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The SEC and Fake Investment Sites

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the save-a-buck-or-two dept.

An anonymous reader sent in: "Our web-based challenge for the day: find the SEC's fake investment sites! The SEC claims to have seeded the web with fake investment sites in order to teach naive web users and investors about the dangers of believing all you read and investing without research. These sites have telltale signs of online investment fraud, and if people manage to overlook or ignore those issues and attempt to invest money, informs them that they have made an unwise decision. The SEC says that these sites are intended to encourage wise investing decisions, or in more casual terms, to attempt to slap fools upside the head with a cluestick before they lose their money in a real scam. It's an interesting use of the web by a government-related agency."

5 of 453 comments (clear)

  1. Um, FTC doing EXACTLY this since 1990's... by backtick · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.gppf.org/events/oswindle.htm Shows the FTC doing the exact same thing and discussing it in the 1990's. Sheesh, stuff from 3-5 years ago isn't exactly new :-)

  2. whois on SEC by agrounds · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here are the results of the domains owned by the SEC according to the whois database at network solutions:

    WINDHANDEL.COM
    SEC-CIVIL.COM
    SECRECRUITMENT.COM
    SEC-NL.COM
    OPERATIONDESERTFOX.COM
    DOUZALS.COM
    SEC (SE463-ORG) no.valid.email@WORLDNIC.NET 619 487 7988
    MCWHORTLE.COM

  3. Re:White hat v. Black hat by An+Ominous+Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tricking someone into acting illegally isn't necessarily entrapment. Otherwise there would be no sting operations. Entrapment requires harassment or continual provocation -- that is, forcing someone into doing something they normally would not.

  4. Re:White hat v. Black hat by legLess · · Score: 5, Informative

    First, this isn't entrapment - they're not going to prosecute people for trying to give money to these fake sites.

    Second, the theoretical FBI tactic you describe sounds very much like entrapment (IANAL), which is very illegal.

    Frankly, I'm amazed and gratified to see a government agency making such good use of the web.

    --
    This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
  5. Re:Here's one! by Azog · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, the first thing that came to my mind was:

    Finally! A real explanation for ZeoSync!

    (For those who haven't been keeping up, ZeoSync is the company that claims to have broken / bypassed Shannon's laws of information entropy to create some sort of encoding or compression that can compress random data. Except that they don't call it compression - they call it "Information Crystals" or something equally stupid.)

    I asked for and got ZeoSync's Investors Package, and it truly has some strange stuff in it... they are suing some previous employees, have some financial stuff that looks weird even to me (I know very little about corporate finance), and those computer scientists that are so prominently featured on their web site are not actually associated with the company - ZeoSync just paid them (an unspecified amount) for some sort of unspecified consulting. Basically meaningless.

    They admit in the fine print that the alleged "technology" has never been demoed to anyone outside the company...

    Really, I would not be surprised if ZeoSync was an elaborate ruse to teach gullible investors a lesson.

    --
    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
    "HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox