Overstock.com's Latest Gambit: Email Spams to Promote Its Wacky CEO

The corporate fraud poster boy Overstock.com, having just restated its financial results going back to the time of Copernicus, has invested its scarce cash in a new but typically slimy tactic: email spams.

Now, the purpose of this spam was not to clear out the company's inventory of schlock goods or otherwise promote this third rate internet retailer. That would be too much like a "legitimate corporate purpose," and thus would detract from Overstock's downward slide into bankruptcy. No hyping of toilet bowl necklaces by this commode of a company. The aim of the spam was rather to personally promote, and rewrite history about, its wack-a-doo CEO, Patrick Byrne.

The spam that went out yesterday to the media -- including me, which proves it's a brainless robot-mail -- promotes a Youtube video that provides out-of-context excerpts to "prove" that Byrne "predicted" the latest calamity. He didn't, of course. He "predicted" that the world would collapse because of his "stock counterfeiting" obsession. He actually spoke in favor of one leading subprime lender, Novastar Financial, on a stock message board, long after subprime began its slide into oblivion. I'm sure that his small coterie of brainless followers snapped up Novastar's worthless stock as a result.

I don't want to get the fellow who did this in trouble, so I'll blank out his name. Evidently he is a former journalist who was canned recently and will do anything -- I mean anything -- for money. After trying his hand as a stockbroker (great timing), he apparently decided that flacking for Byrne was right up is alley. He is a new name in the Overstock pantheon, and apparently was hired just for the purpose of obtaining ego-stroking TV appearances for Byrne.

The email reads:

from xxxxxx@overstock.com
to
date Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:28 PM
subject What's Next?
mailed-by xmr3.com

Gary

The “shock” of the financial meltdown has passed, now comes, the “awe,” and with it plenty of questions. Primarily, “What’s next?” Is there another bubble brewing? What happens if millions of Americans begin to default on their credit card debt?

Overstock.com chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne, says we are less than 50% of the way through the mess, he predicted the coming of this current crisis many times before, starting 3 years ago, Watch this montage to see Byrne’s predictions beginning in 2005: [spam link excised]

Today Byrne is suggesting one of the following scenarios could occur in the coming years:

*Reagan Recession: A deep retraction reminiscent of the recession under Reagan in the early 80’s.
*The lost decade: A protracted recession similar to the one suffered by Japan in the 90’s.
*Great Depression: A severe economic dip on par with the Great American Depression in the early 30’s.
*Mad Max: Not likely, but still possible, a catastrophic breakdown of society with mass shortages of energy, food, and water.

Dr. Patrick Byrne has learned at the knee of Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of all time. As a child Byrne’s parents would allow him skip school so he could spend time and get an education from the “Oracle of Omaha.”

He survived cancer, to go on to get a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and Asian studies from Dartmouth, a Master’s of philosophy from Cambridge, and a Doctorate of philosophy from Stanford. He founded Overstock in 1999, and in 2007 the company generated nearly a billion dollars in revenue.

Byrne is an experienced and pithy commentator, if you’d like to speak with him I’d be happy to arrange it.

Thanks for you time and have a great week.

xxx

xxxxx@overstock.com
(o) 801- xxx-xxxx
(c) 801- xxx=xxxx

I wonder how Warren Buffett feels about his name being constantly bandied about by Byrne and his paid shills. I know how the company's comatose board of directors feels about Byrne using Overstock's corporate resources to spread lies about his past rants: they turn over and get more sleep.

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Spam King Indicted -- But What Took Them So Long?

I don't mean to splash cold water on the indictment yesterday of the "spam king," Alan Ralsky, and ten others on multiple stock fraud charges. Nor do I wish to cast aspersions on what the Justice Department describes as a massive, multiyear investigation.

The Justice Department announcement says that this was a heckuva effort:

The charges arose after a three-year investigation led by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Internal Revenue Service revealed a sophisticated and extensive spamming operation that, as alleged in the indictment, largely focused on running a stock pump and dump scheme, whereby the defendants sent spam touting thinly traded Chinese penny stocks, drove up their stock price, and reaped profits by selling the stock at artificially inflated prices.

But what the Justice Department doesn't say is that Ralsky was hardly holed up in some cave in Afghanistan. He was operating out in the open, and was even the subject of an article in the New York Times, for Pete's sake. The Spamhaus Project has a file on this man a mile long, and notes that the FBI raided his house three years ago.

OK, it takes a while to build a criminal case. But what about the SEC? Why hasn't it ever taken action against Ralsky? After all, his spams went out to millions upon millions of people, and I presume that the SEC must have gotten wind of them at some point.

The whole thing seems fishy to me. Still, I am glad to see that a notorious spammer is getting his just desserts.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne Spams Customers With Baloney

The meltdown of Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne seems to be accelerating.

The Retail Email blog reports that Byrne spammed customers yesterday with an email promoting the latest wack-a-doo, insult-filled rant on his personal blog. That was the one in which he blurted out that he was target of an SEC probe, contradicting previous statements.

Here's the email:



The blog, which follows email campaigns by Internet retailers, comments as follows:

In the past I’ve taken issue with CEO Patrick Byrne’s use of Overstock’s commercial email as a platform for his fight against Wall Street corruption (see Aug. 6, 2006 AM Inbox). I think it’s an unnecessary risk with limited upside, as it brings up issues that some customers may interpret negatively and that they would probably be ignorant of otherwise. In this email, it got a little more uncomfortable for me as a reader because Byrne incentivized subscribers to click through to the Overstock forum and read his rant against Wall Street by offering a 10% off discount at the end of his post. That just struck me as inappropriate.

That's for sure, and it makes me wonder if Byrne has violated Overstock's privacy policy by spamming his customers in this fashion. It says in pertinent part:

We may request your email address, or other information needed to contact you online. We use it to complete, support and analyze your purchases from Overstock.com and use of the Overstock.com web site, and to comply with any requirements of law. We use it to respond to any questions you might have and to provide you with information about specials occurring on the Overstock.com web site if you have chosen this service on the Account Login page. This information may be disclosed to our staff and to third parties involved in the completion of your transaction, the delivery of your order or the analysis and support of your use of the Overstock.com website.

"Contact you online" is not, and should not be, carte blanche to annoy customers with this type of crap. Nothing in the privacy policy says "we may use your email address to send you links to our CEO's latest nutty rant."

Byrne clearly is feeling the heat if he has to stoop to this kind of stunt. Let's hope the old saying is true in this instance: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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

Overstock.com Finds a 10-Year-Old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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