When I read Richard's first post I thought "Low I.Q. flim-flam man".
Or you can watch his response.
The blowhards can't resist. I'll post one of my all-time favorites after the jump.
From Naked Capitalism:
Moron from Scam Companies “Validated Carbon Credits” and “Baron Traders Limited ” Threatens This Blog
I posted this a few days ago, about the screechingly obvious fake Gibraltar company Validated Carbon Credits, a trading name of Baron Traders Ltd and its lying “CEO” James Richards. Two comments to the post have caught my eye:Back in 2007 we were following the exploits of Planktos, a little scamma-jamma trading on the successor to the old Vancouver Stock Exchange and on the Nasdaq bulletin board.
It´s obvious your posting is not only slanderous but based on pure conjecture without any circumstantial evidence whatsoever. Why is it you don´t have a “contact us” link? Did you even bother contacting the company / individuals to try and establish some facts?This was purportedly by a lady called Karen Johnson, who guilelessly provides an email address, bubblybosun@gmail.com, which, a quick Google reveals, is a handle used by none other than James Richards, the aforementioned lying CEO. Rather than dwell on that, or on the fact that “she” evidently doesn’t understand the meanings of the words “circumstantial evidence” and “slanderous”, I responded as follows:
Hello Karen,Evidence was not forthcoming. But you will have guessed that, dear readers. Instead, James Richards freaked out a bit and took his web site down for a few hours, as reported here, and then realised that doing that gave completely the wrong impression, and put it back up again. Twerp.
Since I know that James Richards is a liar, and Ellie Johnson is a liar, why on earth would I go out of my way to contact them? I’d just get told more lies.
I don’t think my post is the least bit slanderous.
Produce some evidence that I am wrong.
There is more: today James Richards has followed up again in the comments, using his usual name. His comment has the same IP address as the Karen Johnson comment already quoted, confirming my belief a) that he can’t be relied on to give his own gender correctly, never mind his name or his business, and b) that he is startlingly stupid. So now he’s even on record on this blog, lying about who he is. But heck, we knew he did that already.
I can’t fix his IQ, but I do wish he would decide what he’s called, and whether he’s a boy or a girl. There is quite enough gender confusion at this blog already.
I will respond in-line to his latest ungrammatical rant.
We are writing in response to some poisonous, but more importantly, completely incorrect diatribe you have written about our company. We do not know who you are or what your motives are but what you have published is completely without substance, has no evidence to back up your wild allegations and is ultimately libellous and defamatory.You will find all the evidence that’s needed if you read the post again, James. For reference: ignoring what you’ve been told already is another very well-known sign of bad faith, just like faking your name. There is a simple way to rebut the claim that your company does not exist. Provide a URL to a register of Gibraltar companies that shows your company. You haven’t done that very simple thing. It is fairly obvious why that is. By the way, our motives are perfectly irrelevant, (and would be unintelligible to the personality-disordered anyway, so it may be doubly a waste of time talking about them, to you).
Our company is registered in Gibraltar…No it isn’t. Read the post again. We covered that already. For reference: ignoring what you’ve been told already is another very well-known sign of bad faith, just like faking your name....MORE
We had dozens of posts which steadily ramped up the vilification as I secretly hoped the miscreants could be goaded into a libel action. Here's one of them:
Planktos Highlights Real Ocean/Climate Crises & Responds to Recent Misinformation Campaigns
But first, one of my favorite examples of a stock scam (I told you, I have a morbid fascination with the underbelly of the markets, it's like watching the lions approach the wildebeest at the watering hole, you don't want to see it but you can't look away):The stock, of course, went to zero.
...Peter Uttley, Equisure's chairman and a former Lloyds of London executive, took control of the company this week, assuming the chief executive post....
...Uttley said in the press release that his chairman role had been a "passive" one, but he now plans an active reorganization of the company, whose reputation has been stained by allegations that it is a scam insurance operation....
...In an unusually emotional statement to the press, sent from an Equisure board meeting Friday in London, Uttley told his version of events over the summer, which eventually led to the delisting of Equisure shares on the American Stock Exchange."The simple truth was consumed in the belly of deception, but now has been vomited for the world to see," Uttley began.He then proceeded to tell a story of three men, whom he described as "liars," "cheats," and "scallywags," who worked with law enforcement officials and the press to spread false rumors about the company with the intent of buying Equisure out at 50 cents a share, a tiny fraction of the stock's trading price of $15, before AMEX suspended trading Aug. 1.Isn't that damn fine bloviating? It's hard to research but I think Uttley et. al. got away with $100 mil.
[of course -ed]
I repeated the tale in an InterOil post in 2010:
My Favorite Stock Scam Blowhards
Re-reading the email from the senior manager of InterOil's media relations department reminded me of one of the best ever. I referenced it in a post on Planktos which long time readers will remember as one of the best shorts ever.The day of that post IOC closed at $63.32. It got as high as $81.00 in mid-April 2010.
After doing this a while you don't even need to call in the forensic accountants to spot the weird ones. A bit of backround, Equisure Inc. was purportedly a reinsurer based in Belgium that had, in a remarkably short period of time gone from the NASDAQ bulletin board to the American Stock Exchange by way of a reverse merger with a dormant shell company.
The heart of the scam was to hype the stock by way of news releases to a) gun the stock for the early buyers and b) get the stock on the Federal Reserve Board's list of marginable securities.
That step is a bit more sophisticated than your run-of-the-mill pump and dump because it allows the crooks to borrow against the shares rather than having to sell them. The lack of selling pressure makes it easier to maintain the run-up until the plug is pulled....
It's at $46.94 this morning after trading as low as $31.18 on Oct. 4.
This one was tougher, George Soros was on the other side, buying.
