Slashdot Mirror
The SEC and Fake Investment Sites
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."
It's showing that the government is begging to use the web in creative ways that dont harm users. I think it's a very good idea.
It costs, what, maybe $30000 a year for them to run these fake sites? Less? I know I could do something like them in my spare time, I doubt they hired anyone specifically for this, so lets say it costs them $5000 a year, still a high estimate. If just a few people are LARTed by these sites, I think it's worth it. I'm a Libertarian, so I am against all the things the Gov does to try to "protect us from ourselves" too, but this is a cheap and clever way to educate people, and it probably costs less than the production of a single PSA for TV.
Let the FBI put up sites for child porn, and the requirement for entry into the child porn is submitting your own child porn. Is this entrapment? What about the MPAA doing this with movie downloads?
Fight Spammers!
On their About page, they have an image of their building. The sign on the building is a sorry attempt at making it look seamless.
I wonder which building is pictured, anyways. Maybe all the SEC's 'scam sites' use the same buildling.
Doing a Google search for 'mcwhorgle', one finds out that the SEC even got Yahoo to have a length article on the SEC pre-approving its IPO. Interesting that they put that much work into it.
The ASIC - Australia's equivalent to the SEC - has been runnning bogus internet scams of their own for a while now. They even have awards for the best (or worst depending on your viewpoint) scams found - The Gull Awards (past winners)
Thats Gull as in Gullible.
*** I am the real stylewagon
Given that it's been reported on sites like CNN as well, pulling in rubberneckers who are techy and not, SEC is probably not counting on much beyond the curiosity factor with this particular site. Searchs by slashdotters may through off stats on other sites today, but that's probably an expected outlier as well--we are not the only ones to like challenges, and announcing that you've got sites like this out there is tantamount to declaring a challenge.
Immediate "news-worthy" benefits had already been generated by this site prior to its mentions on news sites. Hopefully ongoing benefits (people who are little more clued in about internet scams) will be generated by other of their fake sites. SEC did throw this one away--at least for now--by using it as the basis for a press release.
http://www.wemarket4u.net/
Yes, really. Domain is registered to the federal trade commission.
So, the government can't pretend to be a non-existent company for the purpose of educating people?
Do you also oppose sting operations? Reverse stings? Should I not be allowed to bluff confessions out of rape suspects? ("We found a beer bottle at the scene with a very interesting fingerprint...")
So object lessons aren't to be allowed anymore?
And lying isn't necessarily criminal. Not all statements fall under perjury/false swearing statutes, truth-in-advertising laws, or mandated-disclosure. It's not like the SEC is accepting money at this site, gundecking an Environmental Impact Statement, issuing a buy advisory for Enron, or claiming to be Marie of Rumania under oath.
I gave up trying to figure this out years ago, and now content myself to just reading whatever
interesting stuff happens to make it through the filter, and posting an occasional diatribe or two.
The reasoning (or lack there of) behind what stories get accepted or rejected from Slashdot is not actually all that hard to understand. Like anything in PR, it's a crapshoot.
Here are my views (I always submit as AC, due to some particular personal reasons, but have a fairly decent acceptance rate.)
Submitting a story to Slashdot involves creating a mini press release. You are promoting your "version" of the story, so that it gets chosen over all other "versions." Creating an effective press release is frickin' hard. I've seen cases in which a 2-page, double-spaced press release took two-three weeks to produce.
As with any press release, you increase your chances by focusing on certain aspects.
1. Engaging language. You are selling your summary to the editor who reviews it. They probably go through dozens of submissions a day, and yours has to catch their eye and engage their attention.
2. Interesting topic, which could give rise to a ongoing discussion. When looking back on most of my failed submissions, they did not meet #2. If it is interesting, but probably won't create much of a discussion, it is worthless for Slashdot's purposes. This is not a news site, it is a discussion site. Even if you believe it would generate a discussion, posing a jumping off point for that discussion increases your chances.
But still, things will be rejected, as thousands of press releases around the world are thrown into thousands of trash cans every day. Other versions of the same thing may be accepted because the language/discussion points appeal more to the editor who reviews it. This can be a problem at times, because an incorrect and more controversial version which provides a jumping off point for argument will probably be accepted over a summary which is technically correct and dry. But this is not a problem with this site alone--it is a problem throughout the news world. Where do you think that the news sites get some of their incorrect yet controversial information about technical issues? Badly written press releases whose information may be incorrect, but has the "gotcha" factor.
And there's always the editor factor. Maybe editor A couldn't give a damn about the subject and rejected submission A because it didn't interest him. Then submission B comes around a day later and is reviewed by editor B, who loves the information provided. Therefore, B is accepted over A. This too, is not a problem limited to this news site. Once more than one person is involved consistancy goes straight out the window, no matter how hard you strive for it.
Submitting to Slashdot is a crapshoot. There are ways that you can improve your odds, but if your summary is reviewed by an editor who believes it is uninteresting, or believes it will not stimulate discussion, it gets rejected.
Did anyone read the Enron Human Rights Statement? The part concerning "fair compensation" for employees was quite laughable :)
Honorable mentions also go to the clause concerning the conducting of businesses according to given laws, along with the section concerning "Respect".
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
That's because they got kicked off the NYSE. Only NYSE stocks have ticker symbols of 3 or fewer characters. As an OTC stock, they had to pick a new symbol.
They (ENRNQ) only got to pick the first 4 letters of their symbol - the "Q" suffix indicates the company is involved in bankruptcy proceedings. There's a table of codes here if anyone's interested.
I find it disturbing that Yahoo includes these press releases in its biz.yahoo.com site. Until now, I assumed that if Yahoo was a reliable news source. I'm aware that press releases usually have heavy bias, but I would expect Yahoo to verify that the company exists and that claims of facts such as "SEC 'Pre-Approves' IPO" were actually true.
If Yahoo wants to protect its reputation while running unverified press releases, it should put text near the top of each PRNewswire article saying "PRNewswire does not run background checks on companies, nor does it check claims of facts for validity."
The shareholder is always right.