Overstock.com Admits its Financial Statements Were Phony

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne was too busy cyberstalking to comment

(Updated 10/4 evening)

It's official: Overstock.com is now the Overstock Stock Fraud.

The corporate crime petri dish put out an SEC filing this afternoon. after the market closed, announcing that its 2008 and 2009 financials will have to be restated.

What that means can be summed up very simply: all of its recent financial statements are lies. It also means that white collar crime-fighter Sam Antar, who has previously blogged on how Overstock has systematically falsified its financial statements--and was viciously attacked in return--was right in every detail.

The usually voluble CEO Patrick Byrne was believed to be in a bunker with Eva Braun.

As usual, Byrne acted like a kid waiting till the last moment before telling Mummy that he broke the bathroom window. The decision to make the restatements--something Byrne had previously, vehemently said was unecessary, to the point of firing his previous auditor--was made on Jan. 29. He waited until the expiration of the time period set by those pesky securities laws.

Sam has blogged voluminously on this issue, and justifiably gloats in this post tonight. Sam summarizes the case he had previously laid out for regulators, which is that Overstock manipulated its earnings by using a "cookie jar reserve."

Here's a chart from Sam describing just what the restatements mean--something Overstock deliberately concealed in its deliberately murky filing today:



Be sure to compare the top row of numbers with the bottom row. Note that a much-hyped fourth quarter "gain" was actually a loss.

One of my favorite war movies, Above and Beyond, about the bombing or Hiroshima, was playing on Turner Classic Movies at the time the 8-K was filed. But you didn't have to be watching TCM to see a mushroom cloud--the one rising over whatever credibility Overstock may have previously had. It also puts a fresh light on the disgusting activities of Byrne's employee Judd Bagley (right), a possible pederast, as he was eloquently termed by one his victims, who has cyberstalked the wives and kids of his critics and people in the media, on Facebook and elsewhere.

These people have behaved with all the class of kids in sixth grade who spy on the girls' bathroom, and there is now no possible doubt as to the reason: they were covering up for the cookie jar reserve that Patrick Byrne's instituted to manipulate his quarterly financials.

All the attacks on Antar, all the claims that its accounting was a product of "Mormon eagle scouts," have all turned out to be lies to divert attention from fraud.

The SEC is investigating Overstock.com. I hope that this investigation examines the whole range of wrongdoing by this rotten little company and the creeps who run it.

The voluble Byrne, meanwhile, was last found on a stock message board, doing his usual stalking shtick. He's bored and repelled anyone who's taken a close look at his reptillian self, but not to worry, I'll hang around until he is an odoriferous memory. I don't think that will be too long.

Barry Ritholtz summed up the situation well in a post tonight:

Their whole campaign against naked shorting, the bizarre cyberstalking — all of that junk has been nothing more than a grand case of misdirection to hide the fact that Overstock has been cooking their books for who knows how long.

Let’s look at what preceded their latest 8k filing with the SEC:

• Price Waterhouse Coopers was fired after 8 years of failed audits;

• Grant Thorton recommended restating financial reports to correct material misstatements; They were fired soon thereafter;

• Grant Thorton files letter with SEC stating material misstatements ont he part of Overstock (SEC)

• CFO resigned January 20th; (SEC)

• SEC begins examining Overstock’s financial reporting;

And where has that led us?

• In the most recent 8k, Overstock admits having to restate quarterly financials from Q1 2008 to Q3 2009;

. . . I suspect there will be more shoes to drop in the future. I also have a suspicion that a few execs and former employees will be getting fitted for state issued orange jumpsuits.

Stay tuned.

Related posts:

Restatements Highlight Overstock.com's Lies to Salt Lake Tribune

Can Overstock.com Get the SEC Off Its Back?

© 2010 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Patrick Byrne Admits Funding Dirty Tricks Operation

Throws down the gauntlet to the SEC

(See Update: Overstock cleaned up after Byrne's latest mess by issuing an 8-K)

A chilling story is out today in the New York Observer on Overstock.com's dirty tricks operation. Apart from the usual "oh my goodness" stuff, what's most interesting from a securities fraud perspective is further evidence of how Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is flouting SEC disclosure rules.

First, Byrne has failed to disclose in any Overstock filing his ownership and ongoing financing of the "Deep Capture" astroturf website. The article made clear that it's his website, bought and paid for with a cool half million bucks, making rather pointless his efforts in the past to erect corporate shells to disguise his role.

The second and more clear cut violation of the securities laws is his flippant, almost giddy disregard of Regulation FD:

. . . Overstock does not enjoy getting into why it’s never recorded an annual profit in its history. (Mr. Byrne, though, said at deadline that the company is about to report its first annual profit. “I’m probably going to get a lot of shit for having said this,” he offered.)

That's entirely possible, but it depends on how serious the SEC is about enforcing Regulation FD, as in "fair disclosure." That's designed to ensure investors get material information uniformly, and not through the online editions of newspapers not ordinarily read by investors in Utah stock frauds, and teasers planted on bulletin boards ("PS: Patrick gives some interesting "guidance" in the piece. You OSTK investors will probably appreciate it.")

I'll be interested to see if Overstock wipes up after this latest mess by issuing an 8-K before the start of trading today. Whether it does or not, Byrne has just thrown down the gauntlet to the SEC, and it's up to them to accept the challenge or, as usual when crooked execs throw down gauntlets, do nothing.

"Profit" of course is an elastic term as Overstock, which is why the SEC is investigating its accounting.

You can't write about Byrne or his nauseating lackey Judd Bagley without being grossed out, so we have this creepy bit of stalking:

. . . Afterward, he was looking on a map to get his bearings. “And I saw this little cul-de-sac. I thought, ‘I know I’ve heard of that before.’ And I remembered, ‘That’s right! Gary Weiss lives there. So I just kind of walked down it.”

Bagley was off target. We haven't many young kids for him to stalk where I live, but there's a public school just around the corner.

“Posting the name of my 16-year-old son, what did that prove?” said the Barron’s editor Eric Savitz.

Well, I guess it proves that Bagley is a special kind of douchebag, as this article makes abundantly clear. But you have to admit that he's a well-financed douchebag.

The article was written by Max Abelson, who shares a surname (I don't know if he's related) with Alan Abelson of Barron's. Alan Abelson years ago was subjected to constant legal harassment by bagholders of companies he wrote about, who blamed him for the decline of stocks in which they invested. The only thing that's changed is that the harassers are getting scummier, and that they're going after families.

The parting shot from Barry Ritholtz is probably the best description of naked shorting that I've ever seen:

“It’s like a guy leaping off the Empire State Building, and he hits the pavement, and it turns out he also has high cholesterol,” Mr. Ritholtz said. “When they do the autopsy, I don’t think they’ll give a fuck about the high cholesterol. Naked shorting is the high cholesterol.”

UPDATE: BusinessInsider reminds me that Byrne, reconfiguring his nutty "Sith Lord" rant from 2005 is now saying there is not one but two "Sith Lords": Michael Milken and Steven Cohen of SAC Capital. Sort of the Sith Lord Twins. I'm surprised he didn't throw in Bernie Madoff and Al Capone, to make it a quartet.

A sarcastic message board post sums up Byrne's latest self-created problem: "An annual profit! Wow! OK, I am changing my sentiment to STRONG BUY, because of this information. . . . Now that I have changed my sentiments based on this statement by Mr. Byrne, I am going to start searching for the Reg FD filing."

Late in the day, Overstock's legal beagles shot over to the SEC a clean-up-the-latest-Byrne-mess filing, with the Observer article attached, but they were tardy. The filing came after the market closed, after an illegal runup of the stock, which ended up nearly a percentage point.

Ahem. I call that closing the barn door after the cow, or in this case the Reg. FD violation, had gone.

The filing says basically nothing: "The Company has not yet completed its financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2009. The Company intends to issue a press release containing financial results for the year ended December 31, 2009 when they are available." So what is that supposed to mean? That just makes the whole thing murkier. This is one of the weirdest 8-Ks I've ever seen, even from these buffoons.

This has happened before. Let's face facts: Patrick Byrne does not like abiding by the securities laws. I mean, they're not included in the envelope with the check that comes every month from the trust fund, so why should he obey them?

By the way, when Byrne said “I’m probably going to get a lot of shit for having said this,” the term of art for that is scienter.

© 2010 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Patrick Byrne Celebrates Pretexting Debacle

Byrne takes joy in being a scumbag

In the furor over the Overstock.com pretexting scandal, I missed this gem: Overstock's wacky CEO, Patrick Byrne, staggered onto the corporate p.r. blog, Deep Capture, long enough to celebrate his being whacked upside the head by his infuriated victims.

Here's a quote from Byrne that was published on a Salt Lake Tribune blog (so as to obviate the need to duck malware and tracking bugs at Byrne's website):

We can always tell when we are getting to them by the whine of the Spin-Blender’s motor in the blogosphere and financial media. Right now, they’ve punched the button marked, “Purée”.

Getting to whom, is what I would like to know:

Facebook, which just banned his cyberstalker Judd Bagley from the premises and issued a statement condemning the pretexting scheme?

The SEC, which now has something else to investigate, in addition to the "cookie jar reserve" he used to manipulate earnings?

His board of directors, which has given silent assent to his misconduct, thereby changing their status from "bird brains" into "accomplices"?

Investors, who sent the share price spiraling down in the wake of the scandal, who have a new reason to stay away?

Oh, I know what he means. He means his victims--the dozens of previously uninvolved journalists and bloggers whose privacy was violated, and would like to see Overstock boycotted Byrne and his henchman Judd Bagley tossed in jail.

He has definitely "gotten" to all those people.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Teed-Off Facebook Dumps Patrick Byrne Accounts, Issues Stern Warning

Facebook expelled stalker Judd Bagley--even deleting his personal account

UPDATE: Judd Bagley copped a plea to eight drug felonies in April 2013. See "Closing the File on a Criminal and Junkie Named Judd Bagley," March 30, 2015.

As I've described in various blog posts since 2006, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has been waging a war on the Internet -- sending paid stalkers to websites throughout the web, harassing and smearing critics. But he's been treated less like a menace than as a nut, and hasn't received much pushback -- until now.

A clearly teed-off Facebook today issued a strongly worded statement condemning Byrne's Facebook pretexting scheme, in which Byrne's hood Judd Bagley set up at least one phony account to stalk critics and smear them on an Overstock corporate p.r. website.

In a previous blog post I noted that Bagley's own Facebook account had been deleted as well as the phony one that he created on Byrne's behalf, "Larry Bergman." It wasn't clear by whom -- I once incorrectly posted that the accounts were deleted by Byrne.

The Facebook statement makes it abundantly clear that the accounts were deleted by Facebook, after what was described as a "thorough investigative review."

Facebook spokesman Simon Axten, responding to my request for comment on the Overstock pretexting, emailed to me the following statement:

We take the privacy and safety of our users very seriously. Using a fake name or operating under a false identity is a violation of Facebook’s policies, and we encourage users to report anyone they think is doing this, either through the report links we provide on the site or through the contact forms in our Help Center. In this case, we conducted a thorough investigative review, discovered accounts linked to the reported misconduct, and promptly removed them.

Axten wouldn't elaborate on the accounts removed, citing policy, but "accounts linked to the reported misconduct" obviously refers to Bagley's now-deleted personal account and "Bergman." If there are other pretexting accounts controlled by Byrne, Axten isn't saying.

Facebook has been criticized a lot for its own approach to privacy, and today was the target of complaints to the FTC, so clearly the last thing it needs is criminal activity on its own website. The timing of using Facebook, of all things, for pretexting and invasion of privacy was about as moronic as I've ever encountered. Bagley must surely go down in history as the most inept p.r. practitioner since Baghdad Bob.

Bagley, meanwhile, is continuing to insist that pretexting -- establishing phony accounts and seeking to gain people's confidence -- is... well it's honest, that's what it is, and is such a routine practice among p.r. practitioners that it's as second nature as writing a press release.

He said in one blog comment that "Larry was just a tool for determining whether or not certain people accept every Facebook friend request.' That's like saying he threw a rock through someone's window to see if it was shatterproof.

The guy is a psycho. Seriously. No p.r. person that I know of would ever tell embarrassing whoppers like that, no matter how desperate for employment (or terrified of criminal prosecution) he or she may be. It's also flat-out dumb. If there ever is a criminal prosecution, this kind of defiance would be evidence of criminal intent.

Though some friend lists were not kept private, most Facebook pages contain private, personal information that only can be accessed by "friends." Bagley was compiling that information, under false pretenses and using a stolen photograph, for clearly hostile purposes, in the course of his employment by Byrne.

Copyright violation and identity theft are a violation of federal law. Indeed, Facebook nuked the stolen photo of "Bergman" -- actually the photo of an Italian art critic -- before it deleted the account.

Pretexting in pursuit of a corporate agenda has been prosecuted. Just ask Hewlett-Packard. Overstock is already under SEC investigation for cooking the books.

Byrne and his cronies are endlessly entertaining, but they're remorseless criminals. They belong in prison. Until Byrne, Bagley and their accomplices are locked up, no critic of Overstock.com, real or imaginary, or their families, will be safe from harassment and invasion of privacy.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Patrick Byrne's Facebook Pretexting Lasted Seven Months

Byrne hard at work at his day job: stalking his critics and their families

(Updated with length of scheme corrected. See this update on Facebook expelling Overstock's pretexting guru Judd Bagley.)

I've been perusing the wreckage left behind from "Larry Bergman," the phony Facebook account used by Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne in his pretexting and identity theft scheme to stalk critics.

What I've found was that this pretexting scheme was the full time occupation of his creepy cyberstalker, the nauseating Judd Bagley, for the past seven months. Bagley went to elaborate lengths to establish an alternate identity, doing everything from creating a fake Twitter ID to using the stolen, copyrighted picture of a well-known Italian art critic to establish his identity.

Among the tidbits I've found:

1. "Bergman" was fabricated seven months ago to stalk whistleblower Sam Antar and his family.

As best as I can tell -- if anyone knows differently, please let me know -- Sam was his first target back in May, seven months before Byrne's pretexting chief Bagley loused up so badly that a little checking revealed that "Bergman" was a phony.

Sam is the former CFO of the Crazy Eddie stock swindle, a convicted felon who has devoted his life to fighting white collar crime. He has exposed on his blog systematic financial fraud at Overstock.com, in particular how Byrne created a "cookie jar reserve" that he used to create earnings where there should have been a loss. Sam single-handedly prompted an SEC investigation into those very issues.

Byrne's henchman Bagley (right), a glassy-eyed p.r. hack and ex-Florida Republican dirty-trickster, began stalking Sam through "Bergman" in May 2009.

At that time, Byrne knew that Sam had been sending emails to the SEC ripping apart the company's phony financial statements. Overstock board member Joseph Tabacco was cc’d on those emails.

Tabacco is on Overstock's audit committee, and he fulfilled his role handsomely: he forwarded the emails to Byrne, and went right back to sleep. This was immediately before the SEC opened its investigation.

Therefore, Byrne was attempting, through pretexting and identity theft, to spy on an independent whistleblower that he knew was communicating with the SEC.

After he succeeded in "infiltrating" (to use Byrne's words), the Facebook "network" of "miscreants" headed by Sam, Byrne then had Bagley target Sam's son, a kid in his twenties.

From: Facebook

Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 11:36 PM

To: xxxxx Antar

Subject: Larry Bergman added you as a friend on Facebook...

Larry added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Larry in order for you to be friends on Facebook.

Larry says, "Hi xxxxx I'm a friend of Sam's.".

To confirm this friend request, follow the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?reqs.php&mid=97xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

When Sam raised the issue with Bagley on a message board after the scheme fizzled, Bagley responded in his typically big-hearted way: "Time to cut the apron strings, don't you think?"

Bagley continued to work the"Bergman" charade through the summer and into the fall and winter. He tried to gain Sam's confidence on Nov. 4 by posting a sympathetic question concerning this blog post, which described how Byrne refused to take questions from Sam at a quarterly conference call.:

Sam, did you email your questions to Overstock IR guy Kevin Moon beforehand? If so you have good reason to be bothered.

What's ironic is that this is the first time I've ever seen this psychopath utter anything that wasn't a lie or dishonest spin. And he did it posing as a "friend" of Sam's, trying to work his way into the "Facebook conspiracy."

2. The Facebook pretexting scheme targeted Marc Cohodes -- a hedge fund manager who was being sued by Overstock -- and (of course) his family.

Bagley has long claimed to have severed his connections with Overstock. He had been corporate spokesman before joining the ostensibly independent website "Deep Capture" in 2007. But that was actually an astroturf site, financed by Byrne, owned by him through corporate shells, with its content aimed almost exclusively at smearing critics of Overstock and Byrne. By targeting Cohodes, who was involved with a dispute with Overstock, any pretense of independence went out the window.

"Bergman" stalked Cohodes on Facebook in mid-November, and when that failed he went after Cohodes' wife and daughter, an 18-year-old college student, all of this while the litigation was still pending. It was settled earlier this month. (Bagley did the same thing with me, "friending" my wife in early December shortly after she posted on her page that I was her husband. Bagley was watching me that minutely.)

It takes a special kind of douchebag to stalk the wives and kids of your critics and adversaries. Bagley and Byrne are that kind of douchebag.

I think you can imagine the shit storm that would have developed if some hireling of Cohodes had stalked Byrne, his family members, or Bagley's wife and kids. You'd have the entire Utah congressional delegation up in arms. They'd have quit sabotaging the Obama health plan long enough to get the SEC and FBI to put Cohodes on the hot seat.

Bagley, again functioning in a p.r. capacity for Overstock, yesterday posted an elaborate presentation on his "antisocialmedia" website (another Overstock astroturfing outfit) trying to spin the settlement of the Cohodes litigation.

There is now no daylight whatsoever between Bagley, Byrne's two astroturf websites and Overstock.com. Astroturfing is not only the lowest form of life in the p.r. industry, it is fraudulent conduct because it presents corporate p.r. as "independent" coverage. Doesn't the SEC have rules against fraudulent conduct?

3. Byrne had my Facebook account under tight surveillance.

My Facebook account was inactive until Dec. 4, when I activated it in order to connect with some friends who recently moved abroad. There was a flurry of activity from Dec. 7-12, as I added several dozen Facebook friends, and then, bingo! Byrne's thug Bagley tried to get me to friend the phony "Bergman" account on Dec. 10.

What this means is that Bagley -- he is paid to do this full time by Byrne, remember -- was closely watching my Facebook account, noticed the sudden spurt of activity and then pounced, hoping that I would accept him as a "friend" without noticing:




This friend request came to me a few hours after I wrote a post on the outrage that had greeted posting of Byrne's enemies list on the corporate p.r. site. The timing of the invitation to me was typical of the narcissistic Bagley. He's smarter than anyone else, you see.

True. He's so smart that he has singlehandedly destroyed what was left of his and his boss's reputation.

In the past few days we've seen the most ridicule I have ever seen directed toward Wacky Patty, including a serious effort to boycott the company and criminally prosecute Byrne, spearheaded by financial blogger Barry Ritholtz.

Ritholtz, and other targets like Felix Salmon of Reuters, had barely uttered a word about Byrne or Overstock. Thanks to the pretexting scheme and the clumsiness of his thugs, Byrne has a whole new tranche of people who would like to see him and Bagley put in jail.

Byrne has been desperately scrambling since his pretexting scheme was exposed. He backpeddled furiously, reducing the size of the "conspiracy list" he published on the corporate website, and he and Bagley claimed that the intent was to show that ties between journalists and hedge fund managers were too close.

But if that were the case, Byrne would have pursued media people and bloggers who cover hedge funds. He didn't. That flimsy lie is contradicted by the fact that he only stalked media people and bloggers (and the family members thereof) who had been critical of Overstock.com. Some had nothing to do with hedge funds, such as Eric Savitz of Barron's, who covers the tech beat, which includes Overstock, and occasionally has made mildly critical references to the company.

Byrne omitted from his hit list all of the hedge fund beat reporters for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune and BusinessWeek. Hey, it's good he didn't: a half dozen fewer reporters stalked. But he included an obscure but talented newsletter writer and blogger named Chris Faille, who has occasionally written critically of Overstock. What all this proves is the true purpose of his pretexting scheme -- to stalk media critics of Overstock.com.

In fact, he went after media people who are critical of hedge funds: myself, John Carney and Felix Salmon, to name a few. I've been critical of the hedge fund industry for years, and devoted much of Wall Street Versus America to excoriating the hedgies. Sam Antar, of course, is not a media or hedge fund guy. He's a whistleblower who has nailed Overstock's accounting, pure and simple.

Journalists and bloggers who stayed away from Overstock, and the few deemed friendly of course, were left alone. Byrne never bothered throwing in people like that for balance, because he never expected his scheme to be discovered.

(Bagley later said that "Larry was just a tool for determining whether or not certain people accept every Facebook friend request." I'm serious. That's like the old joke about the burglar who said he was breaking into someone's house to test their alarm system.)

Bagley, meanwhile, has deleted his former Facebook page. The poor dear is worried about his privacy, you see.

Not to worry. He can put that page right back up. Nobody gives a damn who Bagley "friends" on Facebook (under his real name, that is). Nobody is stalking him, his wife or his kids. Normal people don't do that. Criminals like Bagley and his sicko boss do that.

That's a charitable interpretation of his account vanishing, by the way. The uncharitable interpretation is that Facebook kicked him off for his cyberstalking.

Bad as this is getting for Byrne and his crew, it's going to get a lot worse before it doesn't get better.

I expect Byrne to make more mistakes, to give vent to more anti-Semitic jibes, to engage in more pretexting, more cyberstalking and accounting fraud, to tell more and more lies. That's how he's wired. It will be fascinating to watch.

UPDATE: Based on other corroborative details brought to my attention, I'm now fairly certain that Bagley was kicked off Facebook.

What that means is that Facebook is not pleased. I wonder if this is the end of it.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Barry Ritholtz: Boycott Overstock.com

Overstock.com's unhinged CEO, Patrick Byrne, has won a new pal from his recent foray into pretexting and cyberstalking: respected economics blogger Barry Ritholtz, who last night called for a boycott of Overstock.com.

Barry turned up on Wacky Patty's enemies list because of some mildly skeptical posts on this nutty CEO. He was completely fed up when this blog revealed that Byrne had been garnered names for his enemies list through a fraudulent pretexting and identity theft scheme dreamed up by his full-time cyberstalker, Judd Bagley.

Bagley and Byrne really need to see the inside of a jail cell over this, and Barry has set the wheels in motion:

I am totally out of patience with Patrick Byrne, his firm Overstock.com, and the punks at DeepCapture.com. Here is what I propose to do:

1) Request the FBI investigate and prosecute the identity theft, online cyber-stalking, and fraud of Judd Bagley of Overstock.com

2) Request the SEC investigate Patrick Byrne, Judd Bagley, and Overstock.com for their part in this scam. If they find it to be a fraudulent scheme, then they should prosecute.

3) Call for a boycott of Overstock.com.

Lastly, some free advice to the Overstock Board of Directors: You have a fiduciary duty. It does not appear to me that you are fulfilling it. At a certain point, you will be called out for how you handled your obligations. Wise up . . .

While I agree in principle, I would point out that Byrne would not have hand-picked the cronies and dimwits who serve on that board if they weren't going to say "how high?" when he says "jump!"

There's only one problem with a boycott, raised by a commenter on Barry's blog:

Given Patrick Byrne’s rather obvious issues, and given that the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 covers “mental impairment”, are you risking litigation by calling for a boycott?

The same point was not lost on a Motley Fool writer expounding on retailing stocks yesterday:

Writers take potshots at Patrick Byrne at their own risk -- but recent reports that the Overstock CEO is compiling an electronic "hit-list" of journalists deemed unfriendly to the company are truly frightening (and some have suggested, legally questionable). While the company has done a reasonable job of maintaining sales and generating free cash flow in the middle of the Great Recession, investors would be foolish (small "f") to discount the risks of investing in a company ... run by a madman.

You see, at bottom, that's the issue at Overstock: not the jihad against naked shorting, not the Sith Lord fantasy, not cyberstalking, not even Overstock's cooking the books, so that its "sales and cash flow" are actually not maintained, but manipulated. The fundamental problem with the company, the one from which all its problems flow, is that its CEO is stark, raving nuts.

I don't mean that in a bad way. Seeing a nut run a company is fascinating, sort of like watching Marley tear up a garage.

As for that boycott: great idea, except that with Byrne manipulating the financials, how would you know if it is having any impact?

UPDATE: Caleb Newquist suggests that the boycott bid may hurt Overstock's search for an auditor.

Now personally I don't have such faith in the accounting profession that I believe nobody would be dumb enough to work for these pigs. I'm sure they'll find an accounting firm dishonest or dumb enough to take the job because, believe me, Wacky Patty isn't getting anyone for the job who won't say "How high?"

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Patrick Byrne Disables Phony Facebook Account

"Larry Bergman," R.I.P.

UPDATE: Facebook later confirmed that it deleted the phony account. See this blog post.

Overstock.com's wacky CEO, Patrick Byrne, has disabled the phony "Larry Bergman" Facebook account that he used to track, stalk and harass media people deemed unfriendly. I've gotten a number of emails from Byrne's stalking victims, asking me why "Bergman" is not on their friends list, and that's the reason.

There's growing outrage among the affected people that they were targets of this tawdry pretexting scheme. Byrne and Bagley seem taken aback by the rage directed toward them over this. I've been writing about these slimeballs for three years, but to newcomers they seem shockingly wretched, sort of like creatures from outer space. I'd say the repercussions of this are far from over.

Byrne pulled the plug on "Bergmann" at about 7 p.m. Saturday night, in the middle of a frantic damage-control frenzy orchestrated by his in-house computer hacker, full-time cyberstalker and pretexting specialist Judd Bagley.

It's possible that Facebook killed the account, but I doubt that they'd do this on a weekend. Bagley has claimed that Bergman was a "composite" used by several Byrne employees -- something contradicted by Byrne himself, who posted on the corporate blog that "Bagley used an assumed name to infiltrate their Facebook network."

Note the use of the expression "Facebook network" (singular). It's all a conspiracy, you see, a "network." "Infiltrate" is also a precise use of the term, and it also contradicts Bagley's spin. Byrne and Bagley really have to get their stories straight. Note also the haziness over whether there are other phony Facebook accounts that haven't yet been exposed. Given the size of Byrne's enemies list, that seems likely.

The enemies list can be found here on Overstock's "Deep Capture" corporate p.r. website, an astroturf operation that Byrne has hidden behind corporate shells, but until recently was clumsily hosted on Overstock servers.

It doesn't really matter whether the "Bergman" account was one person or several, because it was an identity theft and pretexting scheme orchestrated by Byrne. The identity theft element comes from the fact that Bagley used a photograph of a person who did not give his consent, as I described in my last item. Keep in mind that this was not some hobby photo; it was the work of a professional. Yet it was obscure, not some famous photo in the public domain. The identity theft victim and the photographer, whose picture was used for nefarious purposes without his consent, in violation of the Lanham Act, have been notified. It will be up to them whether they want to press charges.

Chances are they won't bother, but you never know. Just another "contingent liability" for Overstock's ever-lengthening list of risk factors. If I were Byrne, I'd dip into the trust fund and settle with these people fast. Oh, and don't forget getting them to sign a gag order.

Bagley has been trying frantically, like the loyal subordinate that he is, to divert attention to himself (while carefully sidestepping legal responsibility for "Bergman"). I've never seen him in such a frenzy. His latest gambit was to ask an intermediary to set up a "debate" with me not about naked shorting, but the "personal stuff." That's like Bruno Richard Hauptmann asking to debate Lindbergh. I want Bagley prosecuted and jailed, not given a forum to spew his lies and hate or to attack my wife, as he has done in the past, and aid his effort to divert attention from his boss.

Bagley's frenzied effort to take a bullet for Byrne isn't working. He and his accomplices were acting on behalf of Byrne. All of the media and blog attention to this wretched episode (such as this post by Seth Jayson and this one by Felix Salmon) have recognized that.

The irony is that he's turned a bunch of people who otherwise would be indifferent to Overstock into outraged, personally offended, teed-off people. You might say that in compiling his enemies list, Byrne created enemies where none previously existed. Nice going! And hey, he had the world's most incompetent p.r. man, Judd Bagley, to carry out this task.

Sam Antar posted on his blog this morning his issuer-retaliation complaint against Byrne with the SEC, and I think it bears careful reading. Note the nauseating exchange with Bagley over his targeting Sam's kids. I hear that Bagley has been obsessed with tracking the kiddies, probably feeling that they're plotting against his nutty boss in their dorm rooms.

Byrne couldn't have chosen a worse time to pull this stunt. Facebook has been under increasing scrutiny for its abysmal security, and in fact, Overstock was already sued for participating in the controversial, now defunct Facebook Beacon service. Its latest 10Q -- you know, the one that isn't certified by an auditor, putting Overstock on the fast track to be delisted by Nasdaq -- discloses:

On August 12, 2008, the Company along with seven other defendants, was sued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, by Sean Lane, and seventeen other individuals, on their own behalf and for others similarly in a class action suit, alleging violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Video Privacy Protection Act, and California’s Consumer legal Remedies Act and Computer Crime Law. The complaint relates to the Company’s use of a product known as Facebook Beacon, created and provided to the Company by Facebook, Inc. Facebook Beacon provided the means for Facebook users to share purchasing data among their Facebook friends. Plaintiffs and Defendants, including the Company, have stipulated to an extension in the time for answering the complaint, while the parties engage in a mediation of the dispute. The Company has not responded to the Complaint.

...The nature of the loss contingencies relating to claims that have been asserted against us are described above. However no estimate of the loss or range of loss can be made. If the case is not settled, the Company intends to vigorously defend this action and pursue with Facebook its indemnification rights under the Facebook Beacon agreement.

Note the solicitude directed toward Internet privacy by Overstock spokesman Judd Bagley.

According to TechCrunch, the suit alleges:

The Beacon program sent information regarding specific user transactions on Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliates’ websites to Facebook regardless of whether the user was a Facebook member or not. Thus, no consent was sought, nor was any consent obtained from persons who utilize the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiiliate’s website who were not Facebook members. . .

It was deceptive because, in almost every instance, the information sharing was contrary to the stated privacy policies of the Facebook website and every other Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate that had signed up for the program.

Not to worry. "Invasion of privacy" is Patrick Byrne's middle name! He'll think of something. Surely Byrne can sic Bagley on the plaintiff's and their lawyers, their Facebook friends, their kids, their friends' kids, their friends' kids' friends.

The suit was settled a couple of weeks ago, so Byrne won't have to deploy Bagley and his phony accounts in that battle. Or at least Facebook settled. I don't know if Overstock did. No matter. Now he has a nice, big fat, Facebook scandal, one for which he has only himself to blame.

Meanwhile, Byrne can get back to work on defending himself from an SEC investigation into his cooking the books, manufacturing profits and reducing losses over a period of years by creating a "cookie jar reserve." That's the main event. All the rest is distraction -- deliberate distraction, if you ask me.

UPDATE:An amusing item in Going Concern today was titled,"Is Patrick Byrne’s Facebook Friends List Motivated by a Farmville Obsession?"

We haven’t really touched on the Patrick Byrne’s ill-fated attempt to stalk his critics (and all their friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers) mostly because we weren’t on the list and those that were (including Gary Weiss, Sam Antar, Joe Wiesenthal, and Barry Ritholtz) are doing a fine job of pointing out how desperate, shady, and just plain fucking bad this makes Patsy, his head minion at DeepCapture Judd Bagley, and Overstock look. . .

. . . This agonizing torture method will eventually wear down the haters to the point to where no one will be able to take the man, his doomed-to-fail quest to locate an auditor, and his company seriously and will thus give up their quest of destroying him.

You just can't buy publicity like this. It also shows that Bagley's stop-the-bullet p.r. strategy is not working. Bagley is personally responsible for some of the most denigrating ridicule I have ever seen directed at his very amoral, very sick employer. I wonder whether Byrne, beneath the haze of whatever intoxicants he may be on, is lucid enough to comprehend that.

If he doesn't, others may remind him of the consequences of playing the fool once too often. The New York Times observed in an editorial on Saturday that "The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters."

I'm fairly sure that Overstock is not being overlooked in this scrutiny. In fact, I'm certain it isn't.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

How Patrick Byrne Stalked Critics and the Media on Facebook

A Byrne minion used this stolen photo in an elaborate ruse

(See this update: Overstock was already being sued over Facebook privacy breaches, and this update on Facebook expelling Overstock's Judd Bagley.)

So I only just recently got an account at Facebook up and running, just a few days before word broke that Overstock.com's wacky CEO, Patrick Byrne, was hacking into Facebook accounts of his critics -- violating their privacy and stalking their friends, acquaintances, business contacts and family members, including little kids.

One of the people who tried to "friend" me on Facebook was the person with the above picture, who gave his name as "Larry Bergman."

But that's not his name, and that's not his picture. (See update. That's a copyrighted, stolen photo.) His name is Judd Bagley, and he is Byrne's pretexting specialist.

Bagley created "Bergman" and an unknown number of phony Facebook accounts to con people into "friending" him. That way he could circumvent Facebook security, violating their rules and, well, Lord knows how many laws he broke in this pretexting scheme.

The aim was to get their friends' lists in order to publish them on Byrne's "Deep Capture" corporate p.r. website. That, in turn, is then used to concoct elaborate conspiracy theories. ("Deep Capture" is what is known as an "astroturfing" website, claiming to be independent but owned by Byrne via corporate shells, and used to attack his critics.)

I presume that Bergman is just one of a number of phony accounts Bagley set up to carry out this scheme, because he targeted Felix Salmon and others not among the 56 persons on the Bergman friend list.

Byrne succeeded with my wife (family members are prime targets of Byrne's thugs), as well as media people and short-sellers, as well as innocuous folks tossed in to make it all look legit. Sam Antar, who mistakenly accepted his invitation to be "friends," says he tried to friend his kids too.

Among the people who were targeted by "Bergman" were journalists like Joe Nocera of the New York Times, Big Money editor James Ledbetter, teen blogger (and insightful Overstock critic) Zac Bissonnette, Barron's writers Bill Alpert and Eric Savitz, Columbia Journalism Review Audit columnist Dean Starkman -- whose predecessor, Mark Mitchell, went to work for Byrne after he was canned from that job -- blogger Barry Ritholtz, hedge fund managers like Daniel Loeb and David Einhorn, and a sprinkling of people (some real, others probably fellow phonies) to make it all look legit.

The only anomaly is Starkman, who has not written critically about Overstock. I imagine this was just payback by Mitchell.

Oh, and one of the people he conned was Michael Milken, a target of occasional Bagley salvos, no doubt to establish if any of the awful people he targeted were tied in with that person.

I don't think Bagley is cut out for pretexting work, because he was incredibly sloppy.

"Bergman" claimed to work for Goldman Sachs, which was dumb. Maybe he figured it was such a common name there had to be a few "Larry Bergmans" working there. But a GS spokesman told me earlier on Friday that there is no record of any employee by the name of Larry or Lawrence Bergman, and hadn't been except for a part-timer some years ago.

"Bergman" claimed to be a UCLA graduate, class of '96. The alumni association had never heard of him, and a database failed to turn up anybody with that name living in southern California in the 90s.

Another slip-up: Bagley gave "Bergman" my birthday.

"Bergman" also has a Twitter account, following Overstock critics Sam Antar, Tracy Coenen, Herb Greenberg, and with a request to follow me.

Here's an exchange I had with "Larry" earlier today:



After I asked him another question, asking if he worked for Goldman Sachs, he proved he was Bagley by excising most of the information from his profile, including access to his friends list.

Here's how the phony profile looked before my query (I've redacted the birth date):



Note the "sellrshort@gmail.com" email address, in keeping with Bagley's comic-book image of a typical Goldman Sachs-ite.

Here's how it looked later in the day, after my questions:



Now that was really dumb. I was not 100% sure he was Bagley until he tried to cover it up. In fact, I posted an item earlier today and thought better of it, deleting it immediately afterwards.

(Shortly after this item came out, I got a sneering Facebook message from "Bergman" confirming that he was indeed Judd Bagley.)

Oh, and one thing I almost forgot to mention: before I got the friend request from "Bergman," I found that somebody -- gee, I wonder who? -- hacked into my Facebook account and uploaded photographs of "guilt-by-association" presentations Bagley has drawn up over the years, one of which was made the picture associated with my account. Now that ain't legal either, obviously. And yes, I will prosecute.

That indicates that Byrne may have harvested some of these friends lists by hacking into accounts as well as by creating phonies like this.

The objective of this crude scheme is the same one that Joe Nocera described in his February 2006 column, "Overstock's Campaign of Menace":

This is what Mr. Bryne does: along with [Bagley predecessor Phil "Bob O'Brien" Saunders]. . . 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.

I wonder why anyone would shop at an Internet retailer that makes invasion of privacy part of its business model. I also wonder what Facebook thinks of its members being harassed in this fashion by a corporate functionary of Overstock.com, a publicly traded company.

(See this update on Facebook shutting down the "Bergman" account, expelling Bagley from the site, and issuing a sternly worded statement on this pretexting scam.)

I also wonder if the SEC is investigating Byrne's Facebook pretexting scheme and if not, why not.

Even if Bagley hadn't tried this crude stunt, it was already obvious he infiltrated Facebook, one way or the other, for the purpose of harassing Overstock critics, intimidating members of the media, and all with the intent of boosting Overstock's share price by discouraging negative coverage and criticism.

Bagley seemed a bit pissed off in his email to me from the "Bergman" account after the jig was up, so I assume that we'll be seeing a lot of anti-Semitic diatribes on Byrne's Deep Capture website, and perhaps some new lies a-fomenting.

The thing that matters is not that Byrne engages in pretexting and has a staff of people stalking his critics, but that he cooks the books and is facing delisting by Nasdaq.

And I hear that's just an appetizer.

UPDATE: A reader, using a website called "IDThis," ascertained that the picture is an award winning portrait of Matthias Dusini by Heribert Corn . I'm sure they both appreciate their work being stolen and used in a pretexting scheme by corporate scam artists.

They have ample reason to be more than just annoyed. Byrne may learn the true meaning of "copyright" and "identity theft" before too much more time has passed. It's OK for hobby bloggers to use photos like that to illustrate articles, but not for paid corporate p.r. people to do so, and to misrepresent the identity of the person in the photo.

I'm told "Larry's" friends list is still available via this link.

Tracy Coenen opines:

But here’s the best thing about this whole pretexting project of Bagley and Byrne: It completely disproves exactly what they were trying to prove with the project. Their theory was that anyone on their enemies list who was “friends” with one another on Facebook must be part of a conspiracy. After all, Facebook is the perfect tool for co-conspirators to show love for one another, Bagley would have you believe.

Except the fact that people were accepting the friend request of a fake person named Larry Bergman, shows that people on their friends lists don’t even have to exist to get there. They may have “friends” on their lists that they’ve never met and don’t even know. Which completely disproves the theory that “friends’ on Facebook are automatically part of a conspiracy.

What idiots. Who in their right mind wants to shop at Overstock.com when this is the kind of nonsense that CEO Patrick Bryne promotes and pays for? Do you really think any of your private information is safe with them? Do you want even one cent of your hard earned money to go to sleazeballs like this?

UPDATE: As expected, the following day Bagley posted in various forums, under his name and others, wearing his fingers ragged attacking me, deflecting and evading. This exchange is typical. First Bagley suggests he didn't need to create phony identities to create an enemies list for his boss, which raises the question: why did he?

The reason is immaterial, but what is significant is this exchange:

John Carney: Is Gary correct in saying you are behind the Larry Bergman profile? Why friend us with a fake profile? Why has Deep Capture put together a list of our Facebook friends?

Bagley:

No response. The reason is that Bagley blundered. He stole someone's identity. In addition to his usual tactics of lies, lies, and more lies (I trust he was not born "Larry Bergman" and dropped off at the Bagley doorstep), he used someone else's picture to establish a false identity for the purpose of causing harm to third parties, and for the benefit of his employer.

Say, isn't identity theft a criminal offense?

Bagley later tried to diffuse and deflect responsibility for this debacle, saying that "Bergman" was a "composite" (translation: it was Bagley) and that "The reason for creating him was to simplify the process of finding links, since gathering the data was a pain in the ass." Translation: "Bergman" was created by Bagley to stalk critics of Patrick Byrne.

Separately, Bagley heatedly denied that he uploaded the pictures to my Facebook account, and then described how it was done before demanding an apology from me for accusing him of doing that.

Er, I didn't accuse him of doing that. Methinks the man doth protest too much. But one thing he ain't protesting at all is the fact that he stole the identity of an innocent man and put it on his phony Facebook page.

Byrne himself, however, had no such compunction, freely admitting on Deep Capture his employee's illegal activities:

DeepCapture investigative reporter Judd Bagley used an assumed name to infiltrate their Facebook network and discovered that, yes, the hedge fund managers are in fact Facebook Friends with each other and precisely the financial journalists and bloggers about whom we have been writing, and that (while no one would claim that Facebook Friendship = “co-conspirators”), this fact is interesting.

Gee, that's convincing. Sure does explain why Bagley friended my wife, who doesn't know hedge funds from Adam, or tried to friend Antar's young kids, or Zac.

Byrne and his loyal toady may want to read this New York Times article about how someone was arrested in Manhattan for using someone else's identity on the Internet.

The "Larry Bergman" account was deactivated at about 7 p.m. on Dec. 12. It's unclear whether Bagley removed the account or if it was done by Facebook, since I understand that there were complaints. A bit late for that, wouldn't you say? And note the ambiguity in Byrne's comment, which leaves open the question about whether there are other phony accounts, and other stolen identities, out there.

As Felix Salmon points out, "You really can’t make this stuff up, but the problem is that public ridicule has no effect on these people."

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

The 'Mark Mitchell Mystery' Solved

Conspiracy theorist Mark Mitchell, ex-CJR Audit columnist

Updated 4/20

It was never much of a mystery, but the bizarre tale of Mark Mitchell, the eccentric ex-journalist who used to write CJR Daily's Audit column, has been resolved.

White collar crime-fighter Sam Antar has a post today that clears up a question I raised a few weeks ago.

It appeared then that Mitchell -- who fruitlessly pursued for Columbia Journalism Review a hatchet job on Herb Greenberg and other journalists critical of Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne -- was now working for Byrne while masquerading as a journalist.

A Utah college newspaper had referred to Mitchell, who made a joint appearance with Byrne on campus, as a "business associate" of Byrne's, but the reference was pulled at Byrne's insistence. (See also Mitchell's bizarre comments in this Deseret News article.)

Turns out the college paper was right, as indicated by his email to Sam and his reply to this item here. Mitchell now very proudly states that he works for something called "Deepcapture.com."

According to Utah corporate records, Deepcapture LLC is operated by High Plains Investments LLC. According to the SEC, Byrne "holds 100% of the voting interest in and controls High Plains Investments LLC."



Byrne is registrant of the site (see bottom of post), which is lavishly promoted on the Overstock "community" web page, as a tab labeled "deep capture ceo blog." Click on that tab and it takes you not to a "CEO blog" but to "deepcapture" and its bizarre rants, mostly cut-and-pasted from Overstock's antisocialmedia.net smear site.

Why Byrne would create a corporate veil so thin you could puncture it with a butter knife -- I don't know, it is just beyond me. But keep in mind that he is not exactly known for being rational.

In a comment to an earlier version of this item, Mitchell admits he was working for this Byrne-owned-and operated smear site when we spoke in early March. He was pretending to be a "journalist" while taking great pains to conceal that he was actually working for Byrne, and was pursuing a smear piece targeting me and other journalists.

The word for this is "pretexting."

And just to clear up any doubt that Mitchell was pretexting: After this item initially ran, Byrne admitted that he was listening in when Mitchell called me and misled me into thinking that he was functioning as a "journalist":

And best of all, Gary omitted from his description his complete and total meltdown on the phone with Mark. I and two other witnesses to that, besides Mark and Gary themselves. [boldface added]

Nice of him to clear that up.

Byrne says that the website that employs Mitchell is a "separate company." But there's nothing "separate" about Deepcapture. It is openly owned and run by Patrick Byrne and Overstock.

Apart from the corporate data quoted above, the website was registered by Byrne and is operated over Overstock servers (see below).



Note the date the site was created: September 2007. The "separate company" was established on March 3, 2008, according to records anyone can fetch from this site.

Does he really think that whoever raised this issue (his board or the SEC, I imagine) will be fooled by this lame attempt to put a sheet of tissue paper between Overstock.com and its latest misconduct?

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Is a Former CJR Editor a Patrick Byrne 'Business Partner'?

Mark Mitchell

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has done everything but strip nude in public to attract attention lately, in order to deflect attention from his company's chronic inability to make money and the ongoing SEC investigation. He is so out of control that he recently made common cause with the Universal Express fraud, according to Zac Bissonnette of Bloggingstocks.com.

I've been ignoring his infantile antics, and I was not surprised to see this article in a Utah college newspaper, containing the usual fantasies and smears. What I did find interesting was his reference (later deleted--see update) to a fellow named Mark Mitchell as his "business partner." That name may not mean much to you, but Mitchell is the former editor of CJR Daily's "Audit" feature on the financial press.

While there, Mitchell worked for many months on a CJR feature concerning Byrne's nutty allegations against journalists, including Herb Greenberg of Marketwatch.com and others who have written critically on Overstock. He interviewed myself and others extensively, and his open pro-Byrne bias was obvious. (He viewed Enron as a victim of short-selling, which I thought curious enough to mention in a Salon article.)

The CJR article never ran, and Mitchell departed as the Audit's editor. His tenure at the Audit had been, to put it delicately, controversial. See also this and this.

So, guess who emails and calls me two days ago? Yup, Mark Mitchell. His email said as follows:

Gary,

To refresh your memory: I was working on a story about short-sellers and the media while at the Columbia Journalism Review.

I took a break for awhile, but I'm working on the story again.

May I call you to ask a few questions?

If so, please let me know your phone number.

Thanks very much.

Mark Mitchell

I wrote back as follows: "For what publication are you writing?" and expected a prompt answer to this routine question. As any journalist (and any journalism review editor, surely) can attest, it is S.O.P. to tell one the publication one is writing for, or, if the piece has not been sold, to say so.

I got no response to the email but I did get a call from Mitchell a few hours later. "I'm working on the same article I was working on two years ago, taking that up again." said Mitchell. For what publication? "Can't tell you what publication right now."

Now, as I said earlier, that is not S.O.P. In fact, it is not terribly ethical. Remember that this is the former operator of a journalism review website.

It's a secret publication? "Something like that, yeah." Has this article been sold to a publication? "It has not."

At last, the truth. Or is it? Has the article indeed been "paid for" by Overstock's media-obsessed CEO? I don't know the answer to that. However, if Byrne is to be believed -- and he is as lacking in credibility as one can find in a CEO -- it would appear that Mitchell is not actually functioning as a journalist at all, but as a "business partner" of the subject of the article.

If so, and if he is working to add to Overstock's pantheon of smears, the word for what he did is called "pretexting." At the very least, it would be a grave violation of journalism ethics for him to write an article about a "business partner."

However, let's not jump to conclusions. Knowing Byrne, my tendency is to believe that Mitchell is not his "business partner," that he just wants to revive the hatchet job on Greenberg that CJR refused to publish, and that he was less than forthcoming with me about the fact that he hasn't sold it just yet.

I've asked Mitchell for his side of the story, so we'll see what he has to say about that. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Still no word from Mitchell. Meanwhile I see that the article in the Utah paper has been dramatically altered to remove the reference to Mitchell as his "business partner," along with all references to myself. (And no, I did not ask for that.) A correction is promised.

Even as corrected, what's in this article is just plain weird:

Additionally, Byrne remarked on how writer Mark Mitchell was threatened in New York and told to stay away from "the Irish guy," which Byrne believes was himself

I hope that Mitchell returns my call as I'd like to ask him about this anecdote, which is similar to a fairy tale in the article from Byrne. He talks about a "visit to a greasy spoon" that also has "crock" written all over it.

I'm also interested to know if he is the source of this fish story, which contends that Mitchell's departure from CJR was connected to some hedge fund money arriving at Columbia, that the life of his child was threatened, and that evil forces conspired to keep the article from being published. Goodness! I think Mitchell needs to tell the full story of that.

(It later was revealed that appearances were not deceiving. As he later admitted, Mitchell was working as a PR factotum for Byrne when he appeared with him in Utah. See this subsequent item.)

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

A Victory Over Pretexting: One Down, One to Go

Hewlett Packard has paid a hefty but undisclosed sum to reporters for Business Week and the New York Times, to settle the widely publicized pretexting scandal. Gumshoes for the company had lied to get phone records and other personal information from reporters.

Hewlett Packard had the decency, belated as it was, to admit fault and act to set things straight. Contrast this with Overstock.com, which openly engages in pretexting via its nauseating in-house stalker, Judd Bagley.

Bagley freely admits to lying about his identity and planting spyware in emails, with the goal of intimidating critics and suppressing criticism of the company.

Overstock is under SEC investigation, but it is time for a criminal investigation of Overstock's and Bagley's conduct.



The telegenic lifelong bachelor has boasted on his blog about having "8,000" emails demonstrating his various conspiracy theories -- including "1,841" from me that, as he describes them, would be forged if they are not figments of Byrne's lurid imagination. The SEC needs to subpoena those "emails" in its ongoing probe, and include this sordid company's pretexting and smear campaign in whatever action it eventually takes.

At least one forged email was offered up to a reporter for The Register, an Internet tabloid, who was researching a hatchet job on Wikipedia. The SEC needs to find out who forged those emails (as if we didn't know) and make an appropriate criminal referral.

UPDATE: There's a persistent rumor that Gradient Analytics has filed a countersuit in its long-running legal battle with Overstock. Actually a bit more than a rumor, as the source is the well-informed scambuster, Sam Antar.

Funny that it wasn't disclosed -- even as Overstock belched forth an update on a minor turn of the screw in said litigation. (I would say "SEC take notice," but even the sleepiest SEC investigator would notice this one.) Gee, is it bad when a company discloses only the aspects of ongoing litigation that make it look good?

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Cyberstalking, Pretexting: Doesn't Judd Bagley Have Anything Better to Do?

As busy, and amoral, as a bee

Overstock.com's nauseating house stalker, Judd Bagley, has been busy lately.

Not at Overstock.com, where the OMuse "Wikipedia wanna-be" that he was supposedly hired to run has languished --two new articles were commenced so far this year, and both consist of about five words each so far. It still remains in "beta" one year after being launched.

No, instead he's been working hard, doing what he is paid to do, which is to harass and stalk people on Internet message boards and Wikipedia.

He posted messages like this on a Yahoo message board that sent users to Overstock's stalker website, antisocialmedia.net, and then bounced them back to Yahoo, where a script was initiated to put on "ignore" messages posted by fraud-fighter Sam Antar and another Overstock critic. Here's a post from Internet sleuth Scipio Africanus explaining how it was done.

Lastly, Bagley engaged in a bit of crude pretexting, sending a forged Wikipedia page to a Wiki administrator from the email address garyweiss.mail at gmail.com. (I originally said "probably Bagley" but the genius later boasted on an anti-Wikipedia website (below) that the pretexting and forged email was his.)



My email address is garyweiss.email at gmail.com. The aim was to demonstrate that a Wiki user he doesn't like, "Samiharris," is me. To gild the lily, a spyware script was added to the email.

"garyweiss.mail@gmail.com" has never been my email address, and I did not send that email.

Bagley fed a similar forged email to a reporter for a British Internet tabloid who was working on an anti-Wikipedia hatchet job. British libel laws being as they are, the tabloid did not mention the forged email.

Bagley's skirting close to, if not exceeding, a violation the law with his crude pretexting gambit. I guess it would depend on how teed off the prosecutors would be, if they decide to go after him for his latest sliminess. Since he's clearly engaged in this activity on behalf of Overstock, thereby doing it for gain, I'd imagine what he's doing is more likely than not to be illegal.

What's he done is actually worse than what happened at Hewlett-Packard, since what he's doing here is not to gather information, but to plant disinformation.

But since when has the law ever stopped Judd Bagley from serving his masters at Overstock?

It's certainly not ethical, but then again the word "ethics" has been ripped out of the dictionary at Overstock.

Aside from the usual, nutty, self-destructive obsession with sabotaging message boards and Wikipedia -- which loom large in the fevered brain of Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne -- the aim, of course, is to divert attention from Overstock's stinky finances and its plummeting share price.

The Street consensus is a small profit in the fourth quarter, the first in memory -- though with Overstock's accounting being so shady it's hard to say if a "profit" would really be a profit. My question is: does Bagley crawling out from under a rock mean it will be worse than expected?

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.