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.

A Cover-Up at the Cover Story

The other day I described Overstock.com's laughable "Omuse" user-edited wiki, which was designed to provide a cover story for Patrick Byrne's resident stalker Judd Bagley. Its purpose is to give Bagley a no-show job to cover his real job of running Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site.

I provided a link that showed that Omuse had been a miserable failure: No edits for days at a time. Well, guess what, folks? The link (it used to be http://omuse.overstock.com/wiki/Special:Recentchanges) has been taken down. As the old saying goes, "Stuff a cold, feed a fever, cover-up a failure."

And I do mean failure. The Internet sleuth "Scipio" who brought this to my attention pointed out that as of last night, just before "recent changes" was taken down, there were a grand total of two non-management edits over the past week.

Guess he wasn't the only one to notice.

For comparison purposes, here's what you would see in the "recent changes" link of a non-sham wiki, this one called Wikihow. Incidentally, Wikihow seems alarmingly similar to Omuse (with its "how-to" orientation) wouldn't you say? Except that Wikihow has folks actually editing it, and wasn't created as a make-work excuse for the CEO's crony.

Now, I wonder how Byrne and Bagley will react to this item. Will they proclaim that a "technical glitch" occurred and reinstate the "recent changes" feature? Doing that, of course, would bring back a feature that showed in real time what a failure Omuse has been.

Quite a dilemma for the crackerjack Overstock management team.

Barry Ritholz wonders aloud in his blog today:

Now, with the SEC dropping their investigation of the "Sith Lords," and the company again issuing disappointing sales and earnings, I have one simple question: Who owns this stock, and why?

Overstock shareholders must be 1st rate fools happy to own a 2nd rate internet retailer managed by a 3rd rate CEO whose 4th quarter numbers were awful (400-bps gross margin miss and a 100% negative variance on EPS?), and for the 5th consecutive Q missed the prior sunny forecasts we can expect to be missed for a 6th time in May.

Enough already!

There are 9,000 publicly traded companies out there; Why does anyone even bother with this POS?

Mr. Ritholtz's point is well taken. I can't explain the mentality of people who own bad stocks run by bad people. But I do know this: as a journalist, watching a miserable company thrash itself to death is a fascinating thing to behold.

UPDATE: With the exception of a few of mild posts on message boards, Byrne and Bagley were uncharacteristically quiet over the President's Day Weekend. This is a shame from the standpoint of regulators, class action lawyers and other Overstock watchers, because every time they open their big mouths they dig the hole even deeper.

For instance, Internet sleuth "Scipio" has found this blog post from Aug. 24 which contradicts Byrne's claim that Bagley started work "at the very end of August." It was actually sometime before Aug. 24.

I'm sure that SEC investigators are having a field day combing through these guys' public statements, which are rife with forward-looking stock-hyping and jaw-dropping contradictions. So all I can say is, keep talking, fellas!

Scipio has a timeline that will, I'm sure, be of great value to our erstwhile watchdogs.

© 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.

Bagley's Cover Story Falls Apart

Overstock.com's CEO Patrick Byrne has had a serious problem since it was revealed that he had put on the payroll a full-time resident stalker, Judd Bagley, to smear his critics and divert attention from the lousy job he has been doing as CEO. Byrne needed a cover story, the more convincing the better.

That cover story -- the "secret project" that supposedly has been preoccupying Bagley since August -- has just been announced. And it is such a joke, such an obvious smokescreen, that it eliminates any doubt that Bagley was hired as "director of social media" strictly for the purpose of running Overstock's antisocialmedia.net smear site.

Antisocialmedia.net was created to intimidate and harass Overstock's critics, in a desperate effort to divert attention from the company's horror-show finances and failing share price. As Joe Nocera pointed out in the New York Times almost a year ago, in his article "Overstock's Campaign of Menace," Byrne has made it very clear that there is a "price to be paid" for criticizing this crummy company and its creepy CEO. Bagley is the chief enforcer of that strategy of intimidation.

Bagley has supposedly been toiling for half a year on something called "Omuse." It's supposed to be a user-edited "wiki" portion of Overstock, presumably for people who can't find their way to the real Wikipedia. Byrne thinks so little of it that he "announced" it on the limited-readership Investor Village message board and on an Overstock auctions forum -- in yet another nose-thumbing at Regulation FD.

Omuse also is a weak nose-thumbing at the real Wikipedia, where Bagley was kicked off after pushing Byrne's vendettas via phony IDs that harassed and stalked Wiki administrators. (Here's one of two official Wikipedia lists of Bagley's phony IDs.) Bagley is not ashamed of making an ass of himself on Wikipedia, and has bragged about it several times.

Note (before it is deleted) the amazed initial reaction to Omuse from a hapless Overstock merchant:

Will you please explain what all this has to do with AUCTIONS........I, as most sellers, came over to Overstock to sell our wares at auction........instead of valuable time being spent to get the up-grades, or to get working things done that should have been done before the auctions were started, along comes another program that has nothing to help the AUCTION SELLER.....it looks like another grasping for straws.....

The answer, of course, is that Omuse doesn't even pretend to have any value for Overstock. Its sole purpose is to provide a fig leaf for Bagley's actual responsibility at Overstock, which is the maintenance of Overstock's antisocialmedia.net smear site and similar "strategic messaging" responsibilities for Byrne. (Such as flaunting Reg. FD by putting a spin on Byrne's recent wack-a-doo lawsuit, or flushing any semblance of corporate ethics down the drain by planting spyware to stalk Overstock critics on message boards.)

Take a look at this crudely executed wiki and ask yourself: Does Byrne seriously expect anyone to believe that it took six months to develop this garbage? By all appearances (see this astute analysis) it seems to have been slapped together by a techie in the last few weeks, using freeware that anyone can download off the Internet. Since Bagley is not a web designer, and since it has no "content" to speak of, it obviously didn't take up much of his time.

Of course. His job is antisocialmedia.net, his cyberstalking-and-libel site, designed to carry out the mission Joe Nocera described a year ago. Compare the crude Omuse with the slick, well-designed, content-filled "antisocialmedia"smear site and Bagley's real job becomes apparent.

Meanwhile, Bagley has continued in his real job of lying about his boss's critics, with a post that -- in classic Bagley fashion -- projects onto others his own sliminess. Since he is a paid shill for Byrne, and was obviously hired as payback for running blogs ridiculing Byrne's critics, he feels that everyone is as corrupt as he is. The "paid basher" line is, of course, a classic Byrne intimidation technique as well -- one of the things that has made even Jim Cramer reluctant to criticize Overstock, as he recently pointed out.

This time Bagley is claiming that I have "consulted" for the DTCC (Depository Trust Clearing Corp.), a major whipping boy of Byrne and other anti-naked-shorting nuts. Byrne's "investigative reporter" made no effort to contact me about this absolute crap, and a flat-out denial by DTCC's general counsel was, of course, disregarded. (He said "no" and Bagley responded, "what dat mean?")

Bagley didn't even pretend to have contacted me, not that previous denials and refutations of his lies have prevented him from publishing his smears.

Now, on this consulting thing: I hope I am not misunderstood by my friends in the regulatory community and in law enforcement. If you want to talk with me, or "consult" with me shall say, on the subject of Overstock.com or Patrick Byrne or Judd Bagley or the anti-naked-shorting nuts -- I am at your disposal. In May I gave a presentation, free of charge, to regulatory attorneys of the New York Stock Exchange on that subject, as I pointed out in a post at the time.

So let's go, guys! You have my number. Give me a call.

UPDATE: Omuse has gotten off to a fast start. There were a grand total of zero user edits during the weekend following its announcement. Even if Omuse wasn't created to provide a nonprofit smokscreen for Bagley, it would be a pretty good example of the inept management of this company. As Herb Greenberg pointed out today, at any company with a non-captive board of directors, a CEO with a proven record of failure like Patrick Byrne would have been fired a long time ago.

(The link under "zero user edits" went to Omuse's "recent edits" link. That feature is now gone.)

© 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 Joys of 'Muzzling' Overstock's Critics

Responding to questions posed yesterday by Sam Antar, Overstock.com's resident stalker Judd Bagley has favored us all with a job description of his position as "director of social media." It is required reading for anyone following the increasingly bizarre Overstock saga.

As you can see, Bagley has been tasked with harassing, "muzzling" and "emasculating" critics of his boss Patrick Byrne, stalking them and planting spyware. (So as to make Byrne's critics "think twice before opening any email or following any link.")

I'm not kidding. He not only said all this, he boasted about it.

Bagley also took a stab at damage control -- to rationalize the fact that he is a walking P.R. disaster and legal liability -- by claiming that he has been trying all along to actually reduce negative attention directed at Byrne.

Obviously, if Bagley had wanted to throw himself under a bus for his boss, he would have openly run Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site rather than cowering behind an elaborate system of phony IDs .

If that was indeed his strategy, it has been a miserable failure. Far from diverting attention from Byrne, he has done a very good job of attracting negative publicity for Overstock and his boss. There have been three negative press articles so far -- all trashing Byrne, Overstock and Bagley -- in addition to the blog spanking he is getting from myself and others ("Sleazey McSleaze.")

None of those articles would have appeared, and many of the items in this and other blogs would never have seen the light of day, were it not for Judd Bagley's good work.

What's his next spin, I wonder?

UPDATE: The following day. Byrne engaged in a desperate effort to create "deniability" and shield Overstock from liability for its corporate smear site. In the process, as usual, he just dug the ditch deeper -- admitting that Bagley has not been doing the "social networking job" for which he was supposedly hired.

The story now is that Bagley was "reassigned" the day he started work.

How about that! He's locked himself into quite a fish story, as Internet sleuth ScipioAfricanus points out.

The doubletalk ("I don't read what Sam Antar wrote, but here is a reply") is classic Byrne. Ditto for the loony ranting and paranoia, though this "tools of Satan" and "dead man's switch" stuff is over the top even by Byrne standards. He is clearly a frightened man -- and justifiably so.

P.S. Bagley has said he is trying to divert attention from Byrne. Do the above paragraphs meet that goal?

© 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.

Some Questions For Judd Bagley

Sam Antar, reformed felon and mastermind of the Crazy Eddie stock scam, has dedicated his life to repenting for his past thievery and rooting out wrongdoing. He has taken up the cause of the corporate train wreck called "Overstock.com," and has directed some perceptive questions at Overstock.com's resident stalker Judd Bagley.

The questions can be found here.

Sam left out one question that intrigues me. Bagley was hired as "director of social media" in August. That's six months ago. Apart from creating a smear website to push the personal vendettas of Patrick Byrne, what else has he done as "director of social media"? Or is that his sole job responsibility? (Apart, that is, from dreaming up fantasies for Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site.)

Bagley, who ordinarily waxes rhapsodic on the Investor Village message boards on the weekends, responded to Sam's questions by hiding under his bed.

These are, of course, just a sample of the questions that Bagley will have to address sooner or later. Ditto for Byrne, who has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on his relationship with Bagley.

UPDATE: Byrne, interesting enough, offered up slippery responses and his usual "chewbacca" to the questions posed to his subordinate, sliming his way past the most important ones -- such as the identities of the numerous "handles" Bagley has used on the Internet.

That's not a trivial issue since some possible Bagley handles have made "forward-looking" statements about the company. Not surprised that Byrne has advised "investigative journalist" Bagley not to touch that one with a ten-foot pole.

Note that the questions were posed to Bagley, not Byrne. Yet here he is, the CEO of the company, coming on a stock message board to respond to questions about the "hobby" of his subordinate. Some "hobby." I've known top-level corporate initiatives that have drawn less enthusiastic cheerleading from the CEO than Bagley's smear campaign.

If there was any doubt about Overstock's sponsorship of, and involvement with, Bagley's activities, Byrne just laid it to rest.

I'd still like to see Bagley crawl out from under his bed and respond to Sam's questions. I'm also still anxious to hear about all the good "social media work" -- apart from the smear site, cyberstalking, spyware-planting and so on -- that Bagley has been carrying out for his boss over the past six months.

Note Sam's response. Another valid point.

The Overstock sliminess just keeps going on and on and on. It will stop someday, no doubt about it, and it won't be pretty for Overstock's shareholders.

© 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.

Times Article on Overstalk

The New York Times today has a very good article on the Overstock.com cyberstalking campaign.

None of this is really new. Almost a year ago, Joseph Nocera of the New York Times wrote a damning column on Overstock's "campaign of menace." It described the methods Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne uses -- including anonymous proxies on the Internet -- to silence critical journalists and analysts. The latest tool in Byrne's arsenal of lies is Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site.

After detailing Byrne's stock market conspiracy theories, which he described as "loony beyond belief," Nocera commented:

I've gone from viewing [Overstock CEO] Byrne as an amusing diversion to a menace, at least for anyone who cares about the First Amendment. What has become increasingly clear in the months since the Sith Lord speech is that Mr. Byrne is using the courts, the Internet, his taunting e-mails — and even his conspiracy theory — as part of a thinly disguised effort to squelch any and all criticism of Overstock. . . .

This is what Mr. Bryne does: along with [anonymous blogger "Bob O'Brien"], he bullies and taunts and goads the small handful of reporters who dare to write about Overstock, making it clear that there will be a price to be paid for tackling the company or its chief executive. And as a result, financial reporters have become very chary of taking him on.

That column was written months before Byrne hired a professional smear artist, a former GOP goon who has boasted about smearing a reporter in Florida, to publish lies about me and other critics of Ovestock.

Overstock.com's witch hunt against its real and imaginary enemies has gone from bad to despicable to, well . . . read this article on the new federal cyberstalking law. Bagley is sensitive to the implications of the law, as indicated in the update below.

Just one addendum to the article: the Wikipedia smear was denied not just by me, but by Wikipedia too. The rest of Bagley's smears have been systematically shredded by Internet sleuth "ScipioAfricanus." See this post, (as well as this one and this and this and. . . many others). Scipio, who apparently is a software engineer, also deserves credit for outing Bagley as operator of Overstock's antisocialmedia,net corporate smear site.

Also, the Times didn't mention Bagley's admitted use of spyware to track down critics of his boss, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Blog items on that can be found here. All those items link mainly to Scipio's good detective work in uncovering invisible software "bugs," such as the one described here.

I see that yet another techie has begun to probe Bagley's methods. This is a good example of how citizen activists can counteract corporate Internet abusers like Bagley.

UPDATE: Reacting to the Times story, Bagley redesigned the antisocialmedia corporate smear site, added language confirming that he owned the blog, tossed in some spin and as usual, some new lies.

Bagley's aim was to belatedly turn a corporate cyberstalking site into something resembling "journalism." His obvious purpose was to avoid liability under the federal cyberstalking law, which prohibits anonymous harassment on the Internet. Before Bagley was exposed as its operator, antisocialmedia took great pains to conceal its ownership, including use of a "DomainsByProxy" registration. (See it here, before he changes it.).

But this effort to put lipstick on a pig is not going to work.

This corporate hatchet man's latest lie is that he gave me "multiple opportunities" to respond to his latest fantasies. (He doesn't even pretend to have contacted me before his previous smears.)

In fact, Bagley posted a comment in my blog less than one hour before he set forth his latest fantasies, and I was later forwarded an email he sent to another blogger called "Mediacrity" that he surmises, incorrectly, is me.

Obviously Bagley is apprehensive that he will be held accountable for running this anonymous corporate harassment and dirty tricks operation. He has every reason to be. Spin and lie and conceal as he may, I think Bagley will learn that toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube.

© 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 CEO Expounds on the Joys of Cyberstalking

Over the long weekend, while normal people relaxed, Overstock.com stalker-in-residence Judd Bagley and his out-of-control boss Patrick Byrne dug themselves deeper into the cyberstalking scandal that they have created for themselves and their shareholders.

Bagley boasted about spying on Internet critics (also see this post and this one), and Byrne yanked closely the umbilical chord that binds him with Bagley's stalking-and-lying site, antisocialmedia.net. Here Bagley pretty much confesses to have sent a spyware-infected private message to Internet sleuth "ScipioAfricanus." Nice work, Judd!

More on Bagley's links to spyware-infected Internet messaging can be found in this neat bit of sleuthing. It is now increasingly obvious that the planting of invisible spyware codes in message board posts, which I described a few days ago, was carried out by Bagley.

Byrne's revelations came in two waves. First came his "cyberstalking is citizen journalism and journalists are evil corporations" rant on Jan. 13. When that was found to contain a real whopper of a contradiction, Byrne came back with a post on Jan. 14.

Blabbermouth that he is, Byrne did a nice job of confirming that Bagley's job is to run antisocialmedia:

Does Judd Bagley primarily work from Overstock.com facilities? STRANGE GUY, KEEPS HIS OWN HOURS, COMES IN SOME NIGHTS, STAYS AWAY FOR DAYS.

I would love to be a fly on the wall at the deposition sessions that I am sure are in his future. More evidence that Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site is Bagley's full-time job can be found here.

Byrne then ducked and weaved and contradicted what he had said in the past. The Aug. 8 reference is particularly damning, as "ipfrelee" was an Internet handle Bagley cringed behind earlier in the year. So, what have we here? Byrne spoke to Bagley about his cyberstalking on Aug. 8, hired the same cyberstalker to be a vice president a few days later, and (to quote what he said on Dec. 23) didn't "technically" know who ran antisocialmedia!

(Aside to the SEC: As Byrne would say, "Is this bad?")

Byrne also promised to send email spams to Overstock's hapless customers about an upcoming TV sound bite.

The same Internet sleuth who did all the great work linked above, "ScipioAfricanus," has found disturbing evidence tying Bagley's spyware-planting to Provo Labs of Utah, whose CEO Paul Allen is widely known in the Utah biz community. Provo Labs bought Bagley's "Big Idea" PR firm early in 2006.

In his Jan. 14 IV post, Byrne went out of his way to say that he has never even heard of Provo Labs! I'm convinced. Aren't you? Provo Labs has absolutely, positively nothing to do with Bagley's corporate-blessed critic-stalking, even though one of the spyware-infected message board postings linked directly to a Provo Labs blog.

Last but not least, Bagley posted a message on my blog (not published, of course, but preserved for posterity), reciting lies that he was imminently posting about my wife and then saying: "I again invite you to open a dialog that will allow us to settle our differences. This is getting pretty silly, I trust you'll agree. Judd."

In other words, "shut the f--- up, Weiss, or we'll post more lies about you and we won't stop at you. We'll go after your family."

I'd say Bagley has been watching The Godfather one too many times.

Note the resemblance to an anonymous threat that I posted about a few months ago, as well as an extortionate post by Bagley on a Yahoo message board in December. The message has been nuked by Yahoo, which has no tolerance for cyberstalking, but was replicated here:

"But the fact remains: his bad behavior needs to stop, and at some point, fire must be fought with fire...So, prior to the publication of Part Two on 12/20, we again ask Gary Weiss to engage us in a meaningful dialog. Please contact me at: antisocialmedia@gmail.com"

"Bad behavior" meaning, of course, criticism of Bagley's employer, Patrick Byrne.

It just keep going on and on and on and on..... Every time they open their big mouths, they blurt out something incriminating. Watching Byrne and Bagley dig themselves in deeper is like the fat lady at the carnival: it would almost be amusing if it wasn't so ugly.

Food for thought: this is a hobby blog, one that I write for my own amusement and as a diversion from real work. As you can see, it has driven Byrne over the edge. How is he going to react when the real investigators get on his case? And here's still more to consider.

UPDATE: Later in the day, Bagley made an appearance in the comments section of Dealbreaker.com, and brought his big mouth with him:

Gary's blog is now about me, leaving Bob O'Brien and Patrick Byrne to skip along undistracted. Hell, I'll take one or two for the team, and keep on feeding them the same rope they'll soon find themselves even more profoundly tangled up in. [emphasis added]

In other words, all the stuff about antisocialmedia being separate and apart from Overstock is what it appears to be, which is total bull. Bagley acted in concert with others, Patrick Byrne and Phil Saunders a/k/a "Bob O'Brien," in pursuit of his criminal cyberstalking and harassment enterprise.

Correction: In an early version of this item I inaccurately referred to Bagley as a "vice president" of Overstock.com. He is not. I apologize to all the people holding the title "vice president" in corporate America

© 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.

Judd Bagley Fesses Up

UPDATE: Judd Bagley copped a plea to eight felony forgeries in April 2013. See "Closing the File on a Criminal and Junkie Named Judd Bagley," March 30, 2015, describing his arrest and conviction for repeatedly forging a doctor's name on prescriptions.

Overstock.com's director of social media Judd Bagley, motivated by Lord knows what, admitted last night that he runs the anonymous cyberstalking site antisocialmedia.net.

Wow. That was faster than I expected. The Internet sleuths who smoked out this nightcrawler and professional liar should be congratulated.

Only one question arises in my mind: What laws were broken? Not "were laws broken?" but "what were the laws that were broken?" The new federal cyberstalking law comes to mind, obviously, but what others? Regulation FD is another good possibility, given the ASM Lie Machine was created after Bagley became a corporate officer. (And speaking of corporate disclosure, shouldn't Overstock file an 8-K disclosing its involvement in ASM?)

Bagley is trying hard to distance himself from his employer, Patrick Byrne, who brought him on as "director of social media" in August with all the fanfare that you and I would use in buying a can of Raid cockroach spray. Nice try, but too late. Byrne himself promoted the site and contributed to it, and has indicated that he has advance knowledge of its disclosures. Once again, Byrne's big mouth has landed him in deep doo-doo.

Putting a name behind a smear won't help when it comes to that cyberstalking law, which bans anonymous stalking on the Internet. Not now. Too late for that too. The toothpaste is out of the tube.

Even retracting his lies, and admitting that they've been refuted (such as his oft-repeated Wikipedia lie, which was denied by Wiki founder Jimbo Wales), would be a nice gesture but won't get him off the hook. Again, too late.

Further lies, such as saying that I and others are "criminals" as he did last night, just make the noose tighter. Cybersleuths are already ripping last night's lies to shreds. The time for lies is over. Bagley's admission that he is ASM, after months of cringing behind pseudonyms and anonymous registrations like the coward that he is, is only a first step.

Remember also that there is a lot more than ASM involved here. There is a pattern of intimidation, threats, harassment, invasion of privacy and, as revealed yesterday, implanting of spyware in message board posts. Click here for my posts on this increasingly bizarre corporate chicanery.

As you can see, Bagley is in trouble, and he is not the only one by a long shot. Byrne, and others I am sure, need to be held accountable for their actions. My advice is that Bagley go to the authorities, now, and try something new for a change: tell the truth. This is not a time for spin. The authorities won't expect anything less. He owes that to his wife and kids.

And down the road, if he ever wants to tell the story of the most clumsily executed corporate smear campaign since General Motors stalked Ralph Nader, I'll be happy to talk to him.

Meanwhile, I am reminded of a line from those old British crime movies: "Officer, do your duty."

Dealbreaker's headline sums up the rather self-evident character of the recent tidings: "Sleazey McSleaze Admits To Sleaziness."

But Bagley is just a side issue. Here is a question that is worth pondering:

Byrne said the following on the Investor Village Overstock message board on Dec. 23:

I am not behind antisocialmedia.com, offer it no support, it has nothing to do with overstock. Technically, I do not "know" who out there is behind it (the person who is behind it has made an effort to shield me from that knowledge), though admittedly, I have a very good idea.

Of course, we now know that at the time he said that, his "vice president for social media" was running ASM. As Byrne would put it, is that bad? Or as I would put it, is that a material misrepresentation under the securities laws?

I don't know the answer. But that's a good question, I would think.

UPDATE: Two subsequent developments confirm my thesis that Bagley and Byrne are in deep, deep trouble -- much greater trouble than they may know.

The first is a post at Investors Village from Patrick Byrne that embraces Bagley's antisocialmedia, showing it to be the corporate smear machine that it is. Along the way, Byrne dissembles (as usual) about the circumstances of ASM's creation.

The next is the usual anonymous Judd Bagley fairy tale and collection of lies, hinging on a "letter to the State Department" that somebody supposedly wrote on behalf of my wife to obtain residency in this country. Lurid, but, as usual from Sleazey McSleaze, a lie. Her permanent status application was based on marriage, not employment, and no such letter was ever requested or necessary.

Now, there was indeed a very serious immigration scandal, involving the wife of another correspondent. This has received widespread publicity, and apparently was twisted by Bagley to conform with Byrne's obsessions.

After the ASM's latest lies went online, Bagley appeared on the IV board in a series of bizarre posts, including this one in which he merrily gloated about mastering bigger and better spyware and invasion of privacy techniques. (His pals and sockpuppets did him one better, with the latest of series of death threats directed at me -- here's its former location. IV deleted it, but, as usual, took no action against the creep who posted it.)

Oh well. This is Overstock, after all, a company whose CEO is a habitual liar, and who employs lies and lying liars/stalkers like McSleaze as an essential part of his business plan.

In Byrne's world, anonymous stalkers are "citizen journalists" and his abysmal performance as CEO is replaced by a fantasy land, in which his many critics are the bad guys who have, I suppose, sucked the life out of his company. Them, not him. What a sad, sick world in which he lives.

© 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.com=Overstalk.com?

Today, the New York Post gives a name and an address -- Overstock.com -- to a particularly grimy anonymous Internet stalker.

The stalker in question is a slick, professionally designed website called antisocialmedia.net, and it has posted grotesque, paranoid, convoluted lies about me and other critics of Overstock.com in a sneering, menacing, "we're going to crush you" kind of way. I described one of its fairy tales here.

Antisocialmedia recently began hounding private citizens whose sole offense is criticizing Overstock and its grotesque CEO Patrick Byrne.

Despite this site's careful attempts to guard its anonymity, the Post was not fooled:

Internet retailer Overstock.com's war against its critics is taking an ugly new twist, as a Web site aided and supported by its management is leveling sharp charges against two Internet message board posters.

A few days ago I described how Internet sleuths had tracked that site to Overstock.com "director of social media" Judd Bagley. Byrne himself provided corroboration, by responding with a carefully worded non-denial when asked if the site was run by Bagley.

This corporate smear campaign is a kind of clumsy, low-rent version of General Motor's effort to harass, stalk and discredit Ralph Nader in the sixties.

Anonymously harassing people over the Internet is a federal crime -- even when, as in this instance, the anonymous stalkers are cowering behind a sheet of cellophane.

GM wounding up eating crow, apologizing to Nader and paying damages. Given the miserable state of Overstock's business, as reflected in its share price, I doubt that there will be much left of Overstock when the smoke clears -- except the stench.

UPDATE: On Jan. 3 the market reacted to the Post's revelations with a hearty 6.5% tumble. Meanwhile, the "Overstalk" website came out with another fairy tale, this one concerning my wife. Evidently the Overstalkers took a real UN correspondent scandal and changed the names to suit Byrne's vendetta. The real story can be found here.

Bagley later confessed to running Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site. See this subsequent post.

© 2006 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.

Patrick Byrne's No. 1 Fan is Hired By..... Guess Who?

A reader email caused me to ponder the following: If you were running an Internet closeout retailer that was gushing red ink, what kind of top executive would you hire?

A. A marketing specialist with extensive experience in closeout retailing?
B. A wiz at Internet commerce?
or
C. A guy who runs websites that attack your personal enemies and push your "stock market conspiracy" fantasies?

If you're Overstock.com CEO/conspiracy theorist/ journalist-taunter/short-and-analyst-suer/miscreant-blamer/ Worst CEO-wannabe Patrick Byrne, this is what you call a "no brainer."

Seems that in August 2006, in the midst of Overstock's disastrous third fiscal quarter, Byrne reached out to the gentleman pictured above, Judd Bagley. Bagley is highly qualified to be "Director of Social Media." He runs a slimy website called "businessjive.com," and an even grimier, now defunct blog called "Trailer Park Rave."

In both sites, this obscure flack and ex-traffic reporter has pushed Byrne's paranoid "stock counterfeiting" conspiracy theories and engaged in juvenile attacks on Byrne's enemies. Here's an apparent Bagley post on a Yahoo message board in March ("Big Idea PR" is a Bagley enterprise) spamming a moronic "businessjive" video ridiculing Byrne's enemies.

Another post from "bigideapr" encouraged people to click on a paid Google ad from Overstock critic James Cramer that appeared on the "sanitycheck" stock-conspiracy website. The aim, as you can see, is to soak Cramer while benefiting an ally of Byrne. Such antics are discouraged and, sometimes, prosecuted by Google.

More apparent Bagley message board spewing can be found here. Those with a strong stomach can peruse a particularly revolting Bagley-created attack video from June, this one employing Bagley's grade school sense of humor to mock Herb Greenberg. It can be found at www.businessjive.com/nss/marketshuffle2.wmv (if it hasn't been yanked).

As you can see, Bagley is responsible for some awfully sophomoric, mean-spirited stuff. "Garbage," you might say. A perfect "director of social media"!

Oddly, this appointment wasn't announced by Overstock when it happened last August. Seems like a great hire to me, filled with all kinds of synergies, and a fine use of Overstock's ample (as long as those secondary offerings keeping coming!) cash.

UPDATE: After this item appeared, Internet sleuths found evidence that Bagley runs an anonymous website that stalks Byrne's Internet critics and publishes vicious smears about me. See this subsequent post.

In an article on January 2, the New York Post identified the stalker website as "aided and supported by the management" of Overstock.com, including Bagley. See this update.

Wall Street Folly has a cute illustration that sums up the foregoing (sans update):



Update: Bagley later confessed to running Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net smear site. See this subsequent post.

© 2006 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 Naked Shorting Cult's Hysteria Escalates

Several times in the past, such as in this item, I've pointed out how the anti-short-selling "stock counterfeiting" conspiracy theorists have many of the attributes of a cult. More evidence on that point came to light over the weekend.

One key characteristic of cults is paranoia, which the anti-shorting movement has in abundance, and an increasingly bizarre disconnect from reality.

So note the latest missive from the anonymous anti-shorting crackpot "Bob O'Brien" (identified by the NY Post an ex-used medical equipment peddler named Phil Saunders). "O'Brien's" specialty is taking meaningless trading data and turning it all into a "phantom stock" conspiracy. He then uses the data to orchestrate letter-writing campaigns aimed at diverting regulators and members of Congress from real stock market issues, such as brokerage sales practices and microcap fraud.

On Thanksgiving, while you and I were gouging ourselves on turkey, "O'Brien" was pumping out a dog's breakfast called, I kid you not, "It's The End Of The World As We Know It." In an incoherent mishmash, "O'Brien" portrays the entire repo market as infested by his obsession, "naked short-selling." (That's a form of trading that pretty much everybody, except the naked shorting loons, feels has been exaggerated wildly out of proportion.)

Here's the punch line:

What we have here is a mega, systemic-meltdown-scale problem caused by the brokers treating the markets like their own private piggy bank, from which they can take money and leave IOUs, to be tossed when they've driven the companies to zero. And our regulators, our elected officials, and our media have completely failed us. They have one and all colluded to facilitate the theft of OUR MONEY, and are now scrambling as the size of the theft becomes apparent.

Another classic of the genre, which also appeared on Thanksgiving, was generated by the prolific anti-shorting activist "Bud" Burrell on the sanitycheck website. This one was entitled, "Discovery of Massive Links to Financial Terrorism, Global Fraud, and Treason/Betrayal." Burrell, apparently influenced by the new James Bond film, set forth his thesis in some detail.

The concluding paragraph is a dilly:

"What is out there? We now have a international national network of criminal and terrorist elements working together to crush this country by destroying its financial system. This has all been constructed and operated right under the noses of those who are supposed to protect us. Clearly, they are not competent to do this job, no matter what the reason. Those who are attempting to correct this thievery simply are outgunned, or they are over their heads technically.

"We are left with no recourse but to take this to the highest levels of the Government, making every attempt to stay out of any part of the Government with responsibility for financial activities. This needs fresh eyes, not conflicted ones with motivations to protect themselves rather than us. This will be my last communication with you as a group. This has simply turned too dangerous, literally insane.

"Until I can pass this off to RESPONSIBLE AND ACCOUNTABLE PARTIES, I AM GOING TO STEP AWAY. I will continue to support those of you I have established personal relationships with, but I am otherwise off the playing field. Someone is dirty in EVERY organization that has intersected this."

It's "us versus them," friends. So drop everything you're doing and write your congressman and your senator and the president and tell them to focus on this baloney. After all, we don't want them wasting their time on real problems, do we?


© 2006 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.

Byrne's Dilemma: Dealing With Treason

After a blissful summer hiatus, Overstock.com chief executive/conspiracy theorist/journalist-taunter/short-and-analyst-suer/"miscreant"-blamer Patrick Byrne resumed posting his thoughts on an Internet message board last night.

Byrne immediately found himself tackling a grave dilemma: How does one deal with traitors to the Cause?

Seems that one message-board poster, though otherwise sympathetic to the Cause, had dared to question "stock counterfeiting" conspiracymeister "Bob O'Brien's" (nom de smear of used medical equipment salesman Phil Saunders). Saunders was yammering that a crummy little company called Global Links is the victim of "massive fraud" -- and not the shortcomings of its management. This skeptic suggested that the evidence of fraud was a little thin. She also noted the absence of actual victims. That was clearly the last straw.

"Basher!" the baloney-chompers cried on "O'Brien's" wacky board and elsewhere. ("Basher" is the "stock counterfeiting" cultists' term for "skeptic." One either drinks from the kool-aid basin or is the enemy -- there is no middle ground in the cult.)

Byrne counseled patience with the hated freethinker -- up to a point. Responding to complaints that the dissenter, "Selene," was actually a "basher" in disguise, Byrne said soothingly, "I have no reason not to believe Selene. Nothing in her story sounds implausible."

Byrne went on to note that his patience had limits: "if Selene is in fact a basher, but one who is trying a new approach of sounding reasonable, then I say it is a nice change, and we should not bang on her/him. (Until she starts jabbering nonsense, as she has on the Bunny's ["Bob O'Brien's" wacko "counterfeit stock"-conspiracy] board.)"

"Jabbering nonsense" means, in plain English, "questioning loony conspiracy theories promulgated by anonymous crackpots."

Got to watch that nonsense-jabbering! I am sure that Byrne will stay on patrol for that, as his money-losing company limps along. Stay tuned. I sure will -- so you don't have to.

© 2006 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 SEC's Unfinished Business

In all the coverage of the SEC's new journalist-subpoena guidelines, including my item in this blog, nobody mentioned a lingering issue: Just how does the SEC define "journalists" and "news-gathering"? Nothing in the SEC policy statement defines those terms, and that troubles me.

This a subject I've discussed before (thanks to New Market Machines for reminding me). When the subpoena morass first arose, SEC chairman Christopher Cox told Reuters that people "masquerading as journalists" are a problem, and that the guidelines would cover just the media and nobody else.

The problem is that stock swindlers have long posed as "journalists," such as by publishing "stock market newsletters" that are little more than stock-promotion vehicles. More recently, we have the anonymous crackpots of the anti-naked-shorting cult, some of whom are from the world of penny stocks and are well acquainted with stock-scam tactics.

As I noted in my item last month, the "sanitycheck" website, a favorite of Overstock.com's loopy CEO Patrick Byrne, bills itself as an "independent" website that likes to say that it engages in "journalism." In fact, "sanitycheck" has as much in common with journalism as the anti-shorting "market reform" movement has in common with genuine market reform. In other words, nothing. In fact, its tactics and secrecy make it more a kind of stock market version of the Ku Klux Klan than anything else.

"Sanitycheck" is run anonymously by an individual who hides behind a phony name (used medical equipment salesman Phil Saunders, a/k/a "Bob O'Brien") while he serves as a shill for Overstock and publishes drivel on "stock counterfeiting." One of the site's primary functions is to slander and intimidate journalists who fall afoul of Patrick Byrne and the naked-shorting cultists. One of "O'Brien's" "reporting techniques" is to publish a lie or rumor about someone or other, and then give that person or institution X amount of time to respond or he will consider it as "fact." (See Feb. 15 entry here.)

The SEC needs to investigate the funding, tactics and secret ownership of "Sanitycheck" and similar sites, without being deterred by the misimpression that such phony, crackpot websites are part of the "news media." Some kind of formal guidelines defining the media (perhaps simply excluding anonymously-run sites run to push a particular "cause") are clearly needed.

Now one might think that the SEC would know the difference between a crackpot website and a genuine online journal like, say, Slate. However, judging from its recent witch hunt against journalists, I am not so sure.

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Wall Street Versus America will be 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.

Cox on Phony Journalists

SEC chairman Chris Cox, quoted by Reuters tonight, says that the agency is working on subpoena guidelines for journalists. He then makes the following pointed observation:

He said the commissioners had discussed the problem of defining who is and is not truly a journalist. "There are people masquerading as journalists who really aren't. That's a concern," he said. He said the guidelines would concern only the news media and no one else.

This is indeed a concern. The "sanitycheck" website, promoted by Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne on CNBC yesterday, bills itself as an "independent" website that likes to say that it engages in "journalism." But if you follow Byrne's advice and go there, you see that it is run anonymously by an individual who hides behind a phony name while he promotes several companies, Overstock among them. One of its primary functions is to slander and intimidate journalists who fall afoul of those companies.

That's not "journalism" by any stretch of the imagination. Time for the SEC to take action against this fraudulent website and its scummy operators and hidden backers.

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Wall Street Versus America will be 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 BALONEY CONTINUES: Phil Saunders a/k/a "Bob O'Brien," the bravely anonymous leader of the Baloney Brigade, responded to today's DTCC press release with a lengthy, rambling comment that doesn't even attempt to counter anything in the DTCC press release.

As usual, the ex-used medical equipment salesman's position is that he doesn't have to prove a thing. The rest of the world, the victims of his rants, must come up with "facts" to counter his nutty allegations. He then expresses displeasure that I have not turned over my blog to him to rant at length and goes on to accuses DTCC -- as usual, without substantiation -- of "lying," and slanders an award-winning Dow Jones reporter who has not written articles to his or her (being anonymous, we have no way of knowing) satisfaction.

"Bob," I have a question for you. This you are welcome to post on, and at length. What is your name? Who finances your website? Who finances the Baloney Blitzkrieg?

UPDATE: "Bob" responded in typical fashion, by saying "I'll be happy to respond" and then, after six hundred words, not responding.