Web: Patrick Byrne, Facing Dilemma, Lashes Out at Penson Financial

Web

Patrick Byrne, Facing Dilemma, Lashes Out at Penson Financial

Gary Weiss

gary-weiss.com, 9 October 2009

Sam Antar today describes the serious dilemma facing Patrick Byrne, the wacky CEO of Overstock.com. Thanks to an SEC investigation instigated by Sam, who has posted frequently about how Overstock has systematically inflated its financial statements, Byrne is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

He has to either restate Overstock’s recent earnings–including a much-ballyhooed “profit” in the fourth quarter that was actually a loss–or wait until the SEC forces him to do so.

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Web: Byrne: SEC Enforcement Division Takes Orders From Short-Sellers

Web

Byrne: SEC Enforcement Division Takes Orders From Short-Sellers

Gary Weiss

gary-weiss.com, 19 September 2009

Patrick Byrne has a new conspiracy theory to explain why his corporate crime petri dish Overstock.com is under investigation by the SEC. Seems that short sellers, in addition to having a fax machine at CNBC, also have a hotline to the SEC, in which they bark out orders to start investigations against innocent CEOs like Byrne.

Byrne made that comment on Fox Business News, where he is trotted out as an “internet retailing expert,” no doubt because of the skill at which he has eased Overstock into negative shareholder equity. He was brought out this time for a ritual denunciation of new bank compensation rules.

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Article: How Dendreon Is Proving Short Sellers Wrong

Article - Media

How Dendreon Is Proving Short Sellers Wrong

Gary Weiss

Seeking Alpha, 18 August 2009

In other words, Dendreon is not like the third-rate Internet retailer Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK), whose wack-a-doo CEO Patrick Byrne has been weaving wild conspiracy theories over naked short selling for years, ever since it dawned on him that he simply does not know how to run a company. His talents, to the extent he has any, lie elsewhere (standup comedy?), but he has never eked out a profit for his company. His recent announcement of tiny fourth quarter profits was achieved by accounting gimmickry.

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Article: Our Watchdogs and the Financial Scandal of the Century

Article - Media

Our Watchdogs and the Financial Scandal of the Century

Mark Mitchell

Deep Capture, 3 April 2009

“Accountability – Integrity – Reliability”

That’s the motto of the Government Accountability Office, and it almost makes you believe that there really is a functioning watchdog – somebody, aside from us Internet loons, to investigate and report on the incompetence and malfeasance that pervade our public institutions.

Certainly, there were high hopes when the GAO began investigating the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a black box Wall Street outfit that is at the center of one of the great financial scandals of our era.

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Article: Gary Weiss, Psychopath & Scaramouch

Article - Academic

Gary Weiss, Psychopath & Scaramouch

Patrick Byrne

Portfolio Magazine cited by DeepCapture, 31 December 2008

For over 10 years Gary Weiss (once a reporter with BusinessWeek, and recently, a columnist with Forbes) has been posting under fake names to confuse, distort, and hijack Usenet groups, stock message boards, and Wikipedia, using social media to prevent the public from understanding criminal activity.

I now turn to Gary Weiss. Last year one of the most prominent journalists on Wall Street warned me, “I’ve known Weiss for years. Be careful. He’s a psychopath.” As you will see, he was neither joking nor exaggerating. I think, however, that Gary is better described as a “Scaramouch.”

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Article: Emails show journalist rigged Wikipedia’s naked shorts

Article - Media

Emails show journalist rigged Wikipedia’s naked shorts

Cade Metz

The Register, 1 October 2008

Two and a half years ago, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne penned an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, warning that widespread stock manipulation schemes – including abusive naked short selling – were threatening the health of America’s financial markets. But it wasn’t published.

“An editor at The Journal asked me to write it, and I told him he wouldn’t be allowed to publish it,” Byrne says. “He insisted that only he controlled what was printed on the editorial page, so I wrote it. Then, after a few days, he got back to me and said ‘It appears I can’t run this or anything else you write.'”

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Web: Patrick Byrne Covers Up Ownership of ‘Deep Capture’ Smear Site

Web

Patrick Byrne Covers Up Ownership of ‘Deep Capture’ Smear Site

Gary Weiss

gary-weiss.com, 19 June 2008

A couple of months ago I described how Overstock.com’s terminally wacky CEO Patrick Byrne has thrown caution (and any lingering sanity) to the winds and was openly sponsoring attacks on journalists and other critics, on a smear site that he owned and was operated on Overstock servers, “Deep Capture.”

This was a change from Byrne’s previous tactic of claiming that smears and attacks were by people who just coincidentally happened to be his employees. The word for this is “astroturfing,” and it is a particularly sleazy method of concealing corporate (and sometimes government) involvement in dirty tricks campaigns.

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Article: Flames Flare Over Naked Shorts

Article - Media

Flames Flare Over Naked Shorts

Dan Mitchell

New York Times, 20 January 2007

UNSUSPECTING readers of certain stock message boards may be forgiven for believing they have stumbled into a flame war among 14-year-old boys. But the increasingly vicious online dispute actually involves, among others, the chief executive of a publicly traded corporation and a longtime business journalist.

The chief executive is Patrick Byrne, who in recent years has taken to asserting that a vast conspiracy of securities traders, journalists and government officials is bent on bringing down the stock of his company, Overstock.com, a peddler of excess inventory. The journalist is Gary Weiss, the author and former BusinessWeek reporter who has made a second career out of ridiculing Mr. Byrne on his blog (garyweiss.blogspot.com).

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Web: The Coming Sentencing of Anthony Elgindy, What he is and what he deserves.

Web

The Coming Sentencing of Anthony Elgindy, What he is and what he deserves.

Bud Burrell

Sanity Check via Wayback, 9 April 2006

On May 2nd, Anthony Elgindy is to be sentenced for his activities as a short selling syndicate operator. Over the course of several years, he attacked a couple of thousand companies, in the process putting many of them out of business. If he had been a killer or rapist, his crimes would have been collectively viewed as being “serial” in nature.

We continue to forget that Elgindy is a previously convicted felon for insurance fraud. He has now been convicted of six counts of another form of financial fraud. These counts clearly demonstrate that he engaged in operation of a criminal syndicate to manipulate markets for securities by counterfeiting (a Class B Federal Felony) those same securities, a Class A felony according to the US CJS (Criminal Code) for syndicalism, an act of insurrection and sedition, treason to its core.

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Article: Don’t Force The Shorts To Get Dressed

Article - Media

Don’t Force The Shorts To Get Dressed

Gary Weiss

Business Week cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 8 December 2003

At a time when the stock market is in a state of chronic schizophrenia, with a year’s worth of gains being chipped away, one corner of the market has withstood the recent travails far better than any other: small-cap stocks. The Russell 2000 Index of such stocks is up 37% so far this year — double the gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

And in October, trading volume in the very smallest stocks, which are listed on the OTC Bulletin Board, climbed 400% over a year ago. Good news — but only up to a point. Regulators have long warned that such stocks are notoriously prone to manipulation and hype.

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