Investor Village.

UPDATE: To make the whole thing even more nauseating, Bagley apparently implanted spyware in his IV post. Creeps will be creeps, I guess. Only one thing is sure -- Bagley will not face repercussions from IV for this latest atrocity.

© 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.

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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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.

The Problem With Planting Spyware

(Updated 3/2/07)

The potentially troubling legal issues facing Overstock.com and Judd Bagley, its director of social media, are illustrated by a case that received some attention today involving MySpace.

According to a Newsday article on the subject,

Shaun Harrison, 19, of Ronkonkoma, and Saverio Mondelli, 20, of Oakdale, were given three years' probation for illegal computer access. Each had faced up to nearly 4 years in prison.

Harrison and Mondelli . . were offering a means to acquire e-mail addresses and Internet protocol addresses of users, prosecution said.

Another article adds further detail:

The popular MySpace social-networking site — where people create elaborate profiles and personalize them with photos, music and video — is supposed to offer anonymity to visitors who browse the pages.

But Harrison and Mondelli's program collected e-mail addresses and Internet Protocol addresses, prosecutors said. Such information could have been used by stalkers trying to locate MySpace users, said Deputy District Attorney Jeffrey A. McGrath.

Hmmm... does this sound familiar? As in, for instance, all the instances of spyware-planting uncovered by Internet sleuth "ScipioAfricanus" (see his blog here and items in my blog tagged "spyware").

And then we have this boast by Bagley on the Investor Village message board:

"The cool thing I figured out was using ActiveMeter on remote sites. Maybe its been done before (In fact, I'm sure it must have) but this iteration was developed independently by me and you have no idea the insights it has yielded."

Guess it was done before.

As recently as five days ago, Bagley pointed the finger at himself yet again, bragging about "IV traffic data gathered by those who did the gathering" -- an obvious reference to purloining IP addresses from people reading posts on InvestorVillage. That kind of data is legitimately gathered by people running websites, whether it be IV or MySpace, but not by third parties like Bagley or those two MySpace users. (IV, typically, did nothing in response to this latest outrage.)

Sure, slipping codes into message board posts to gather data on puters comes in handy when you're running a smear campaign -- you use 'em to spin fairy tales, as Bagley did for Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site. But there's a wee problem -- it's called the "penal code," at least in California.

Here's the press release that was issued when the two MySpace guys were arrested last year. Note in particular the reference to Sections 502(c) (1) and 502(c) (2) of the California Penal Code.

Section 502 (c) (2) says it's a crime when someone:

Knowingly accesses and without permission takes, copies, or makes use of any data from a computer, computer system, or computer network, or takes or copies any supporting documentation, whether existing or residing internal or external to a computer, computer system, or computer network.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles applied that statute to a couple of guys harvesting IPs and email addresses from MySpace users. Most states have similar laws. The New York anti-hacker law is here -- note the "computer trespass" section.

Will regulators and law enforcement apply the anti-hacking statutes against Bagley? Beats me. I wonder if it beats Bagley too. I'll bet that this issue has the potential to beat him, and his employer, pretty badly.

* * *

UPDATE: Bagley reacted to the above post and others in O-Smear in typical "strategic messaging" fashion, posting a crude frameup attempt on Overstock's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site.

Bagley or a confederate created spyware and inserted it in a post in the Investor Village Apple message board, and then Bagley claimed on antisocialmedia.net that it was from me. The O-Smear blog has a good analysis of this latest Overstock fabrication, suitably titled "O-Frame O-Lame."

The smear, which was posted at http://antisocialmedia.net/?p=74, was so far-fetched that even the tinfoil hat crowd found it hard to swallow, and it was taken down after a few hours. But I preserved it for posterity, needless to say.

This latest idiocy demonstrates the extent to which Bagley, Patrick Byrne, and their accomplices in the cyberstalking endeavor are in very deep trouble. Since Byrne usually trots out crackpot diversions before announcing bad news, to maintain unity among his "followers," it makes me wonder: could the 10-K possibly be that bad?

© 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.

The Real Investor Pain Caused by Baloney

I sometimes refer to the anti-naked-shorting zealots as the Baloney Brigade, which is flip language prompted by the bizarre, sometimes unintentionally funny paranoid ravings of Baloney propagandists such as Phil Saunders (a/k/a "Bob O'Brien"), Patrick Byrne and so on.

But there's nothing funny about the pain these nightcrawlers cause to their shareholders (in the case of Byrne) or the people naive enough to buy in to their rhetoric (in the case of Saunders, Byrne and the rest).

Probably the best example of that can be found in the Investor Village message board for the naked shorting poster child NovaStar Financial, whose share price recently collapsed. NovaStar was a supposed naked-shorting victim and was mercilessly pumped by Saunders and by Mary Helburn, executive director of the National Coalition Against Naked Shorting.

Here's a sampling of the genuinely pathetic posts from some of the people who bought in to the NovaStar crock peddled by Saunders, Helburn and others. I just took these at random by word-searching "wife" and "401K." And I do mean sampling. There are dozens of others:

"The Worst Thing IS that

"I have to tell my wife that I blew our IRA because I listened to [Phil Saunders a/k/a] the Easter Bunny."

***

"I had borrowed a portion from a 401K plan & plugged it into NFI. It will hurt for a couple of years but will not be mortal....But it did take me a few days to break the news to my wife....She took it better than I expected."

***

"After being in NFI for over four years, it was a painful task to liquidate all my 21K shares on the opening today. I followed this stock closely, moved very slowly gradually building a substantial income stream for retirement. With that income stream now gone, I must find other means. Life will go on, but my less than extravigant lifestyle will be more modest. I realize that I was far to overweight in NFI all along, but the dividends kept comin, and I spent them.
Investing in NFI was entirely my doing. However, the NSS [naked short selling] and manipulation became very alarming as did management's lack of concern and the worst possible PR/IR. Oh well, shoulda, woulda, coulda. Can't look back anymore."

***
.... and then there's this NovaStar investor who was really pushed up against the wall:

"Was forced to sell out today--Schwab raised margin requirement to 50% and wouldn't budge.

Sold last of it; 4K @ 9 and 6K @ 8.50.
Paid off the margin loan.

Paid the only credit card balance I was running.

Have $22K left to pay taxes next year (probably will owe $28K--Argh).

I've paid the 2006 taxes already, and I'll send the IRS what I have left on 4/15 and be done with it.

No debt; SSI coming in, VA for medical plus Med part-B for extras.

Now it's a task of reducing cash out-flow to where it's not more than in-flow.
Going to be an exciting time--I've never had to live on a budget before.

First to go have to be the cows, our most heart-rending task--but they are expensive pets."

****

I don't feel massive amounts of sympathy for these investors. They were adults. But the charlatans who pumped this stock and harassed skeptics, and the message board operators who allowed them to do so, need to be held accountable for their actions.

© 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.

Message Board Operator's Anti-'Basher' Website

In recent posts I've examined how managers of the "Investor Village" message board have suppressed questioning of Overstock.com execs who frequent the board. The New York Post and other media outlets have observed that IV's message board for NovaStar Financial has become infested by stock pumpers who have contributed to shareholder agony.

Remember that these are hands-on administrators who "closely monitor" their boards. So why have IV's managers, particularly its CEO and site administrator Ralph "Blue" Kidd, allowed the NovaStar board to become a stock-touting forum? Why have they allowed their Overstock.com board to become an extension of Overstock's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site, in blatant violation of their own policies?

Why was Kidd so anxious to kick out Sam Antar -- actually siccing his lawyer on the guy -- for asking sharp questions of Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and resident stalker Judd Bagley? (Why did he at one point delete all of the posts by Internet sleuth ScipioAfricanus challenging Bagley's and antisocialmedia.net's smears?

Why do Overstock critics avoid Investor Village? Why was it described by Byrne as a forum that "keeps corruption at bay" -- Byrnespeak for discouraging criticism of Patrick Byrne while allowing Byrne and others to smear and libel critics?

Why would IV openly align itself the smear-happy CEO of a foundering company, thereby opening itself up to lawsuits?

Well, bad me. The answers to at least some of the above questions were available all the time and I just noticed it.

Kidd, it appears, shares Byrne's disdain for stock "bashers" -- people who voice negative opinions about, or address pointed questions toward, execs of public companies.

He thinks "bashers" are so awful that last March he started an infantile website called basherjokes.com, devoted to ridiculing stock "bashers." Kidd is listed as the owner of the site.


Note that there is no "pumperjokes.com" Kidd owns that site name too, but has just "parked" the site name, while starting up the infantile "basher" site.

"Basher," of course, is stock-pumper-speak for what the rest of the world calls "skeptics." That is, people who -- often rightly -- feel that stocks are heading into the toilet. Had the thousands of elderly investors who follow NovaStar listened to these "bashers" that Kidd despises, they'd have saved millions of bucks.

Kidd thinks "bashers" are to be "ignored" and derided. ("Ignoring them is half the fun," says he.) Here's a sample of Kidd's anti-"bashing" website:

BASHERS GATHER FOR ARTSY PHOTO-SHOOT

CRACKASS, Venezuela - More than 15,000 Venezuelan stock bashers and naked short sellers scurried from their basement boiler rooms clad in nothing more than their typical work attire, comprised primarily of brown and yellow stained underwear and the occasional leather face mask with matching restraints (a few even paraded around in nothing but their birthday suits).

Funny!

Observe the reference to "naked short sellers." Another thing I hadn't noticed was that Kidd has promoted a wacky "stock counterfeiting" website, "thefaulkingtruth.com," in a post on the Investor Village website. Kidd urged his readers to "stay informed"by reading the wacko junk on the website.

Explains a lot, I think. Not everything.

UPDATE: This web post has some interesting observations about Kidd's involvement with a penny stock called Eagle Broadband.

© 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.

Overstock's Latest Smear

It didn't take long for Overstock.com's resident stalker, Judd Bagley (left), to crank up a smear about Susan Antilla, who wrote a Bloomberg column yesterday on Overstock's campaign of lies against critics and the media.

This one is typical of the tactics that Bagley and his boss Patrick Byrne deploy, in their campaign to keep people from writing about or criticizing their actions.

First Byrne tried to bully Antilla and Bloomberg by publishing her questions and his slippery, evasive responses on the Internet.

That failed, so they have now moved into the Smear phase of the strategy, in a post that Bagley published on the Investor Village message board this morning. It is titled "A wee bit of context on Susan Antilla."

Said Bagley:

The conventional wisdom has been that her husband, Dennis H Leibowitz , is with Credit Suisse First Boston. Wrong. In 2002 he left SCFB to start his own hedge fund. It's called Act 2.

Act 2 specializes in investing in the media space. Included in Act 2's portfolio is several million dollars worth of News Corp stock. You may also know News Corp as the company that owns the New York Post.

So there you have it -- a media-hedge fund conspiracy! The only problem with this smear is that Antilla and Leibowitz are divorced, a fact that is not only "conventional wisdom" but is also something that Bagley could have easily extracted from the Internet.

As usual with a Bagley smear on behalf of his employer, he takes a faux-factual nugget and fashions it into a paranoid fantasy and lie.

This latest Overstock smear not only illustrates the intimidate-and-lie tactics used by this failing company, but also again focuses attention on Bagley's chosen forum for his smears -- the Investor Village Overstock message board.

As I pointed out in a post yesterday and previously, IV allows Bagley and Byrne -- officers of a public company -- to post with impunity on the Overstock board, smearing and libeling people by name in blatant violation of IV's terms of service. Even death threats like the one in this post are allowed, when they come from Byrne supporters. Yet IV management curbs, harasses and censors critics of this company. Yesterday IV boss Ralph Kidd had the audacity to call
Sam Antar's persistent and effective questioning of Byrne "harassment," and to ban him from the board.

So now, as you can see, Byrne, Bagley and their anonymous allies can post their lies, smears and touting without much in the way of interference, since critics know they can be banned at any moment by IV's crackerjack management team.

A member of the Byrne fan club made that point clear today to one of the rare critics of the company who posts on the board: "Keep on with this frantic pace and garbage like fashion and you'll gather enough tickets to end up in the fridge."

A similar mentality has prevailed in IV's NovaStar message board, where stock touters such as Phil Saunders, the anti-shorting loon who posts as "Easter Bunny," were allowed by IV administrators to abuse and harass skeptics and tout this doggy stock.

In effect, IV has become a willing participant in the campaign by Byrne, Bagley and Overstock.com to muzzle critics and to stalk and intimidate the media. You really have to wonder why a message board operator would be so irresponsible, blatantly biased, and just plain dumb.

UPDATE: The New York Post's Roddy Boyd has a great article on how IV's NovaStar message board became a stock-pumping mechanism, propagating one-sided stock touting to untold numbers of small investors.

A good example of the service rendered by Sam's questions can be found in this post from Bagley on the Yahoo Overstock message board, after Sam was bounced from IV.

As you can see, Bagley feigned ignorance of the SEC 's investigation of Overstock.com, which has been widely publicized and which Overstock itself has disclosed in its filings. I suppose this is what the lawyers might call a "materially misleading" statement by an officer of a public company. I prefer to call it a "bald-faced lie."

These kinds of things make me wonder: What exactly does Bagley have to do before the SEC takes action? Immolate himself in front of the SEC Headquarters?

© 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.

Sam Antar Gagged Again

As I observed in a recent post, reformed scamster Sam Antar has been a thorn in the side of Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and resident stalker Judd Bagley.

Antar has posted numerous polite but probing questions on the Investor Village message board, and in the process has elicited answers (and evasions) that are of real value to investigators and others probing the company.

Well, Investor Village's crackerjack management team -- which has done nothing to prevent IV from being used as a cyberstalking vehicle by Byrne and Bagley -- has restricted Sam to three posts a day. By way of comparison, IV took no such action against Bagley, even after he planted spyware in IV posts. Nor did it take action against members of the Byrne fan club who have used IV to threaten, stalk and libel Sam, myself and others.

IV has used shabby pretexts to gag Sam and another Byrne critic twice before (see this post and this one), both times in reaction to a campaign egged on by Byrne. Both times IV meekly backed down, but this time they seem to mean business.

The excuse given by IV's boss Ralph "Yellow" Kidd -- oh sorry, wrong color. Make that Ralph "Blue" Kidd -- was "clogging our forum to conduct an informal and unofficial campaign of 'deposition-style' messages targeting other members of InvestorVillage."

The "other members" were the CEO of the company and Bagley, operator of the corporate smear site and an officer of the company. The piercing and detailed character of the questions, and the unintentionally revealing answers, are what made Sam's contributions so valuable -- in contrast to the vast mishmash of noise, ravings and ad hominems that comprise IV's Overstock message board.

In effect, Kidd has turned IV into a stock-pumping mechanism for this doggy company -- something that deprives the board of any value for investors, and in fact can do real harm by misleading people seeking information on the company. As Sam observed, "They call it an Overstock.com message board. It seems more like an Overstock.com propaganda board where anyone who questions the actions of Patrick Byrne and Judd Bagley can be attacked with impunity."

To rub salt in the wound, Kidd et al don't even have the guts to talk with Sam about their turning the board into a closed-loop of tinfoil hat rants and stock-pumping. They actually had their lawyer draft the private message that was sent to Sam telling him that he was being gagged, and said Sam should speak to this lawyer if he had any questions.

Got to hand it to Kidd and the other geniuses at IV -- they sure do love paying lawyers. Too bad a lawyer is no substitute for common sense, or a conscience.

UPDATE: Later that night, IV decided to officially make its Overstock board the Patrick Byrne Fan Club, deleting a post from Sam and apparently booting Sam entirely, without explanation.

You really have to wonder why a message board would ally itself so firmly with the management of a foundering company.

Given the litigation that is likely once the Overstock/antisocialmedia dust settles, perhaps hiring the lawyer wasn't such a bad move. When Overstock meets its maker, which I suspect will be in the not-too-distant future, IV is going to have some 'splaining to do. The legal implications of message board postings, and the possible liability of service providers, is explored here.

Byrne celebrated Sam's gagging in a typically nutty post in the now dissent-rein IV: "Let us show our support to Investor Village by spreading the word about what a fair place it is, one that keeps corruption at bay." "Corruption" is, as we all know, Byrnespeak for "criticism."

The New York Post later described how IV's NovaStar message board has become a forum for unrestrained stock touting, helping untold numbers of gullible small investors lose their shirts when the stock collapsed this week.

© 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.

Another Naked Shorting Poster Child Succumbs

Another anti-naked-shorting poster child flamed out today.

It's called NovaStar Financial, and it's a doggy subprime lender that is a favorite stock of an ex-used-medical-equipment peddler named Phil Saunders. The stock is down 29% in aftermarket trading, after word of a disastrous fourth quarter. (It opened the following day down 41% in massive trading.) NovaStar said it expects to "recognize little if any taxable income" through the year 2011.

Gee, that's not what Phil Saunders had been saying! He was saying that this was a great company and that its shares had been hurt not by bad financials, but "stock counterfeiting."

Now, you may ask, "Why would anyone in his right mind care what some crackpot named Saunders thinks about a stock?" Well, believe it or not, lots of dimwitted small investors actually listened to this goofball -- because they think he is the "Easter Bunny."

Yup. According to the New York Post, Saunders is "Bob O'Brien," a/k/a "the Easter Bunny," the anonymous creep who is the leading propagandist of the anti-naked-shorting movement. Saunders runs the "sanitycheck.com" anti-naked shorting website, and also calls himself "manager" of the National Coaltion Against Naked Shortselling astroturf group.

Another Saunders favorite and naked shorting fantasy "victim," Overstock.com, has collapsed since Saunders starting talking up the company and serving as de facto investor relations man for its wack-a-doo CEO, Patrick Byrne.The site is linked on the Overstock.com website under the Orwellian "market reform" label.


Saunders pumped NovaStar mercilessly on message boards (spewing incoherent drivel like this), and operates a stock-pumping website called nfi-info.net, filled with the usual "stock counterfeiting" baloney alongside brainless touting of NovaStar and childish attacks on NovaStar critics (above). Some typical nfi-net misinformation can be found here. Saunders registers nfi-net through a shell company in an offshore domain server under his phony name. A lot of effort to thwart scrutiny, wouldn't you say?

Like its NFI-pumping sister site, Sanitycheck is a collection of incoherent rants and smears of NovaStar/Overstock critics, interspersed with the expertise of "experts" such as a dentist who babbles about "fails to deliver" when not filling cavities, and Mary Helburn, "executive director" of NCANS. She's the one who says that naked shorting, not crooked management, was the real problem at Enron. She's also a militant NovaStar- and Overstock-cheeerleader. (A typical pumper post from two weeks ago.)

Saunders was Overstock's primary smear-disseminator (one of many examples posted here) until that function was taken in-house by Judd Bagley, who runs Overstock's antisocialmedia.net corporate smear site. But Saunders has sat with Byrne in at least one meeting with the media, and his links to Byrne, Overstock and NovaStar need to be probed by regulators.

His smear-and-stalk tactics also deserve scrutiny. As Herb Greenberg recounts, in 2005 Saunders "went so far as to post the address and names of the wife and son of one prominent short-seller of NovaStar in a message board post, with the tag line, 'This is coming up on game over-time. Figure it out. Your playbook is known.' In another post he wrote, 'Anyone know Herb's wife's name, and his middle initial?'" He used similar tactics against Byrne's critics and members of the media, myself included.

Don't make the mistake of dismissing Saunders as just another Internet crackpot. The Motley Fool's Seth Jayson recently observed:

Senators have always been easily duped by people of his ilk regarding short selling. It's happened over and over again throughout our market's history. There are even examples of so-called short "victims" who've testified in front of this august body, who've then been implicated in the very frauds they were trying to cover up by whining about short sellers to their congressmen.

Still, nothing changes, when dangerous blowhards like Bobo get backing from certain multi-millionaires, and gather enough ears, our elected officials drop the steak knives and wine glasses, venture out of the Capital Grill for a few minutes, and blow smoke about how lousy the SEC is.

It's hard to feel sorry for people who lose money after listening to idiots like Saunders, Helburn and their ilk. Any non-institutionalized adult who would stuff his retirement account with this crap -- as per one sob story on a message board -- causing his retirement savings to decline 50%, is deserving of contempt, not sympathy.

The anti-naked shorting whack jobs, reacting to the decimation of their stock picks, are now telling the faithful that they should pull out of the "corrupt" U.S. markets. Again, anyone who follows the advice of these con men and psychos deserves every penny of losses that result.

I guess the good news is that hits on sanitycheck's whack-site have dribbled off to nothing in recent weeks, according to Alexa. The other good news is that Saunders has a ton of money invested in this ca-ca.

Perhaps he can redeploy his life savings into baloney futures?

UPDATE: Several days later, the New York Post had a great piece by Roddy Boyd describing how countless small investors were suckered into this stock via Saunders and other touts on the Investor Village message board.

© 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.

An Overstock Critic Silenced

Sam Antar, a reformed felon who was mastermind of the Crazy Eddie stock scam, has been performing a real public service lately. He's donated his time to shareholders of Overstock.com by directing pointed questions to Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne at the Investor Village messgae board, which Byrne regularly uses to smear critics and justify his actions.

It's been a valuable service, not just for investors but for securities regulators, who I happen to know are following the cat-and-mouse game between Antar and Byrne very closely. Overstock, after all, is a very public transgressor of corporate norms -- with much of that being played out on message boards upon which Byrne obsessively posts.

As I noted in a post that I updated yesterday, some of Byrne's admissions, in his comments, have been incredibly damaging.

That valuable dialogue has been squelched, however, by the crackerjack management team of Investor Village, which has knuckled under to pressure from Overstock loyalists by squelching Antar. IV has limited his ability to post on IV, while giving Byrne, Bagley and their sockpuppets free reign to spread their poison, and repeat the lies and smears of Overstock's antisocialmedia.net smear site. It's not clear how much, if at all, Antar will be allowed to post.

IV also censors even mild ridicule of Byrne (such as the message formerly located here, reprinted here) while allowing the most vicious cyberstalking.

None of this is a surprise, since it has happened before, with Overstock critics gagged on flimsy pretexts.

The excuse given by IV, when it silences critics, is not that they have fallen afoul of some rule, but that they have been subject of "complaints" for "clogging." In other words, the people who are hyping Overstock just don't like them. It's interesting to speculate what motive, aside from stupidity, is behind this curious way of running a public forum.

I do find it interesting that Antar was silenced within hours after Byrne expressed annoyance at his questions.

By running an ostensibly neutral message board that restricts posts by company critics, IV has turned its boards into stock-hyping forums. That creates a nice set of legal entanglements down the road for IV -- or at least, I certainly hope it does.

UPDATE: As previously, the brilliant management team of IV has been shamed into a 180 -- until the next critic draws complaints from the Byrne fan club.

© 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.

Another Overstock Critic Silenced

Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne and loyal flack Judd Bagley are obviously feeling the heat over last week's revelation that Overstock is behind a smear site called antisocialmedia.net. They've just silenced the Internet sleuth who has tied Bagley-Byrne to antisocialmedia--a slimy relationship that could be devastating for Overstock.

The Internet sleuth in question goes by the name of "scipioafricanus," and all of this person's posts have been removed en masse, in Stalinesque fashion, from the Investor Village message board. Since IV hasn't removed the dozens of posts by Bagley (via peseudonyms), Byrne and their pals, mostly hysterical personal attacks on myself and others, it is reasonable to conclude that Byrne and/or Bagley have screamed bloody murder. It is particularly reasonable since Byrne's antisocialmedia stalker site has recently targeted message board posters, as the Post story pointed out.

This same sleuth has since shown that Bagley posted Internet messages under various IDs ("veg-o-matic" was one) showing prejudice against Jews, Mexicans and others. (I'd post links to more of his bizarre yammering, but the posts containing them were deleted by Yahoo, no doubt at Bagley's insistence). The net sleuth also traced his Internet smear campaign in 1999 and 2000 against a Florida reporter who wrote tough articles about his then-boss. Bagley has not denied the former, and responded to the latter by gloating about it.

IV's action is odd indeed for supposedly neutral message board, but apparently IV is seeking a franchise as a free-fire zone for stock touts and stalkers, undeterred by skeptics and dissenters. For example, a death threat ("you ought to be put out of your misery") against Scipio remains on Investor Village. Scip's typically civil response was erased. Ditto for attacks on me and others.

Byrne can now spew hate and lies about his critics, and generally behave like a clown, without fear of contradiction -- something that hardly benefits his shareholders, who have suffered from his inattention. The same goes for other cranks who parrot Byrne's lies, such as this idiot--who can now repeat the "Wikipedia lie" without Scipio to explain that it has been denied by Wikipedia.

Byrne is, of course, always vigorous when it comes to silencing dissent, and his desire to cover his tracks is understandable. Barron's pointed out today that Medifast CEO Bradley T. MacDonald was fired for Internet activity far more benign than Byrne's and Bagley's:

More recently, Barron's has learned, Medifast's board has become concerned about Internet postings, under the name bradmed@verizon.net, in support of Medifast on the Yahoo! Finance message board. People in a position to know say that this is a pseudonym and that MacDonald was the author of these messages.

Barron's reported that "company directors reprimanded MacDonald in mid-December after learning of a Barron's inquiry into the postings, and told him to stop posting messages, fearing, among other things, that this could violate 'fair disclosure' regulations."

That's what happens at a normal board of directors, by the way, as opposed to the collection of Byrne cronies on the Overstock board.

Barron's continued:

But even if a CEO weren't disclosing private company information, corporate governance experts say failure to identify himself as an executive of the company could be a problem. "In a worst-case scenario, it could be considered a fraud on the market if you are giving incomplete information and in my mind it is incomplete per se if you don't say where it is coming from by hiding your identity," says Nell Minow, editor and co-founder of The Corporate Library, a corporate governance group.

I wonder if a company "aiding and supporting" (to quote the Post) a vicious, lying, cyberstalking website violates Regulation FD--and a slew of other securities laws?

It obviously violates any semblance of morality and corporate ethics, but hey, this is Overstock.com!

UPDATE: Reacting to this blog item, Investor Village reinstated Scipio's posts, and IV's Ralph Kidd denied that IV had deleted the messages under pressure from Bagley and/or Byrne. (Well, sort of denied. Kidd used the words, "to my knowledge.") According to Kidd, Scipio's messages were wiped out en masse supposedly under pressure not (to his knowledge) from Bagley or Byrne but from Bagley's/Byrne's supporters, who called Scipio's posts "clogging." Without bothering to look into the matter further, but just caving in to a bunch of jugheads on a message board, IV just deleted all the posts.

It's hard to believe that any message board operator would be quite so craven and irresponsible. It is, to say the least, hard to believe, and frankly I don't (Kidd's fibs about his contacts with me not enhancing his credibility). But this does explain why IV is Patrick Byrne's favorite message board, one that he prefers to post in more than his own.

Bottom line: Scip has been forced by this ham-handed action to curtail his posts to the Overstock board. Byrne and Bagley can now lie to their heart's contend, with Scipio handcuffed. If Kidd truly is not interested in running a cyberstalker board, he will show a little backbone and allow Scipio to respond to Byrne's and Bagley's lies in the forum where they spew them.

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

-----------

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.